Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism 9781501311383, 9781501311406, 9781501311376

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Series Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Toward a New Aesthetic Theory
Part One Conceptualizing Rancière
1 The Hatred of Democracy and “The Democratic Torrent”: Rancière’s Micropolitics
2 Rancière’s Nineteenth Century: Equality and Recognition in Nights of Labor
3 The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Intellectual Emancipation in Circular Form
Translation versus explication
Bibliocentrism and the totality of the book
The book as bridge
Veracity’s orbit and the immateriality of intelligence
Lasting lessons
4 Literature as Rancièrian Film Fable
5 The Emancipated Spectator and Modernism
6 Mute Speech: The Silence of Literature in Rancière’s Aesthetic Paradigm
Literature in a fraught critical terrain
Literature in Rancière’s philosophical trajectory
Literature between historicity and the event
7 Le fil perdu: The Music of the Indistinct
Part Two Rancière and Aesthetics
8 A Method of Equality: Rancière, Jokes, and Their Relation to They Drive by Night
A zany story
The diner
Ed’s office
The last laugh
Credits where credit is due
9 Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police Order
10 Rancière and Proust: Two Temptations
“I realize that my practice of philosophy makes the reading of my work difficult”
“Addressing an author or a concept first means to me setting the stage for a disagreement, testing an operator of difference.
“Literature is ... caught between two nullifications” (MS 146)
“Literature emancipates when it doesn’t tell us how to use art or literature—how we have to understand, how we have to see, h
Disagreement (or, perhaps, misunderstanding)
11 The Conception of the Will in Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of the Arts: Pathos and Reverie in Stendhal, Ibsen, and Freud
Suspension of the will to act: The passivity of the will in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black
Obliteration of the will to know: The sickness of the “will” in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm
The position of the will in the aesthetic regime of the arts
12 Dreaming Bourdieu Away: Rancière and the Reinvented Habitus
13 Rethinking the Aesthetics/Politics Nexus in Latin America
Rancière in Latin America
Dissensual communities, or what is a plaza?
Part Three Glossary of Key Terms
Distribution of the Sensible
Fable
Intellectual Equality
Mute Speech
Regimes of Art
Part Four Interview with Jacques Rancière
Understanding Modernism, Reconfiguring Disciplinarity: Interview with Jacques Rancière on May 11, 2015
Index

Citation preview

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Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism

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Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination. Series Editors: Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Volumes in the Series: Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism edited by Anat Matar Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism edited by David Scott Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Patrick M. Bray Understanding James, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by David H. Evans Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Paola Marrati Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Christopher Langlois Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Ariane Mildenberg Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

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Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism Edited by Patrick M. Bray

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York  London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA  UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Patrick M. Bray and Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editor. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Bray, Patrick M. (Patrick Maxwell), editor. Title: Understanding Rancière, understanding modernism /​edited by Patrick M. Bray. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Understanding philosophy, understanding modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016038805| ISBN 9781501311383 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501311390 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Rancière, Jacques–​Criticism and interpretation. | Modernism (Literature)–​ History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM /​European /​French. | LITERARY CRITICISM /​Semiotics & Theory. Classification: LCC B2430.R274 U53 2017 | DDC 194–​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2016038805 ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​5013-​1138-​3 ePub: 978-​1-​5013-​1139-​0 ePDF: 978-​1-​5013-​1137-​6 Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Notes on Contributors Series Preface List of Abbreviations Introduction: ​Toward a New Aesthetic Theory  Patrick M. Bray

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Part 1  Conceptualizing Rancière 1 The Hatred of Democracy and “The Democratic Torrent”: Rancière’s Micropolitics  Emily Apter

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2 Rancière’s Nineteenth Century: Equality and Recognition in Nights of Labor  Bettina Lerner

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3 The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Intellectual Emancipation in Circular Form  Leon Sachs

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4 Literature as Rancièrian Film Fable  Margaret C. Flinn

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5 The Emancipated Spectator and Modernism  Cary Hollinshead-​Strick

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6 Mute Speech: The Silence of Literature in Rancière’s Aesthetic Paradigm  Giuseppina Mecchia

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7 Le fil perdu: The Music of the Indistinct  David F. Bell

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Part 2  Rancière and Aesthetics 8 A Method of Equality: Rancière, Jokes, and Their Relation to They Drive by Night  Tom Conley

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9 Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police Order  Tina Chanter

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10 Rancière and Proust: Two Temptations  Suzanne Guerlac

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11 The Conception of the Will in Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of the Arts: Pathos and Reverie in Stendhal, Ibsen, and Freud  Alison Ross

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12 Dreaming Bourdieu Away: Rancière and the Reinvented Habitus  Marina van Zuylen

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13 Rethinking the Aesthetics/​Politics Nexus in Latin America  Silvia L. López

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Part 3  Glossary of Key Terms Distribution of the Sensible  Daniel Brant

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Fable  Audrey Évrard

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Intellectual Equality  Zakir Paul

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Mute Speech  Alison James

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Regimes of Art  Robert St. Clair

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Part 4  Interview with Jacques Rancière Understanding Modernism, Reconfiguring Disciplinarity: Interview with Jacques Rancière on May 11, 2015 Translated from the French by Patrick M. Bray

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Patrick M. Bray is associate professor of French at Ohio State University. He has published on critical theory, space in literature, as well as film. He is the coeditor with Phillip John Usher of a volume of L’Esprit Créateur called “Building the Louvre: Architectures of Politics and Art.” His book, The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-​ Century French Fiction was published by Northwestern University Press in 2013. Emily Apter is professor of comparative literature and French at New  York University. She is the editor of the book series Translation/​Transnation at Princeton University Press. She is the author of numerous books including Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013) and Feminizing the Fetish:  Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-​of-​the-​Century France (Cornell University Press, 1991). She has a book forthcoming from Verso Press entitled Politics small p: Towards a Theory of Unexceptional Politics. David F. Bell is professor of French studies at Duke University and serves as the coeditor of SubStance. His work examines critical theory and narrative, as well as science and technology. His books include Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text (University of Nebraska Press 1993). Daniel Brant earned a PhD in French from the University of Illinois at Urbana-​ Champaign. He has published articles on Francophone Caribbean literature and culture from Guadeloupe and Haiti. Tina Chanter is head of the School of Humanities at Kingston University London. She has published widely on questions of aesthetics, politics, sexuality, race, and class in film, literature, and philosophy. She is the author of Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (SUNY Albany Press, 2011) and The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference (Indiana University Press, 2008). Tom Conley is Abbott Lawrence Lowell professor of romance studies and a professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. He is the

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author of seven books on the intersection of literature and the graphic imagination, on French film, on cartography, and on Renaissance culture. Audrey Évrard is assistant professor of French at Fordham University. She is currently working on a book manuscript, provisionally titled Precarious Militancy: French Social Documentary Cinema (1995–​2015). She has published several articles and essays on French documentary cinema in  Contemporary French Civilization, Jump Cut, Working USA, and more recently, Nottingham French Studies. She also contributed to Directory of World Cinema: France (eds T. Palmer and C. Michael; London: Intellect, 2013) and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-​imperialism (eds. E.  Ness and Z.  Cope;  London: Palgrave, 2015). Margaret C. Flinn is associate professor French at Ohio State University. She has published on visual culture in France from the interwar period to the present. Her book The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–​39 was published by Liverpool University Press in 2014. Suzanne Guerlac is professor of French at UC Berkeley. Her work explores cultural ideologies and articulations between literature and philosophy. She is the author of several books including Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Cornell University Press, 2006) and Literary Polemics: Batallie, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford University Press, 1997)  (cowinner of the Modern Language Associations Scaglione Prize). Cary Hollinshead-​Strick is assistant professor of comparative literature and English at the American University of Paris. She specializes in the history of performance, theater, and media. Alison James is associate professor at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Constraining Chance (Northwestern University Press, 2009), studied the tensions between chance and determinism in the works of Georges Perec. Her second book project examines the documentary imagination in French literature. Bettina Lerner is assistant professor of French and deputy chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at City College CUNY. Her work focuses on popular culture in nineteenth-​century France. Her book, The Invention of the Popular: Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-​Century France, is forthcoming from Ashgate.

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Notes on Contributors

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Silvia L. López is professor in the Department of Spanish and the Program in Latin American Studies at Carleton College. Her work focuses on literary and social modernity in Latin America as well as cultural criticism. She has published articles on Adorno, Lukács, Benjamin, Garcia Canclini, Schwarz, Dalton, and Argueta. Giuseppina Mecchia is associate professor of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published on several topics related to French and Italian modernity, critical theory, and space and time. Zakir Paul received his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University in 2015. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the category of “intelligence” in twentieth-​century French literature and thought, with a special focus on Proust, Bergson, and Valéry. He has translated and introduced Maurice Blanchot’s Political Writings 1953–​1993 (Fordham University Press, 2010) and Jacques Rancière’s  Aisthesis:  Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of  Art  (Verso Books, 2013). His work has appeared in L’Esprit créateur, The Germanic Review, The Journal of Modern Literature,  and  Critical Inquiry. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison. Alison Ross is Australian Research Council future fellow in philosophy at Monash University. Her work examines philosophical aesthetics, theories of sensation, and theories of media. She is the author of Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Image (Routledge, 2014)  and The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-​Labarthe, and Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2007), as well as a coedited collection of essays, with Jean-​Philippe Deranty, Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene (Continuum, 2012). Leon Sachs is associate professor of French at the University of Kentucky. Specializing in the history and culture of education, he is the author of The Pedagogical Imagination:  The Republican Legacy in 21st Century French Literature and Film (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Robert St. Clair is assistant professor of French at Dartmouth College. An expert of French poetry, he has published on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, the French Commune, Comics, and laziness. He is currently finishing a book on the body and utopia in Rimbaud’s poetry.

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Marina van Zuylen is professor of French and comparative literature at Bard College. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle (G. Narr, 1994)  and Monomania:  The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Cornell, 2005). Her latest book is The Plenitude of Distraction (Sequence Press, 2016). She has published articles on aesthetics, literature and medicine, philosophy, and literature. Her essays have praised some of the most beleaguered modern maladies—​boredom, fatigue, distraction, idleness—​and analyzed snobbery, dissociative disorders, and obsessive compulsive aesthetics.

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Series Preface Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear literary history, in favor of the multi-​perspectival history implicit in “new historicism” or varieties of “presentism,” say. Amid current reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited various “new” or alternative modernisms—​postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, or even “bad” modernisms. In doing so, they have reassessed not only modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, they have rethought epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism, history, and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only which texts we read as modernist, but also how we read those texts. Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favor of modernism as mode (or mode of production) or concept. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on single key philosophical thinkers influential both to the moment of modernism and to our current understanding of that moment’s geneology, archeology, and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps, folds, interrelationships, interleavings, or cross-​pollinations of modernism and philosophy. Our goals in each volume of the series are to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism. The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to offer both accessibility to the philosopher’s principle texts and to current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on “conceptualizing” the philosopher through close readings of seminal texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A  second section, on aesthetics, maps connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure, often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves as an extended glossary of principal

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terms in the philosopher’s work, each treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement with and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory ways terms are deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy, theory, and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and often to the sciences as well.

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List of Abbreviations Selected books by Jacques Rancière in English translation A AD AL AU D DPP ES FF FI FW HD IC IS MPS MS NH

Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Verso, 2013). Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009). Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010). Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York and London: Verso Books, 2009). Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New  York: Berg, 2006). The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007). The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006). The Intervals of Cinema, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 2014). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Mallarmé:  The Politics of the Siren, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2011). Mute Speech, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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NL OS PA PL PN PP SP

List of Abbreviations

Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-​Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1995). The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011). Proletarian Nights:  The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-​Century France, trans. John Drury (New York: Verso, 2012). The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Staging the People. The Proletarian and His Double, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2011).

Selected books by Jacques Rancière in French AS CM CV DI EC FC FP HDF IE LA LPO ME MH MI MPI MPP

Aisthesis, Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 2011). La Chair des mots: politiques de l’écriture (Paris: Galilée, 1998). Courts Voyages au pays du peuple (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990). Le Destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003). Les Écarts du cinéma (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011). La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001). Le Fil perdu: Essais sur la fiction moderne (Paris: La Fabrique, 2014). La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005). L’Inconscient esthétique (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011). La Parole ouvrière. 1830/​1851, eds. Jacques Rancière and Alain Faure (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976). Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004). Les Mots de l’histoire. Essais de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992). Le Maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987). Moments Politiques:  Interventions 1977–​2009, trans. Mary Foster (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014). La Mésentente: politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995).

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MTE NP PLF PM PO PPF PS SE TP

List of Abbreviations

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La Méthode de l’égalité, eds. Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan (Paris: Éditions Bayard, 2012). La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris:  Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1981). Politique de la littérature (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2007). La parole muette:  Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1998). La Parole ouvrière, Jacques Rancière and Alain Faure (Paris:  la Fabrique, 2007). Le philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Flammarion, 2007). Le Partage du sensible:  politique et esthétique (Paris:  La Fabrique, 2000). Le Spectateur emancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008). Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués:  entretiens (Paris:  Editions Amsterdam, 2009).

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Introduction: Toward a New Aesthetic Theory Patrick M. Bray

The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of the most influential voices in literary, art historical, and film criticism. His work reexamines the divisions that have defined our understanding of modernity, such as those between art and politics, representation and abstraction, and literature and philosophy. Working across these divisions, he engages the historical roots of modernism at the end of the eighteenth century, uncovering forgotten texts in the archive that trouble our notions of intellectual history. Rancière’s story is that of a generation that Hélène Cixous called “les incorruptibles” (after the revolutionary leader Robespierre), placing him in dialogue with and as a successor to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-​Luc Nancy, and others.1 As a young student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Rancière contributed, along with Étienne Balibar, to Louis Althusser’s Reading Capital in 1965. The outsized aspirations and deceptions of May 1968 led Rancière and many others to question the paradoxical elitism of academic Marxism, and in 1974 he published a repudiation of Althusser, Althusser’s Lesson. Rancière’s simple yet formidable revelation was that Marxist theorists, indeed nearly all philosophers, claim to speak for the people as their natural representatives, but in so doing they deny the very equality they supposedly espouse. Like Michel Foucault before him, Rancière returned to the archives to find the traces of popular philosophy and literature, silenced by their benevolent spokesmen. What he discovered were workers who aspired to be poets and philosophers, seeking emancipation through writing. In a series of groundbreaking works in the 1980s that would constitute the foundation of his thought, Rancière told the history of early-​nineteenth-​century workers’ 1 Cited by Jacques Derrida in Apprendre à vivre enfin (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 28.

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writing in the nights after their long working day was through (The Nights of Labor), he exposed self-​serving efforts by philosophers to speak for the poor (The Philosopher and His Poor), and he rediscovered the radical pedagogy of nineteenth-​century thinker Joseph Jacotot, who proposed that through language everyone possesses in Rancière’s words an “equality of intelligence” (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). Intelligence is not granted by a master; it must be affirmed as given in a politics of emancipation. In the 1990s, Rancière’s works turned toward aesthetic concerns in what would appear superficially to be a move away from his preoccupations with equality and politics. However his innovative notion of the “partage du sensible” (often translated as the “distribution of the sensible”) goes to the heart of his thinking on equality by proposing that what politics and art have in common is the distribution and division of the perceptible world. Going back to Plato, Rancière shows how the division of society into distinct classes excludes the masses from governing, since they are said not to have the time to engage in serious matters of state—​politics is a challenge to this division and an affirmation of equality. Art, as the creative deployment of artifice, plays with our perception of the world to invite us to see ourselves in different roles, upsetting the “natural order” of society. One of Rancière’s recurring arguments is that while art and politics act in similar ways, they are not the same thing—​there is an art to politics, and a politics to art, but art is not politics. The antidemocratic views of a Flaubert, for example, express themselves in one of the most democratic novels of the nineteenth-​century, Madame Bovary, where any subject is deemed worthy of novelistic representation, even an unexceptional provincial adulteress. Since 2000, Rancière has published one or two books a year, expanding his range to include contemporary art, comparative literature, and film studies. His radical philosophy in these works can be seen as a critique and a continuation of the work of Gilles Deleuze. For Rancière, Deleuze’s emphasis on “becoming imperceptible” subsumes the tensions between politics and art. Yet in his several influential books on cinema, Rancière takes Deleuze’s monumental Cinéma I and Cinéma II as his point of departure, using Deleuze’s division of cinema into two distinct periods as a way to explore what is common to each, namely, the distance between, on the one hand, the “dream” or the “fable” that cinema could finally be the art of pure sensation, freed from the constraints of plot and representation and, on the other, cinema as the quintessential art of storytelling. Similarly, his notion of the “regimes of art” adds important nuance

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and elaboration in the realm of art to Michel Foucault’s concept of épistémès, while also putting into question the distinction between the modern and the postmodern. Part I of Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism conceptualizes Rancière’s thought through a series of chapters that perform close readings of his major works. This section provides an introduction to Rancière for the uninitiated as well as a deeper understanding of the stakes involved in his writing. Through the lens of a single work, each chapter investigates Rancière’s thinking within the nexus of modern aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. But as Rancière says repeatedly, inspired by the radical nineteenth-​century education reformer Jacotot, “everything is in everything”; an analysis of any one of Rancière’s texts inevitably touches on issues central to his thought present in all of his works. In this first section, the touchstone works that come up most often are the seminal Nights of Labor and Mute Speech, but also his most recent work, Le fil perdu, which has not yet appeared in English. Rancière’s books which fit more classically within the “critical theory” rubric (at least in Anglophone countries), Aisthesis  or La Mésentente, for example, provide valuable conceptual frameworks; however, the contributors find Rancière’s unique contribution in his engagement with singular problems and texts and not in sweeping theoretical abstractions. As Rancière says in the interview for this volume, “It is a singularity that makes an object [of study] and a problem appear at the price of exploding the borders between disciplines.” The chapters in this first section find in Rancière refreshingly new ways of talking about politics, art, film, and literature, but their analyses rely on other discourses in order to open up his texts. In so doing they mount historical and disciplinary critiques of his work, pushing back against the way Rancière strives to work outside of historical, literary historical, art historical, and philosophical frameworks. His work is therefore not easily reconcilable with any disciplinary strictures. Rancière’s thought liberates us from conventional ways of understanding, but also leaves work for scholars to contextualize his thought historically and conceptually, allowing for an interdisciplinary critique. The first three chapters look at Rancière’s more directly political works, specifically how democracy and equality are framed in radically new ways. Emily Apter’s masterful analysis of Hatred of Democracy explores in depth Rancière’s obscure intertextual reference to Hippolyte Taine’s Graindorge. She reveals how, embedded in the term “the democratic torrent,” we discover a complex genealogy of Rancière’s micropolitics, dependent on the notion of “milieu.” Bettina Lerner studies Rancière’s writings on nineteenth-​century workers, especially

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Nights of Labor, to understand how his archival unearthing of workers emancipatory struggles informs his more recent work on politics and aesthetics. While noting Rancière’s critique of philosophical ventriloquizing, which erases the voices of the poor, Lerner discerns one of Rancière’s own blindspots, notably, how his attention to singular events and his suspicion of historical and identitarian narratives risks glossing over voices that emerge within a community. Leon Sachs’s chapter places one of Rancière’s key books, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, into its historical and national context, that of the debates around Republican education in France in the 1980s. As Sachs argues, The Ignorant Schoolmaster is not only an historical account of an obscure nineteenth-​century education reformer or a treatise on intellectual equality, but it is also a political intervention directed against certain dominant trends in French (and American) pedagogical thinking that go to the heart of our own teaching practice. The next four chapters of the first section investigate Rancière’s dynamic thinking about aesthetics, whether in film, theater, or literature. What emerges in these chapters, and will have an echo in the other sections of this volume, is Rancière’s reliance on literature as a model for all aesthetic works. Far from reducing everything to literature, Rancière’s emphasis on literature stems from the link between the written word and emancipation; as Sachs shows in his chapter, in the Rancière/​Jacotot pedagogical model, “nothing is hidden behind the written page.” Margaret Flinn’s chapter argues that, while Rancière’s writing on film, specifically in Film Fables, proposes that cinema (both the films themselves and film theorists) projects itself as coming “after literature” and thus supplanting literature, Rancière’s own thought ends up proposing literature as film’s privileged Other. Cary Hollinshead-​Strick analyzes Rancière’s reconceptualization of the spectator in relation to modernism. Extending his assertions of intellectual equality from The Ignorant Schoolmaster to the idea of spectatorship, Rancière affirms that the modern spectator (of theater, film, photography, sculpture, etc.) is perfectly capable of understanding and translating what she sees. As Hollinshead-​Strick asserts, for Rancière, spectators “connect movements and images into figures that create new kinds of space.” Giuseppina Mecchia takes a critical approach to Rancière’s most influential book on literature, Mute Speech, by tracing its unacknowledged philosophical debts and historical leaps of faith. For Mecchia, Rancière’s alternative thinking of the event (which she places in dialogue with Badiou) and his rejection of conventional models of literary history, while problematic from a disciplinary point of view, explain his appeal to contemporary scholarship in that his work repoliticizes aesthetics. David Bell’s

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Introduction

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chapter, which rounds out the first section, gives an account of Rancière’s most recent work on aesthetics, Le fil perdu. Rancière claims that modern literature after the French Revolution has abandoned Aristotle’s logic of narrative based on a beginning, a middle, and an end; this simple aesthetic shift belies a far-​reaching transformation not only in how actions and words can be represented, but also with regard to social hierarchy and the notion of equality. Rancière proceeds, convincingly, to question the doxa of contemporary literary theory, overturning Barthes’s “l’effet de réel,” Benjamin’s “shock of modernity,” and Lukács’ theory of the novel. Yet for all its ambition to change how we think about literature, Le fil perdu, as Bell argues, limits its scope to well-​known modern French and English authors, leaving the reader to wonder what the implications are outside of Europe and outside the confines of literature. Part II of Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism opens up Rancière’s work in relation to modernism in the broadest sense, encompassing modernist fiction, film, and artworks as well as the notion of modernism itself. These chapters explore the ramifications and limits of Rancière’s radical philosophy in the various disciplines he encounters, from film theory (Conley), to feminism (Chanter), to sociology (van Zuylen). The contributors in this section think alongside Rancière across several of his works, using the critical tools he has discovered (and which the chapters in Part I studied) to raise further questions about aesthetics and politics. Both Suzanne Guerlac in this section and Giuseppina Mecchia in the first section demonstrate that Rancière “needs literature” for his politics of emancipation. As he says in our interview, literature has taught him that “writing is actually a research process, a process of invention. In writing, it isn’t enough to simply find the form that expresses ideas about the world; it is essentially about finding world experiences through trying to write sentences.” As these chapters show, understanding Rancière, understanding modernism, requires an engagement with texts on the level of writing. The first chapter in this section, by Tom Conley, evokes Rancière’s “troubled” cinephilia in order to read Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night, a film whose political aesthetic turns around jokes that stage class tensions and sexual tensions. Conley’s chapter explores how Rancière’s politique de l’amateur (as opposed to the New Wave’s “auteur” politics) allows for a reframing of the economics and politics of the Hollywood studio system. Tina Chanter’s chapter considers the benefits and consequences of Rancière’s aesthetic theories for feminism and critical race theory (which echo in important ways Bettina Lerner’s concluding

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remarks). While his idea of the “distribution of the sensible” offers the promise of an artistic disruption of the police order, Chanter shows how artistic practice itself has shifted debates on consensus, diversity, and inclusivity, and she argues for opening up a dialogue between Rancière’s thought and feminism. Suzanne Guerlac shows the brilliant insights and also the missed opportunities in Rancière’s writing on Marcel Proust, a writer who upsets notions of modernist literature, autobiography, memory, and space and time. Guerlac argues that, while Rancière’s discussion of literature as contradiction has liberated Proust studies from some recent critiques that challenge the intellectual integrity of Proust’s novel, Rancière’s focus on words leads him to miss the originality of Proustian time, which ironically shares much with Rancière’s idea of a “democratic temporality.” Alison Ross juxtaposes theories of the will from Romantic aesthetic philosophers who inform Rancière’s theory with narrative depictions of pathos and reverie in Stendhal, Ibsen, and Freud as they are studied in Rancière’s recent work. Ross takes on questions of ontology and ethics, often elided in Rancière’s work, and relates them to the “emancipatory capacity of the aesthetic regime.” In Marina van Zuylen’s chapter, Rancière’s antagonism to Bourdieu’s sociology, in particular the idea of “habitus,” is shown to be a ­useful foil in debates around equality and determinism. Yet as van Zuylen shows, Bourdieu and Rancière share more than just a preoccupation with social hierarchy, but also a long-​term, if largely unrecognized, interest in ways of defying social expectations. The final chapter, by Silvia López, follows Rancière’s influence in Latin America, especially in relation to the resistance to decades of failed neoliberal policies. López, in ways that recall Tina Chanter’s chapter, examines in particular the use of forgotten public spaces by artists who seek new forms of citizenship through dissensus. Part III consists of a glossary of Rancière’s key terms, in the form of short chapters. As independent works, each glossary entry resonates with and expands upon the longer texts of the first two parts. Although Rancière rejects systems and elaborate theoretical jargon, a few key terms anchor his texts and serve as critical tools:  distribution of the sensible, fable, intellectual ­equality, mute speech, and the regimes of art. While not an easy read in French, Rancière nevertheless relies on the richness of the French language for many of his conceptual inventions. These terms have not always passed into English with all of their original clarity. The short chapters in this section not only define these terms, but delve into their complexity and their development in Rancière’s works.

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Introduction

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The fourth part of Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ­consists of the translation of an extended interview I conducted with Rancière in May 2015. In it, he reflects on the context of his thinking on modernism and on the disciplinary conjunctures that have dominated work in the humanities. The interview can serve as a succinct introduction to Rancière’s thought and an illustration of the breadth of his work, ranging from philosophy, French crime fiction, Soviet film, and German design to contemporary museums and political interventions. The contributors to Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism engage with the multiplicity of Rancière’s thought through close readings of his texts, through comparative readings with other philosophers, and through an engagement with modernist works of art and literature. Unlike many of his illustrious predecessors in French theory, Rancière’s thought does not constitute a definable system, and does not seek out devout followers; “Rancièrian” is hard to pronounce, which I take as a good sign. Instead of a system, Rancière proceeds by undoing or refashioning categories of thought, daring us to draw conclusions even while his own writing remains schematic. Over the course of forty years and over thirty books, however, certain patterns emerge, certain questions return, allowing us to see a new, more political aspect of what we have come to call modernity.

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Part One

Conceptualizing Rancière

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1

The Hatred of Democracy and “The Democratic Torrent”: Rancière’s Micropolitics Emily Apter

In the concluding pages of his 2005 broadside, The Hatred of Democracy [La haine de la démocratie], written during Chirac’s presidency and Sarkozy’s short stint as minister of finance, in the lead-​up to the global financial crisis, Jacques Rancière would draw a parallel between “intellectuals today” and the authoritarian elites in Second Empire France who wage all-​out war against “the democratic torrent”1: To understand what democracy means is to hear the struggle that is at stake in the word: not simply the tones of anger and scorn with which it can be imbued but, more profoundly, the slippages and reversals of meaning that it authorizes, or that one authorizes oneself to make with regard to it. When, in the middle of the manifestations of heightening inequality, our intellectuals become indignant about the havoc wreaked by equality, they exploit a trick that is not new. Already in the nineteenth century, whether under the monarchie censitaire or under the authoritarian Empire, the elites of official France—​of France reduced to two hundred thousand men, or subject to laws and decrees restricting individual and public liberties—​were alarmed at the “democratic torrent” that prevailed in society. Banned in public life, they saw democracy triumphing in cheap fabrics, public transport, boating, open-​air painting, the new behavior of young women,

1 The expression “torrent demographics” appears in quotations without a specific reference in Rancière’s footnote. It would seem to have been drawn from Second Empire political literature. In Taine’s Graindorge we find an allusion to “cette prodigieuse multitude mouvante” (that prodigious multitude in motion), which approximates the “democratic torrent.” It appears in a chapter titled “Society,” which links democratization not only to certain pastimes but also to the explosion of advertising. Hippolyte Taine, Vie et Opinions de Monsieur Frédéric-​ Thomas Graindorge (Paris: Hachette, 1959), 300. In addition to the explicit reference to Taine as a source for political attitudes toward democracy in Second Empire France, Rancière also cites Armand de Pontmartin’s musings on “democracy in literature,” a critique of Madame Bovary published in the Nouvelles Causeries du samedi in 1860.

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12 Emily Apter and the new turns of phrase of writers. However, they were not innovative in this regard either. The pairing of democracy viewed both as a rigid form of government and as a permissive form of society is the original mode in which the hatred of democracy was rationalized by Plato himself.2

Rancière identifies democracy with “a paradoxical condition of politics” associated with the “egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself ” (HD 94). One can take this formula literally as a reference to the suspicion and contempt of elites toward the leveling effects of mass culture and the widening of the franchise, but it really has to do with the supposition that democracy ungrounds itself by spreading democratization. For Rancière, micropolitical practices in the domains of art, leisure, and work furnish conditions of redistributed power even as they engender new forms of policing and censorship. Thus a process of making-​equal is inseparable from inegalitarianism and vice versa: such paradoxes hold as the essence of “politics” in all its unexceptional guises. The Hatred of Democracy makes scant reference to literature and unlike other works of Rancière (La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (1998) [Mute Speech:  Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics]; Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et Politique (2000) [The Politics of Aesthetics]; Politique de la littérature (2007) [Politics of Literature]; Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (2011) [Aisthesis. Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art]; and Le fil perdu (2014) [The Lost Thread]), it offers no concerted politics of the aesthetic. But there is one figure who surfaces as a literary point of reference in Rancière’s suggestive parallels between Second Empire society and neoliberal Europe in the early 2000s, and that is Hippolyte Taine. Those popular pastimes, leisure pursuits, and objects of consumption, those fleeting figures of a mass society that both offend and energize the conservative state, alluded to by Rancière, are in Taine tallied on the basis of an anthology of Second Empire attitudes and mores in the 1867 novel Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de Frédéric-​ Thomas Graindorge: “Pour un bon florilège de ces themes, voir Vie et opinions . . .”3 Rancière footnotes this obscure work in a perfunctory yet intriguing way. Indeed, Taine’s novel works as a key to understanding the “democratic torrent,” to rethinking paradoxes of egalitarianism, to addressing the difficulty of defining 2 Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 93–​94. Further references to this translation will appear in the text abbreviated as HD. 3 Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), 102.

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what politics is (prior to or exceeding its naming by political institutions) or is not. (And for Rancière, as we know, politics is certainly not democracy, where democracy is the name for a presumptive legal equality valid only for those parts of the people who are counted.)4 Taine, in Rancière’s reading, elucidates the messy, hatable contents of democracy—​which, in embodying a reckless adherence to “limitless growth,” ultimately brings about the recession of political space. As Rancière underscores in Hatred of Democracy: The “government of anybody and everybody” is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restrictions on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action. . . . State power and the power of wealth tendentially unite in a sole expert management of monetary and population flows. Together they combine their efforts to reduce the spaces of politics. (94–​95)

Rancière, in fact, never delivers the hypothetical piece he might have written on Taine’s Graindorge, one which might have approached the text as a sociology of obstructions to true democracy, as a study in the evacuated foundation of democracy, or as an exemplary document of the capitalization of social life and the curtailment of political space.5 But I  will argue that Graindorge links the “democratic torrent” to Rancière’s aesthetics of milieu in ways that activate Taine’s own theory of milieu in its full philological development. In this way, activating Rancière’s scattered and parsimonious allusions to Taine, I find material for extending the reach of his own aisthetic politics. Graindorge is a document of the “democratic torrent” which by and large failed to endear him to his readers. This comes through in an exchange with

4 Given Rancière’s redefinition of the terms “le politique,” “la politique,” and “la police,” it is important to keep in mind the ambiguity in English, since depending on how we translate “politics” back into the Rancièrian lexicon, “politics” might be inherent to democracy or antithetical to it. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 61–​62. 5 Rancière holds to the belief that the figment of “democratic man,” going back to Plato, is the product of an operation . . . that aims to ward off an impropriety pertaining to the very principle of politics. The entertaining sociology of a people comprised of carefree consumers, obstructed streets and inverted social roles wards off the presentiment of a more profound evil:  that the unnameable democracy is not a form of society refractory to good government and adapted to the lowest common denominator, but the very principle of politics, the principle that institutes politics in founding ‘good’ government on its own absence of foundation. (HD 37–​38)

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Sainte-​Beuve. Taine had written him an anxious letter acknowledging his influence on this experiment in “moral physiology,” and requesting his frank assessment when the work came out in book form (it was originally published as a series of articles with illustrations by Isidore Planat in La Vie parisienne).6 Sainte-​ Beuve responded with fair warning that the book would not be well received because it was too judgmental and harsh in its depictions of social types. “Why, he asks, are you in such a hurry to translate your impressions into written notes, and these notes into laws?”7 Graindorge answers that question in its probe into the laws of the market at the dawn of a new era of finance capital. Perhaps even more than Balzac, Flaubert, or Marx, Taine devised a language for describing distribution networks of material artifacts and determinations of the market value of goods and social advantage. According to Jonathan Dewald, from Graindorge’s “sharp interest in contemporary material life” we learn the cost of women’s dresses, their fabrics and colors, how marriage proposals were made and what went through the minds of the parties to them, how much income the different levels of Paris society required. . . . Graindorge’s opinions (in addition to appreciation for material comfort) also display a radical detachment from conventional moralities and a readiness to acknowledge the harsh realities of modern life. Notes sur Paris can be read as exemplifying the mode of intellectual life that the Magny group represented; one that combined engagement with contemporary social life, philosophical materialism, and freedom from institutional and pious moralizing.8

Taine, one could say, prefigured the theoretical moment in which we find ourselves now: one of philosophical materialism attuned to the financialization of everything. His literary experiment records how new forms of finance capital generate a milieu that permeates all modes of existence. Graindorge is an uprooted Frenchman, educated in Britain and Germany, and enriched in America, where he made a fortune by investing in pork and oil and profiting from slave labor. His character is a mystery, and must be painstakingly 6 Letter of Hippolyte Taine to Sainte-​Beuve, June 15, 1867, in Hippolyte Taine:  Sa Vie et Sa Corrrespondance, Tome III (Paris: Hachette, 1904), 339. 7 Ibid., 341. Letter of Sainte-​Beuve to Taine, July 16, 1867. 8 Jonathan Dewald, Lost Worlds:  The Emergence of French Social History, 1815–​1970 (University Park, PA:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 25. See also Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem Press, 2011); and Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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reconstructed after his death through techniques of forensic autopsy.9 In this task, “Taine,” his eponymous executor, relies on one M. Marcelin (director of La Vie parisienne), who had “several views taken of the apartment of the deceased by a photographer in repute. By the aid of several portraits he had obtained the principal traits of the person and costume of M. Graindorge” (NP v). The photographic evidence turns up strange artifacts—​a stuffed crocodile in the boudoir, a portrait of his black servant Sam—​but they are mere trace-​elements of eccentricities belied by the character’s bland self-​presentation: “His phrases in themselves were mere statements of facts, dull, and very precise” (NP vii; emphasis in the original). Graindorge personifies matter-​of-​factness, facing his own death with practical equanimity:  “The conclusion you omit to draw is, that it would be better for me if I were dead; that is my opinion too,” and applying the same attitude to social engineering (NP viii). One of his aims in coming to Paris is the creation of a matchmaking service modeled on the Bourse. “Is not marriage an affair? Is anything else considered in it but proper proportions? Are not these proportions values, capable of rise and fall, of valuation and tariff? Do we not say, a young girl of one hundred thousand francs? Are not life-​situations, a handsome figure, a chance of promotion, articles of merchandise quoted at five, then, twenty, fifty thousand francs, deliverable only against equal value?” (NP 174). The business plan for a “universal matrimonial agency” (a kind of match.com, Facebook, and Grindr avant la lettre) is outlined in chapter XIV “A Proposition, New, and Suited to the Tendencies of Modern Civilization, Designed to Assure the Happiness of Households and to Establish on a Sound Basis a First-​Class Institution Hitherto Left to Arbitrary Direction and to Chance” (NP 176, 169). Graindorge’s astuce is to fine-​tune the marriage market by applying the financial instruments of data and risk management: “Each offer inscribed at the agency shall be accompanied by a demand, specifying approximately the amount of fortune, and the kind of position demanded in exchange” (NP 176). A photographic record that includes close-​ups of teeth, feet, and hands, will accompany a complete dossier of “medical certificates, mortgage clearances, title-​deeds, evidences of income and of property, legal attestations as to correct 9 The final chapter offers more insight into Graindorge’s character. Its conceit is a letter addressed to M. Marcelin by Graindorge’s “private secretary and chiropodist.” After outlining the indignities he endured while in Graindorge’s employ, and criticizing “the unfortunate traces which a grossly commercial life had left on his mind,” he churlishly registers the meager estate left to him upon Graindorge’s death. Hippolyte Taine, Notes on Paris:  The Life and Opinions of M.  Frédéric Graindorge, trans. John Austin Stevens (Henry Holt and Co. 1875), 351. Further references to this work will be to this translation and will appear in the text abbreviated as NP.

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life and habits” (NP 177). Marriage prospects will be put up as investment opportunities, and buyers will be insured against the risk of shoddy goods by religious, educational, and legal authorities. Graindorge thus shifts the patrician model of intermarriage and fortune-​consolidation into the speculative economy of stock trading and hedging. A prospect’s value will be adjusted for inflation and deflation according to political fluctuations: “A threat of war will send down the value of officers. The news of peace in America will raise the value of merchants. Each one, on opening his journal in the morning, will have the pleasure of finding his value inscribed, and quoted” (NP 179). Graindorge sees his proposal as the natural outgrowth of the positive sciences “extending everywhere unceasingly; everybody is now occupied with statistics, political economy, publicity, industrial, commercial and practical customs” (NP 180). What project, he reasons, “gives more guarantee to private interests, more publicity to commerce . . . which creates at once more commercial men and more functionaries; which renders life at once more convenient and more mechanical; which brings man nearer to those stamped and quoted values, duly registered and circulating, to which he is striving to assimilate himself?” (NP 180). So certain is he of the venture that he declares himself willing to stake his own capital which, he wagers, will earn 10 percent more in interest than his salt pork or oil shares. To ensure the success of his agency, Graindorge must learn the social networks of Paris, and here is where Tainian milieu theory takes hold as an inventory of Second Empire mores and social hierarchies. Spaces of leisure and populist socializing are scanned in shabby recycled couches, jostling bodies, dirty dancing, smells of gas and tobacco, heat and steam; cast-​offs and clothing for hire. High-​culture venues are similarly assessed in material terms. The lorettes seated in the balcony at the opera are products of their cosmetic consumption: a Titian-​style blond with pasty complexion “represents ten years of lotions, vice, powder, midnight vigils, and pâtés de foie gras” (NP 1). A wedding party in a restaurant is broken down into units of net worth: The groom, a head clerk, is valued at four thousand francs, and the bride, daughter of a provincial inspector of streams and forests, is valued at fifty thousand francs (NP 4). The drawing room becomes a tragic scene of goods inspection, featuring women “imprisoned by a wall of dresses” as the “men stare at them, leaning in the doorways; they use their eye-​glasses as though they were at a bazar, and in fact it is an exhibition of flounces, diamonds and shoulders” (NP 8). The social milieu is carceral, forcing the women to renounce the opportunity to live life with the same kind of freedom enjoyed by men. The new egalitarianism of pleasure seeking,

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which migrates from the demimonde to respectable circles, seeds the disorder of despair in the bourgeoisie, which then reinvigorates the authoritarian reaction. Women, Graindorge notes, “are ordered to limit themselves to the tame feelings of caged squirrels, to lead a regular life, . . . as free from passion, as that of a Dutch philosopher; and at the same time they are taught the art of satisfying, of arousing and exciting the wildest imaginations, and the most exquisite desires” (NP 9). Graindorge consistently charts the inegalitarian effects of egalitarian contingencies, but where the novel really excels is in its representation of how democratization comes to be identified with acts of appraisal. Graindorge relies on a ledger to determine whether existence is profitable. He devises a math sheet for his opera experience by dividing agreeable and disagreeable sensations into credit and debit columns and calculating the cost of the enjoyment. (“A pretty pastoral rondo, credit 1 franc, an ‘Incomparable stupidity of the figurants dressed as lords,’ debit 1 franc”) (NP 145). Thoughts and impressions are similarly computed: “I only know how to jot down my thoughts when they come and as they come, to describe the furniture of a drawing-​room after the manner of an appraiser, in broken sentences and with all sorts of absurd remarks” (NP 23). It is this appraising consciousness, the necessity of calculating the price of everything, that transforms the “democratic torrent” into a total environment of financialization. Fabrics become the poetry of appraisal: “I hear a hum of words; moire antique, spangled velvet, tarlatan, poplin, guipure, flounces and the like” (NP 9). “Temperature” is gauged in the quality of an evening: the “Voltaire,” for example, is an atmosphere that comes off the sparkle of a supper-​table and the champagne “effervescing in the brain” (NP 10). These barely perceptible material and immaterial elements are the site of politics because they afford a way of seeing the organization of the senses, of apprehending the unaccountable in what is manically accounted for. When Graindorge takes note of vulgarity and cheapness as characteristics of mass culture, he inadvertently names the happiness that comes of freeloading or acquiring free stuff. This uncounted stuff pushes back against the price of everything, constituting a micropolitical environment of what “anyone” desires. Taine is a reference point for Rancière as a sociologist of democratic contradictions under conditions of burgeoning finance capitalism, but it must not be forgotten that Rancière’s theory of the demos is informed by an anti-​ sociological imperative. Sociology tout court is seen to harbor strains of miserabilism and moral judgment carried over from philosophy. Social reproduction,

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as underscored by Pierre Bourdieu’s ordering of class distinctions, social attitudes, and distributed symbolic capital, is explicitly targeted, most pointedly in the 2006 preface to The Philosopher and His Poor [Le philosophe et ses pauvres] where Rancière insists that suffering begins by being treated as one who suffers.10 As a reader of literature, Rancière, in contrast to Bourdieu, refuses to place an author like Flaubert within a “literary field” gridded by the socio-​logic of doxa, habitus, and class conformation. Instead, he gives us a Flaubert who democratizes literature by accessing the “what is” of metaphysical substance; the elements of ousia, primary substance, the singular or essential property in which the particular inheres. In Le fil perdu (2014) Rancière’s approach to Flaubertian realism dispenses with the Barthesian “reality effect”—​which treated supernumerary detail as the symptom of reification—​in favor of what might be called an “equality effect,” whereby things, worlds, and characters are equally important or unimportant.11 This “equality effect” of sensible effects is given full sway in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013), an account of Euro-​American modernism that builds on his thesis that “anything whatsoever can belong to art.”12 The book interpolates how a regime of perception, sensation and interpretation of art is constituted and transformed by welcoming images, objects and performances that seemed most opposed to the idea of fine art: vulgar figures of genre painting, the exaltation of the most prosaic activities in verse freed from meter, music-​hall stunts and gags, industrial buildings and machine rhythms, smoke from trains and ships reproduced mechanically, extravagant inventories of accessories from the lives of the poor. (A xii)

In fourteen “episodes,” many taken from “poets who have fallen into the purgatory of literary anthologies, talks by thinkers or critics who have fallen from grace, sketchbooks for stagings rarely performed. . .,” Rancière restitutes “the genealogy of forms and perceptions of thought that were able to make them events in the first place” (A xii). It is the “scene”—​“the little optical machine”—​ that redistributes art. By no longer permitting art to be walled into the precinct of aesthetic autonomy, a re-​spacing of political sociality becomes possible, 10 Jacques Rancière, Le philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), xii. 11 Jacques Rancière, Le fil perdu: Essais sur la fiction moderne (Paris: La Fabrique, 2014), 23. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated as FP. 12 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis:  Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Verso, 2013), x. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated as A.

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manifest in the very small event. Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black from 1830 will provide a typology consisting of small causes that produce large effects, like refilling a mattress or a dropped pair of scissors, that makes Madame de Rénal Julien’s accomplice, despite her best intentions. Others are not linked in any chain of causes or effects, means or ends. On the contrary, they suspend these links in favor of the sole happiness of feeling, the sentiment of existence alone: a day in the country, a butterfly hunt, or the pleasure of a summer evening spent in the shade of a linden tree with the soft noise of the wind blowing. In the heterogeneous weaving of small events, the grand schemes find themselves torn between two kinds of logic: there is Julien’s duty that orders him to take revenge on those who humiliate him, by mastering his master’s wife; and there is the pure happiness of a shared sensible moment: a hand that surrenders to another in the mildness of the evening under a tall linden tree. (A 44; emphasis in the original)

If there is one aspect of Rancière’s political aesthetic that seems consistent—​if not easily graspable—​it is its micrological scale, its virtual ineffability. Whether we are dealing with “small causes” that escalate into whirligigs of psychopolitical calculation or exquisite, fleeting moments of the “shared sensible,” Rancière expounds a radical ecumenicalism according to which “[e]‌verything can be interesting, it can all happen to anyone, and it can all be copied by the penman. To be sure, this law of new literature depends upon the other novelty: anyone can grab a pen, taste any kind of pleasure, or nourish any ambition whatsoever” (A 51). Rancière reads fiction politically, which is to work against the grain of the historical novel—​too indebted to Aristotelian principles of dramatic action and character; structural and historical causality. He seeks out in literature evidence of the least visible forms of sociality; the finest of fine-​grain politics. Where Sartre, as Badiou points out in an exchange with Rancière, took as his philosophical project the advent of subjective freedom in the materiality of existence, Rancière relinquishes the whole idea of a philosophical project, opting instead for immersion in an inchoate mix of gestures, material practices, and environmental interactions that form something like an atmosphere, an ambiance, a milieu, even if those are not immediately his chosen terms. “Transition of sonorities to fabrics.” This phrase of Mallarmé does not imply that the flowing veils of Loïe Fuller are transposed into music of some kind. Commentators on the serpentine dance apparently pay little attention to music.

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20 Emily Apter They occasionally evoke the flower-​girls of Parsifal or the flame surrounding Brunehilde, but these Wagnerian references are aesthetic ideas, not musical themes. The movement of the veil transposes no musical motif, but the very idea of music. This idea is that of an art that serves as a material instrument to produce a sensed immaterial milieu. (A 151; my italics)

Rancière will refer to the idea of milieu in two apparently contrasting ways. On the one hand in Hatred of Democracy milieu is alluded to in all its negative connotations, identified with a reactionary principle of elite-​formation that denounces “individualist democracy,” as with Jules Ferry’s tracking of citizens into the ranks of the republican professional and political classes.13 This “subterfuge” distracts the people from seeing that a collectivity inclusive of “anyone” has been foreclosed:  “It is not the collectivity in general that is being defended by the denouncer of ‘democratic individualism.’ It is a certain collectivity, the well-​ordered collectivity of bodies, milieus and ‘atmospheres’ that adapts knowledges to rank under the wise direction of an elite. And it is not individualism as such that is being rejected but the idea that anyone at all can share in its prerogatives” (HD 67–​68). Here milieus and atmospheres are freighted with conservative baggage. On the other hand, Rancière will develop the use of the word in Aisthesis to allow for the conjoining of aesthetics and politics—​and specifically the micro-​politics of the torrent—​that is already to be found in Taine’s own milieu theory. For while comparable to works by the great chroniclers of Parisian high life and urban street culture (Balzac, Baudelaire, Gautier, Zola, Uzanne, MacOrlan, Kracauer, Benjamin), Taine’s Graindorge is particularly suited to Rancièrian politics not because it focuses on scenes of quotidian political life, but because it gives a political cast—​the ironies of democratization—​to everything that isn’t overtly political. What 13 The censorship of politics was built into the early legislative framework of the Napoleonic code during the Second Empire. As Sudhir Hazareesingh observes:  “Legislation adopted in the early days of the Empire forbade the General Councils from expressing political views. Municipal councils deemed to be governed by unruly political passions were dissolved. At the same time, local assemblies were presented as performing a useful civic role, notably in educating the citizenry in the virtues of sound administration. In his opening speech at the session of the General Council of the Puy-​de-​Dôme in August 1864, Eugène Rouher delineated the following Bonapartist conception of the educative function of departmental administrative councils. ‘These assemblies are in all of France a great technical school that facilitates the deeper study of our administrative, economic, and financial organization in which the politician prepares or completes his education. . . . Politics and its irritant passions are banished from these surroundings so as to preserve a greater purity in the atmosphere.’ ” (Archives Nationales, Papiers Eugène Rouher) in From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 45.

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René Wellek criticized as “Taine’s astonishingly uncritical use of evidence” referring to his indiscriminate habit of “drawing on all sources:  fiction, history, documents, anecdotes, etc.” is precisely that which makes it sympathetic to Rancière’s way of working, where “indiscrimination” is a first principle of emancipatory politics.14 Taine’s milieu theory is prominent in the preface to his 1858 Essais de critique et d’histoire and introduction to the 1864 Histoire de la littérature anglaise [History of English Literature]. Influenced by Herder’s analysis of collective dispositions of the nation, by Comte’s historical positivism and extension of the French term “milieu” to encompass not only the physical medium that surrounds an organism, but the general scope of external conditions that are necessary to support the organism’s existence, by Darwin’s adaptive environment, and by Guizot’s recourse to fact-​based, quantitative history (“only circumstantial, naked facts express quantity”), Taine cemented the trilogy “race, milieu, moment.” Roughly translatable in English as “nation/​volk/​cultural heritage,” “environment/​situation,” and “time/​Zeitgeist/​acquired speed/​impulsion of historical process,” the terms came to signify a thick conception of context bridging fact and literature, science and history, situation and environment, all posed against romantic ideals of national genius, of sui generis creation sprung from the singular personality of a people.15 It is easy to see how Taine’s use of milieu became vulnerable to caricature, with its recourse to clunky, overdetermined constructs of heredity, climate, digestion, topography, and psychological laws. Italian civilization, for example, is divided in two—​with one side outward-​looking, bellicose, and imperial, the other, inward-​looking, passive, reliant on papal directives, influenced by neighboring territories. This kind of simplistic cultural projection is what renders Taine’s thought irredeemably outmoded. But when one delves into the actual descriptions of how a person “lives” in space, one gleans a unique aisthesis, an infra-​world of perceptible phenomena, a sociology of seeing. This is certainly the gist of Taine’s exhortation, in the preface to the History of English Literature, to sharpen observation by focusing on the complete thing is the man who acts [a man in motion or “l’homme agissant”], the man corporeal and visible, who eats, walks, fights, labours. Leave aside the 14 René Wellek, “Hippolyte Taine’s Literary Theory and Criticism,” Criticism 1, no. 1 (Winter 1959): 15. 15 See Taine’s essay “M. Guizot,” in Essais de critique et d’histoire, as cited by Patrizia Lombardo, “Hippolyte Taine between Art and Science,” Yale French Studies, no. 77, Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions (1990): 129.

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22 Emily Apter theory and the mechanism of constitutions, religions and their systems, and try to see men in their workshops, in their offices, in their fields, with their sky and soil, their houses, their dress, cultivations, meals, as you do when, landing in England or Italy, you look at faces and motions, roads and inns, a citizen taking his walk, a workman drinking.16

History of English Literature undresses the social “type” to reveal a body produced by the physics of animation. Racine is brought back to life through his comportment. Taine imagines him at the court of Versailles, elegant and bewigged, cuing his body language to the “policed” protocols of a sociality that emanates from the palace décor.17 In another instance, the figure of a “poet” is portrayed not as a freestanding genius, but as a social agent whose swollen ego issues forth from the atmosphere of corrupted democracy: A modern poet, who has studied and travelled, a man like Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or Heine, in a black coat and gloves, welcomed by the ladies, and making every evening his fifty bows and his score of bon-​mots in society, reading the papers in the morning, lodging as a rule on a second floor; not over gay, because he has nerves, and especially because, in this dense democracy where we choke one another, the discredit of the dignities of office has exaggerated his pretensions while increasing his importance, and because the keenness of his feelings in general disposes him somewhat to believe himself a deity. (History of English Literature 3)

Taine attends to the minutest inflections of voice and shifting posture; no alteration of mood, energy, or inhibition should go unregistered.18 For Zakir Paul, this 16 Hippolyte Taine, History of English literature 1, trans. Henri Van Laun, preface Richard Henry Stoddard (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1904), 5. 17 This kind of milieu reading retains its currency, as evinced by Pierre Bergounioux’s channeling of grand siècle literature in and through architecture, décor, and forms of sociality: “La littérature classique a, pour décor, l’antichambre du palais, les arcades de la Place Royale, le salon, le jardin à la française, la nature académique des fables, le café des philosophes. L’idéalisme abstrait, qui est sa tendance majeure, durable, est indissociable des intérieurs, pièces d’apparat éclairées de flambeaux, dallées de marbre, boudoirs propices aux fausses confidences, aux réconciliations, lieux clos du système curial-​absolutiste ou de la sociabilité urbaine.” Exister par deux fois (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 239–​40. [Classical literature has, for décor, the palace antechamber, the arcades of the Place Royale, the salon, the French garden, the academic nature of its fables, the cafés of the philosophers. Abstract idealism, its major and lasting feature, is indissociable from the interiors: state rooms lit by tapers, marble floors, boudoirs set up for sharing false intimacies and reconciliations; closed systems of curial-​absolutism and urban sociability.] 18 Taine could be said to anticipate the social theorist Erving Goffman, who (drawing on Georg Simmel, Durkheim, and theories of theatrical performance) would categorize his landmark The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), xi, as “a sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which social life can be studied, especially the kind of social life that is organized within the physical confines of a building or plant”. It is the notion of physical confines that is significant here:  Goffman’s work builds up a vast inventory of everyday

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emphasis on the extimate will be key to Taine’s semiotic theory of “intelligence” (published in 1874 as the monumental De l’Intelligence) effecting “the shift of intelligence from a faculty to a sign.”19 As Paul argues, no innate ideas ground the thinking being (Descartes), no “faculties of the soul” inscribe the metaphysical subject (Maine de Biran); what Taine will imagine as a “self ” is a collection of psychophysiological signs indexing the individual’s status and vocation, and more profoundly still, their cognitive and performative animating traits. A language of biosemiosis or “inner-​micro-​kinesis”20 is mobilized, describing how each visible action serves as a direct line into a subliminal matrix; a window into infinitesimal worlds of rationalization, emotion, sensation, and proprioceptive hallucination. In History of English Literature this theory of intelligence is not yet worked out, but already in evidence is a sensorimotorial approach to the analysis of the social type: When you consider with your eyes the visible man, what do you look for? The man invisible. The words which enter your ears, the gestures, the motions of his head, the clothes he wears, visible acts and deeds of every kind, are expressions merely; something is revealed beneath them, and that is a soul. An inner man is concealed beneath the outer man; the second does but reveal the first. You look at his house, furniture, dress; and that in order to discover in them the marks of his habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement or rusticity, his extravagance or his economy, his stupidity or his acuteness. [. . .] You consider his writings, his artistic productions, his business transactions of political ventures; and that in order to measure the scope and limits of his intelligence, his inventiveness, his coolness, to find out the order, the character, the general force of his ideas, the mode in which he thinks and resolves. All these externals are but avenues converging towards a centre; you enter them simply in order to reach that centre; and that centre is the genuine man, I mean that mass of faculties and feelings which are the inner man. We have reached a new world, which is infinite, because every action which we see involves an infinite association of reasonings, emotions, sensations new and old, which sociality, from body language in the business world, to social protocols in the workplace, and they are shown as responsive to their physical environment. From the relays of power bouncing off gazes we move to the relays of power glancing off rooms, walls, and furniture. The workspace or domestic habitat is an ambient surround rife with micro-​political anecdote and performative interactivity. 19 Zakir Paul, “Disarming Intelligence: On a Modern French Faculty,” PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2015. See chapter on “Gathering Intelligence: From Taine to Bergson.” 20 The terms are borrowed from François Dagognet, Faces, Surfaces, Interfaces (Paris: Vrin, 1982).

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24 Emily Apter have served to bring it to light, and which, like great rocks deep-​seated in the ground, find in it their end and their level. This underworld is a new subject matter, proper to the historian. (History of English Literature 6–​7 [translation modified])

Milieu is intelligence insofar as physical data form part of a continuum coextensive with moods, memories, and sensory impressions stored by the “brain-​eye.”21 The body becomes a sensating interface of social space and cognitive plasticity. This plasticity is glossed by Rancière in Aisthesis when he draws on Taine (and Taine’s reading of Hegel in his Philosophy of Art) to parse Rodin’s transcription of movement. Taine’s diagnosis of “nervousness,” a symptomatic condition of modern life, generates a micro-​milieu in which mass spectacle, calisthenics (new ways of moving and throwing), and volitional dissipation coalesce in Rodin’s sculptural praxis: Taine wanted to determine what separates modern life from the old ideal of it in the plastic arts: it was no longer just a question of the dark and fitted clothing in which the bourgeois century draped the athletic Olympian body. It was the physiological character typical of modern man: its “nervosity” (“le nervosisme”), the disordered agitation of individuals dragged into the tumult of urban life, bombarded by a multitude of ideas and spectacles, overwhelmed by a thousand little preoccupations that made it impossible to focus on definite goals or tailor gestures towards precise ends—​the hurling of a discus, an army thrown into battle—​which had animated the classical statues. In transcribing new ways of holding and throwing, of tightening up or gesturing; in exploring the infinity of transitions between action and inaction, Rodin expedited entire theses to the storehouse of antiquity, theses on modern nervosity. . . . Plasticity would no longer be the conservator of ideal forms . . . it would march to the same rhythm as modern life . . . colored surface and sculptural volume henceforth would find their common principle in movement. (A 200–​201)

Rodin’s sculpture becomes an ambient milieu branded as “nervosity,” a medium of the reorientated sensorium, and of the redistribution of matter and spirit (partes extra partes).22 21 See Eric Alliez, L’Oeil-​Cerveau. Nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne (Paris:  Vrin, 2007). English edition, The Brain-​ Eye. New Histories of Modern Painting, trans. Robin Mackay (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 22 There is an interesting parallel between Rancière and Spizter on Rodin and the choreographer Rudolf von Laban. Both use these artists to extend the idea of milieu to microworlds of embodied plasticity. As Spitzer notes, in his treatise Die Welt des Tänzers (1920) von Laban conceptualized the receptacle of gesture as a Raumkörper, a ‘three-​dimensional space in which the ballet dancer cuts his figures

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The relevance of the concept of milieu to Rancière’s micropolitics becomes clearer still when one draws out the range of meanings embedded in its philology. Leo Spitzer’s two-​part essay on “Milieu and Ambiance in Historical Semantics,” published in 1942, is the logical place to begin.23 Written during the war, some six years after he had resettled in the American university system, (an Austrian Jew fired from his post in Marburg he worked in Istanbul between 1933 and 1936) the essay positions itself against the Heideggerian Umwelt (surround). While Heidegger “shows us man frantically entrenching himself within his Umwelt,” Spitzer maintains that there is no Dasein, or being-​in-​the-​world without Umwelt. This is politically consequential: “To free himself from the boxed-​in feeling, Heidegger must needs imitate the great desperate moves of his Führer, by a sudden turn to activism which is a far cry from Husserl’s meditativeness: he leads his teacher’s praktische Welt via an Arbeitswelt toward the Lebensraum of a world-​annexing Germany” (MA 309–​10). Spitzer’s polemic against Heidegger subtends the broader project of unseating Tainian milieu.24 If he includes an exhaustive appendix, “Synonyms of the Tainian milieu in Other Languages,” it would seem at least in part because the term’s dérive in other languages refutes notions of nationalist in-​dwelling or the specter of a lowering, persecutory outside world. Yet milieu perforce harbors political threat and danger, trauma and wartime dislocation. The final sentence—​“Man today is content with a more modest receptacle, nor need it be all-​protective, so long as he can feel to ‘belong’ somewhere in this chaotic and complex modern world”—​suggests the author’s willingness to settle for a second-​best milieu; one that shelters the exile, but makes no promise to relieve existential insecurity (MA 225). . . . What surrounds him is an indifferent environment not a plastic partner’ (as cited by Spitzer, 315). Spitzer ends the notes to Part I of his essay with the arresting image of the modern dancer Mary Wigman, a pupil of von Laban’s, whose movements bring the outlines of the Raumkörper into visibility; they are described by Spitzer, in very Rancièrian language, as “the determinant tensions and crystallization in the choric medium.” Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Journal of Phenomenological Research 3, no.  2 (December 1942):  316. Further references to this essay will appear in the text abbreviated as MA. 23 Spitzer originally published the essay in two parts, both in the Journal of Phenomenological Research. Part I appeared in vol. 3, no. 1 (September 1942). Its continuation appeared in vol. 3, no. 2 (December 1942). 24 On the discrediting of Taine, based on the abridgement of milieu and Nazi race theory, see René Wellek, “Hippolyte Taine’s Literary Theory and Criticism,” Criticism 1, no.  1 (Winter 1959):  15. Wellek will go on to criticize this formulaic reduction:  “ ‘Race’ in Taine is not open to the usual objections: it is not a fixed integer, a mysterious biological factor; Taine does not preach the purity or superiority of a race.” Wellek stresses, with reference to De l’intelligence and Graindorge, that Taine’s primary interest was an “intelligible universe” whose goal was “complete knowledge” and the revision of Hegel’s concept of history to rely less on internal dynamics of change and more causes on scientific laws of things (3 and 11–​12).

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As Spitzer’s essay proceeds, milieu and ambiance emerge as full-​fledged Untranslatables, encompassing Spanish medio, Italian ambiente, German Umwelt, English environment. With each historical period, with each language, headway is made against Taine’s concept of milieu as “an aggregate of influences or conditions which shape or determine the being, environment, life or behavior of a person or a thing” (MA 180). Spitzer wants to wean milieu from Tainian determinism by putting it back into dialogue with its cosmic, classical origins, most particularly with the Greek periechon (to contain) taken to mean “that which surrounds, encompasses . . . the all-​embracing air, space, sky, atmosphere, climate . . .” (MA 180). In the Classical Latin of Catullus and Ovid, ambire refers to the ocean’s embrace, but Spitzer will insist that the Romans were ultimately unable “to sense the grandeur of all-​embracingness,” and had to resort to multiple verbs to approximate the Greek periechon (MA 189, 193). It would seem that the only way to get back to the “embrace” of the world is through modern science. Relying on the hermeneutic circle, Spitzer describes the circuit from Aristotelian physics, to mechanics, to biology, to sociology, to the post-​Einsteinian moment of particle and quantum physics (MA 223). At every philological pass, aspects, properties, and grammatical variants of the paired terms are used to chart (and sometimes confuse) the relations of geometry and space-​time; sectional midpoint and golden mean, mapping and ontic self-​positioning, immersive medium and immaterial interface. With Aristotle, the space of place is riven between the containing and the contained, leading to the “closed vase” theory of the world in the Middle Ages, and embarking the subject on a long and fateful sense of enclosure by an exterior world envelope (MA 196, 199). This split was not a feature of Platonic cosmological modeling in Spitzer’s view. In the Timaeus evidence is found that “the air was active in the act of perception, it came to represent a sort of ‘Welt-​Seele’ ” (MA 183). The World-​Soul surrounds the world from outside, holding in place its perfect sphere, itself a formal container of multiple wholes. In the late Classical period, Pliny carries this concept of the sphere over to “medium,” identified with what is held and what holds in place (“medium quiddam tenere,” “Le medium qu’il faut tenir en tout”) (MA 208). “In Old French,” Spitzer observes, milieu “was to be found in an exclusively ‘middle’ meaning (en milieu del pré)—​which seems likewise to have been true of its Latin etymon medius locus” (MA 207). But during the Renaissance an “intermediary’ notion (‘the midpoint between two extremes’) began to develop with this word” gradually giving rise to notions of the juste

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milieu. In Pascal milieu is distinguished as “the position of man between two abysses, the ‘infiniment grand’ and the ‘infiniment petit,’ ” leaving finite man fated never to escape the two poles of the absolute. From thence we arrive at the great antinomy of early modern thought, summed up by Arthur Lovejoy as the anomaly wherein “metaphysical and practical otherworldliness coexisted with a cosmological finitism” (MA 198). Dante’s Paradiso finds reconciliation in the Christic Incarnation, which serves as a “this-​worldly” projection of celestial presence. Exterior world and worldly embodiment are further resolved in Descartes’s concept of matière subtile—​a medium of transmission of influences—​that courses into “every pore and crevice” and allows the “stuff which fills the heavens [to be] at the same time within us,” even at the risk of contravening Cartesian dualism. With Newton, “medium” refers to ether as the locus of gravitational force and as the matter of perception. Spitzer maintains that it was Newton’s inconspicuous, perfunctory ambient medium that was to flourish most vigorously when transplanted to French soil . . . such definitions as “tout ce qui sert à établir une communication” or “tout corps soit solide, soit fluide, qui peut être traversé par un autre corps, spécialement la lumière,” which one finds in Littré, are based on eighteenth century examples of milieu. What was destined to survive, to become so deeply rooted in the language as to continue to put forth new fruit, is the phrase “milieu ambient” as the element immediately surrounding a given body. (MA 172–​73)

Throughout Spitzer’s exposition of ambient medium, the “what” of medium diverges from the “where” of “ambient” and the reader finds herself toggling conceptually among the eclecticism of material substances, the motility of the sensible, the notion of world as a padded, “filled in” place, and the idea of space as a “field” of dynamic particles. Berthelot’s use of milieu ambient in the nineteenth century typifies the biological turn, whereby milieu approximates a concept of media grounded in experiments with bacteria-​culture. As an epithelium or nurturing membrane milieu ambient becomes synonymous with a biosystems paradigm—​a “conditioning medium” (Claude Bernard)—​that will be applied by the positivists to climatology and national cultures (MA 212). By the end of the nineteenth century, “ambiance” shifts from biosociology to something closer to spiritual climate or atmosphere (captured in the plural coinage “ambiance des milieux” (MA 220).

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Anticipating Rancière’s critique of regimes of articulation, Spitzer makes the interesting argument that milieu is gradually democratized as a French word while “ambiance” retreats to the elite precinct of literarity: While ambiance seems to have remained in France, even today, a part of the literary language, the word milieu came to be the property of the people. Such a transference was facilitated by the existence of the Bouvard et Pécuchet type of bourgeois who delighted in adopting abstract, scientific terms . . . which become thereby less abstract and only pseudoscientific. Little of the Comtian or Tainian connotation was preserved in this popular milieu; that which was once a “factor” in the biological or cultural development of the species, became rather a “place where one may (more or less comfortably) live”; that is to say that the eternally latent lieu (“place”) has come again to the fore. (MA 192–​93)

Milieu acquires a populist edge when Tainean determinism enters general parlance as a language of place rather than environment. Part of a watered down, pseudoscientific vocabulary of domesticity it becomes something resembling Lebensraum, living room, myspace. The significance of milieu’s democratized usage falls away, however, when Spitzer delves into Newton’s construct of ambient milieu and its French translations. As a compound term, its referential circumference will broaden notionally to encompass environment, atmosphere, circumstance, situation, Stimmung, and, we might add, disciplinary offshoots—​ethology, ecology, urban sociology—​and more colloquial applications to creative and intellectual microsocieties, including artist colonies, seminars, and think-​tanks: Black Mountain to Yaddo, Marfa to the Santa Fe Institute, the Frankfurt School to the New School, Pontigny to Cerisy and beyond, the International College of Philosophy, the School of Criticism and Theory, the European Graduate School, and so on.25 Jonathan Crary and Sandford Kwinter give more focus to this list when Derrida’s description of the Cerisy décade as a historic form of the philosophical milieu is apt. He evokes the special alloy of affection and risk among participants, who manage to “touch one another” both physically and intellectually thereby ensuring the solidarity of the group. And he assigns a specific aura and affective atmosphere to the “time” of the décade, invested in the very word itself and its persistence in the form of a ten-​day seminar: I say “Cerisy days” in order to indicate that if there is a unity to the décade (the ten days), there are also the individual days, les journées, with everything with which that word can be invested, the rhythmic unity of the time of day, of time in the sense of the time granted and indicated by the tolling of the bell, the variations of the weather (temps), of the journey to Cerisy; and each day has its essence, its signature, as does each décade. . . . I attempted to let myself be infused with the essential flavor, the original and irreplaceable feeling of each décade,(the word décade itself, moreover, has an aura which it owes entirely to Cerisy; it would have deserted the French language, the idiom would have fallen into disuse were it not for Cerisy. . . . I tried to make my memory receptive to something 25

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they group under “biotechnics” the terms “lifeworlds” and “ambient milieus.”26 Writing in the early 1990s, they take stock of a postwar period in which milieu theory was absorbed into heuristics of behavioral imprinting, biofeedback, cybernetics, systems theory, Situationist psychogeography and critiques of post-​ Fordist industrial environments ranging from Georges Friedmann’s diagnosis of the “technical milieu” on the factory floor to Autonomist constructs of the “social factory” (in which Marx’s means of production is totalized as a social system), to Foucault’s and Deleuze’s recourse to (sharply differentiated) assignations of the “control society.” Kwinter and Crary herald a post-​2000 explosion in ambiance studies in architecture, design, media, and network theory (notably, Terranova’s “informational milieu”) deferring to technologies of interface, parametric surfaces, smart walls, and infrastructure.27 Interestingly, contemporary ambiance theory often circles back to the classic touchstones: for example, in the introduction to Performance-​Oriented Architecture:  Rethinking Architectural Design and the Built Environment Michael Hensel acknowledges Taine, Spitzer, Georges Canguilhem (his investigations of insect camouflage in “Le vivant et son milieu”), and Jakob von Uexküll, who distinguished “between general surroundings (Umgebung) and subjectively perceived environments (Umwelt).”28 Ambient milieu is not only, then, a synonym for “expanded field,” it describes like a philosophical truth of each décade, a meaning, a teaching, and adventure of thought at once palpable and intelligible, and which could be reduced not to the philosophical content of what was said, the themes and problems debated, but to something more affective, more tenacious, more inward, at once unsayable and even unthinkable, but which would have counted in the experience of thought—​and which was inseparable from the specific individuals, the names of those whom we crossed paths with here. Jacques Derrida, “The Philosophical Model of a Counter-Institution,” in Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II:  The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–​4 4, eds. Christopher E. Benfey and Karen Remmler (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 49. 26 In their foreword to Incorporations, Crary and Kwinter write:  “Overlapping ‘biotechnic’ arrangements have throughout the twentieth century brought about continuous transformations of a ‘lifeworld.’ The same relentless processes of modernization and rationalization continue today unabated, they have become increasingly linked to the positive production of such generalized lifeworlds or ambient milieus as sites of invention.” Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 15. 27 See Tiziana Terranova’s influential coinage of “informational milieu” in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004). See too Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2014). 28 In his introduction Michael Hensel refers to Taine and to Spitzer as critical forerunners in the contemporary architectural theorization of ambiance. See Performance-​Oriented Architecture:  Rethinking Architectural Design and the Built Environment (West Sussex:  Wiley, 2013). Karen Pinkus recognizes the rich implications of Spitzer’s essay in “Ambiguity, Ambience, Ambivalence, and the Environment,” Common Knowledge, 19, no.  1 (Winter 2013):  92–​93. On ambiance theory and its wider applications, see Timothy Morton, “An Object-​Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History, 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 205–​24; and Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2013).

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milieu theory on the move, so to speak, walking around subfields and venturing into new fields; including, in its ubiquity, Rancièrian politics. As a carrier of this enlarged philology, milieu speaks to Rancière’s approximation of ambient milieu in allusions to atmosphere, halo, mood, unrated plethora, embodied labor, orchestral movement, and micro-​event. In Le fil perdu, Rancière offers up ambiance in the guise of Aristotelian substance theory, specifically the notion of kath’hekaston, or “facts as they happen.” Emma Bovary’s love is seen to originate in the kath’hekaston at the moment when she and Rodolphe meet at the agricultural fair. Like Flaubert, Rancière takes the reader through a procession of sense-​impressions and associations, but where Flaubert ultimately allows these particulars to become organized as a critical project (the writerly vocation, the aesthetics of impersonality), Rancière is concerned to preserve the singular impression as a non-​cohering, “sensible micro-​event,” one of many, coursing through the narrative stream: [T]‌he heat of a summer afternoon, the voices of the fair which resonate in the air, the braying of the oxen, the bleats of the goats, the golden flecks of light around black irises, an odor of vanilla and lemon, the plume of dust trailing in the wake of a passing carriage, the memory of a waltz and old desires stirring like grains of sand in the wind—​of which had for its consequence the action of a hand—​hers—​slipping into another hand—​that of her seducer. It is thus that her love is born as the effect of a multiplicity of sensible micro-​ events, which swept along in a single wave, swept up words read in books, images from plate-​illustrations, colorful vignettes embossed on prayer-​books and keepsakes, the smell of the altar, and refrains from sentimental ballads. (FP 33)

Woolf and Conrad, similarly, will mark out instances of kath’hekaston as they evoke an atmospheric halo that, instead of foregrounding the individual it surrounds, becomes the evidence of a parallel, semi-​visible world existing alongside the subject. Woolf ’s phrase “life is a luminous halo, a semi-​transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” is traced to the “luminous halo” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, used to describe Marlow’s way of wrapping the stories he tells in a special narrative envelope: “the flame is in the service of the mist, the light is there to reveal the atmosphere.” The acting in concert of the elements, each of which continues to exist in its discrete capacity as a substance, blurs the line between being and becoming, between an action and its preparation. The indistinct “halo” in Flaubert, Conrad, and Woolf is no

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mere plot device—​a mood-​enhancer on the order of smoke and shadow in film noir—​but a parliament of substances of equal parts. Like Taine, Rancière scores his scenographies of an aesthetic modernism, producing a veritable art of describing the materialities of politics.29 In expanding the notion of lieu or “place” to environment, habitus, atmosphere, climate, comportment, intelligence, and technical milieu, Taine, one could speculate, gives Rancière a way of seeing the ubiquity and contingency of the “part of no part,” on which democracy rides and falls; a physics of micropolitics if you will. Here Rancière stands in contrast to Badiou. For Badiou, “ ‘the part of no part’ is ‘aristocratic’ because it lives in the breach, apart from the regime. . . . The space of the polis, the virtual city of the collectivity of equals, separates itself suddenly, while at the same time remaining in contact with the ‘police.’ ” “This body,” Badiou alleges, “is not immediately democratic in nature because its heterogeneity affects the multiplicity—​the demos—​at the heart of which it is constituted, in an immanent but separating manner. What makes possible the existence, or at least the propagation, of the egalitarian hypothesis is not itself an immediately equal regime.”30 Where for Badiou the separation of true democracy, or how one “counts” equality, may be located in the absolute terms of mathematical equation, for Rancière equality is situated within diffusive ambiance. Both thinkers separate politics from the state, and both set out to articulate emancipatory moments of rupture, but where Badiou militates for a mathematical equality outside the state’s accounting system, Rancière (at least according to Badiou), projects a political body that adds to what can be counted, while not changing the terms by which the count is performed.31 Rancière’s politics, finally, is “politics” that falls, as he stipulates in La mésentente (Disagreement) neither into the category of the prepolitical (“archipolitics,” ascribed to the Platonic elimination of politics as an activity because it is entirely assimilated into the nomos), nor into the category of the absented or withdrawn political (“parapolitics,” associated with the peasant demos whose constituents have been evacuated to distant fields and thus kept apart from each other), nor 29 Politics remains the driver of Rancière’s microphenomenological investigations of materialities, and in this key aspect, it really cannot be compared with ongoing work in speculative materialism and object-​oriented ontology. 30 Alain Badiou, “Jacques Rancière’s Lessons,” in The Adventure of Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2012), 108–​109. 31 This comparison between Rancière and Badiou is resumed by Adriel M. Trott, “The Truth of Politics in Alain Badiou: ‘There is only One World,’ ” Parrhesia, 12 (2011): 82–​93. http://​parrhesiajournal. org/​parrhesia12/​parrhesia12_​trott.

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again into the category of the “beyond political” (“metapolitics,” associated with the exposure of democracy’s empty set, and with its stake in false names or distance from the shores of realities that it purports to represent). Rancière’s alternative “politics,” may be cast as a microphysics, where atmosphere and aureole harbor the micro-​milieus of making-​equal, rendering politics as ambient milieu intelligible in the material, the sensible, and the aleatory. A work like Graindorge, one might hypothesize, allows Rancière to repurpose Taine’s experiment in literary sociology for a critique of democratic inegalitarianism and render the politics of literature “operative” as a non-​necessitarian concept of milieu, in which emancipatory particles are quite literally in the air (a concept that might well have answered Spitzer’s plea for an all-​embracing cosmos). In a chapter on Stendhal in Aisthesis devoted to “the plebian sky” it is the country air that Julien Sorel discovers with Madame de Rénal that provides a new sensation of otium, of time outside the calculation of labor time, or the luxury of awaiting the unforeseen. For Fabrice del Dongo, imprisoned in a cell, the patch of sky becomes a space of “reverie.” As matter (matière), the sky nurtures revolutionary aspiration; a limitless horizon, it suspends obedience to worldly dictates of court intrigue and fiscally organized romance (A 63–​68). In short, the sky is portrayed as an ambient milieu in which the repartition of hierarchized modes of existence can occur, in which politics can happen. With literature cast as an “operative” medium of ambiance, it performs politics microphenomenologically. As summed up by Rancière in the prologue of Le fil perdu: “I will localize the politics of fiction not in the zone of representation, but in how it operates, the situations it constructs, the populations it convenes, the relations of inclusion or exclusion that it institutes, the borders it traces or effaces between perception and action, between states of things and movements of thought; all those relations which it establishes among situations and significations, coexistences, temporal successions, and chains of causality” (FP 12–​13).

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Rancière’s Nineteenth Century: Equality and Recognition in Nights of Labor Bettina Lerner

Halfway through the first volume of Capital, in the chapter entitled “The Working Day,” Marx’s rather dry exposition of surplus value and commodity exchange gives way to a bit of stagecraft. “Suddenly,” Marx writes, “there arises the voice of the worker,” who claims his right to a workday allowing sufficient time to rest, socialize, and recover strength.1 In the dialogue that ensues, the worker lays out his argument for an equitable working day against the demands of the “vampire-​like” capitalist who thinks only of extracting the maximum amount of profit from his laborers. This discussion stages class struggle in more vivid terms than in the previous nine chapters of Capital, and brings the questions of capitalist temporality into sharp focus. At the same time, however, the dialogue operates through the further abstraction of everyday social and psychic relationships into the fixed roles of the Worker and Capitalist. This theatrical moment points to the emergent tensions between socially necessary labor and the temporally dependent distribution of work and leisure while also hinting at the limits of theoretical abstraction within emancipatory discourses. This sudden and ambiguous spectacularization of the worker’s voice provides a good vantage point from which to begin to understand the stakes in Jacques Rancière’s numerous seminal studies on workers’ cultural production in the nineteenth century. Spanning social history, historiography, politics, and aesthetics, Rancière’s oeuvre is difficult to characterize as a unified body of thought. If some sort of continuity can indeed be traced from his earliest to most recent works, it is most readily found in the repeated interrogation of traditional sites of critical and 1 Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 342.

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scientific authority and the displacement of philosophical thought onto unexpected arenas. Whether looking at the archives of the workers’ movement or the darkened theaters where spectators sit, Rancière’s work consistently challenges the distribution of fixed social roles and the scientific discourses that seek to legitimize them. His archaeology of literary and philosophical practices among some of nineteenth-​century France’s least recognized writers and thinkers goes a long way toward recovering the individuals behind the workers whose voices Marx sometimes ventriloquized in passages like the one above, and reveals how some of these roles are miscast by philosophers and sociologists who claim to lend voice to the oppressed masses. On the heels of his definitive break with Louis Althusser marked by the publication of La leçon d’Althusser, Rancière took position against reigning leftist ideals of a unified party whose leaders, trained in Marxist science, would deliver the masses from oppression. During these same years, he also developed a critique of the sociology of education led by Pierre Bourdieu that located the reproduction of social hierarchies in the very republican institutions that had historically promised emancipation and equality through education.2 For Rancière, this new sociology shone a light on apparently hidden hierarchies only to reify and reinstate them through its insistence on a hermeneutic practice that only an initiated few might master and deploy in the service of emancipation. The dominated masses trapped under sociology’s statistical thumb thus find themselves caught in an apparently unbreakable cycle. Sociology reveals to students from underprivileged backgrounds what they apparently do not already know, that is, that they are in fact excluded from educational institutions to which they should have equal claim as those hailing from dominant classes. At the same time as it reveals this inequality, sociology moves to position itself as the only discipline capable of disseminating the knowledge necessary for emancipation, knowledge that the masses are de facto prevented from acquiring because they have been excluded from the selfsame educational institutions within which these emancipatory discourses are produced. Phrased in such schematic terms, these arguments might be dismissed as overly reductive or even simplistic. In fact, the radical potential in Rancière’s approach to these debates lies less in his indictment of Theory’s elitism, but rather in the unlikely context out of which 2 Kristin Ross examines Rancière’s position in the debates over educational reform in relation to his argument in The Ignorant Schoolmaster in “Rancière and the Practice of Equality,” Social Text, 29 (1991): 57–​71.

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he articulates his critique: the archival recovery of an entire corpus of writing by nineteenth-​century workers who fought for equality, paved the way for the revolution of 1848, and went on to live in the shadow of the revolution’s aftermath. As Rancière shows, these philosophical approaches to equality that emerged contemporaneously to but separately from Marx’s and Engels’s rise relied on a homegrown, grassroots theory and praxis of education which transformed individual lives and communities. This chapter looks anew at a crucial decade in the development of Rancière’s oeuvre beginning in the mid-​1970s. I  aim first and foremost to retrace how ideas of equality, pedagogy, and popular culture emerge out of years of archival research that led from La Parole ouvrière: 1830–​51 to the groundbreaking historical and philosophical investigations of La Nuit des prolétaires, The Philosopher and His Poor, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster. These works all share in Rancière’s commitment to allow actual voices of workers to speak for themselves, through their own written words, even when what they have to say falls well outside established expectations about class consciousness and unity. Rancière does not ventriloquize in the name of an abstracted Worker, but instead republishes and examines texts by forgotten nineteenth-​century writers like Gabriel Gauny, autodidacts from artisanal classes who aligned political emancipation with humanistic self-​enlightenment while suffering profound cultural displacement and disillusionment as a result of their commitment to artistic and intellectual achievement. Rancière’s forays into the archives are not just valuable for the primary texts they unearth, nor for the unique methodology he develops, but because they also already lay the groundwork for his subsequent redefinition of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. These writers’ challenge to the apparently natural division of labor and literature must be read for its political valence. “In a sense,” Rancière writes in Politique de la Littérature, “all political activity is conflict meant to distinguish between speech and a cry, to thus redraw the discernible borders by which political capacity affirms itself.”3 At its most basic level then, the political is the process through which legitimacy is conferred on certain kinds of discourse, deciding what constitutes authorized speech while dismissing alternative enunciations as unformed noise. In their fight to be heard, the nineteenth-​century writers whose work Rancière brings to 3 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la Littérature (Paris:  Éditions Galilée, 2007), 12; hereafter PLF. A  special thanks to my research assistant Evan Knight. All translations are his unless otherwise indicated.

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light actively disrupted the existing distribution of the sensible with enduring, if unrecognized, consequences for democratic practice. Figures like Gauny loom large in Rancière’s consideration of modernity precisely because their experiences are at odds even with the militant workers and cultural producers who seemed to be his peers. For labor historians like William Sewell, whose debate with Rancière over the “myth of the artisan” highlights some of the impasses that underlie his project, workers’ culture was largely defined by corporational and associational idioms that arose following the Revolution’s destruction of the centuries-​old guild system. If Gauny and Jacotot explicitly rejected an identitarian politics that mythologized artisanal labor, some of their contemporaries including Savinien Lapointe, Agricol Perdiguier, and Suzanne Voilquin found other ways to contest the scientific and journalistic portrayals of the working classes that Rancière’s work does not always fully acknowledge. Unlike Gauny, these writers were deeply invested in cultivating readership beyond the working classes, reaching out to already established writers like Eugène Sue and George Sand. I contend that the dialogues that emerged out of these encounters go beyond the conventions of patronage and in fact point to the existence of a community of sense that articulated the problematic intersections of class and gender in ways more complex than what Rancière’s analysis might allow. As a concluding example, I  reexamine Rancière’s debate with Geneviève Fraisse, with whom he cofounded the journal Les Révoltes logiques in 1976, and Lydia Elhadad around her edition of Voilquin’s memoirs. Rancière’s long-​standing reflection on political equality and emancipation is intimately linked to the years he spent researching the nineteenth-​century origins of workers’ movements. La Parole ouvrière, edited with historian Alain Faure, is an early result of this unearthing of documents from the archives of social movements in early-​nineteenth-​century France. The tome brings together brochures, posters, letters, newspaper articles, and poems penned by “militant workers” who expressed “the protests and aspirations of their class.”4 In their prefatory essays, Faure and Rancière contest the view commonly held since Marx that France’s artisanal classes had been held back by dead-​end utopian theories, thus failing to develop the emancipatory self-​consciousness of a more advanced industrial proletariat. Instead, La Parole ouvrière reprints evidence of a politically savvy avant-​garde composed of artisans from various 4 Jacques Rancière and Alain Faure, eds., La Parole ouvrière. 1830/​1851 (Paris:  Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976), 7.

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trades including printers, shoemakers, and masons from Paris and the provinces. Arranged chronologically, the selection of texts includes excerpts from the first biweeklies for workers that saw light for a brief few months during the short-​lived loosening of the press that followed the revolution of 1830, to more developed publications born a decade later including L’Atelier and La ruche populaire, to the veritable explosion in print media that followed the revolution of 1848. The examples they select share a number of commonalities beyond their status as texts penned by writers from the artisanal classes. In general, they focus on strong, individual male voices who openly, and often ironically, respond to public figures through the relatively new medium of a working-​class press. Thus, the first section entitled “The Proletarian: Between Slave and Associate” introduces readers to printer Jean-​François Barraud’s 1832 critical letter to François Bertin, the editor of the powerful daily Journal des débats, who had written against the canuts uprisings in Lyon earlier that same year. It might not be surprising to see workers in the printing industry, long considered the literate elite of the artisanal classes, take the lead in the birth of the working-​class press but the same cannot be said for shoemakers like Savinien Lapointe, who occupied the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Lapointe appears infrequently in Rancière’s later work, but his stinging critique of Victor Hugo is one of the most powerfully evocative texts included in La Parole ouvrière. In the spring of 1846, a committee to which Hugo had lent support announced the creation of a competition rewarding workers who displayed a clear “love of work and morality.” The handful of newspapers written for and by workers seized on the project’s paternalism and its underlying assumptions about the habits and morality of an entire class. Together, they crafted an ironic response, announcing the creation of a parallel “Prize Committee for the Encouragement of Foremen,” and thus highlighting the struggle between workers and employers, whose unfair hiring practices and unsafe working conditions went largely unchallenged.5 Lapointe’s letter to Hugo, which appeared in the newly created working-​class monthly L’Union, went a step further, taking aim not just at the romantic poet’s condescension but also at his ideological flip-​flopping. Lapointe outrightly accuses Hugo of opportunism, 5 The July Monarchy saw the publication of a number of statistical and highly moralizing studies on the working classes, including the Baron de Morogue’s De la misère des ouvriers (Paris: Chez Madame Huzart (Née Vallat la Chapelle), 1832); Eugène Buret’s Misère des classes laborieuses en France et en Angleterre (Paris and Leipzig: Jules Renouard et compagnie, 1840); and Louis-​René Villermé’s Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie (Paris: Jules Renouard et compagnie, 1841).

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quoting extensively from his poetry to reveal how the royalist adolescent who penned “The Coronation of Charles X” went on to declare his admiration for Napoleon before adopting democratic ideas which, Lapointe suggests, should not be taken seriously given this background (LPO 193–​99). Writing ten years apart, Barraud and Lapointe share a number of traits. They both use irony to defend artisanal interests against dominant discourses, whether contained in daily newspapers like Le Journal des débats or expressed by poets who claim tenuous allegiances with the working classes. Moreover, they both draw strength from their skill as readers and decoders of texts whose rhetorical inconsistencies and internal contradictions they are quick to point out. In this sense, Barraud and Lapointe were not just literate but actively writerly: they grasped the power of words and the strength that came with exercising hermeneutic pressure on them. What Rancière and Faure label a singular “parole ouvrière” describes a militant activism in the name of a proletarian struggle against bourgeois society:  “the singular effort put forth by a class to name itself, to expose its situation and to respond to discourses perpetuated about it” (LPO 9). Five years later, Rancière published a revised version of his doctoral thesis as La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier.6 In some ways, this book is a continuation and deepening of the research that had appeared in La Parole ouvrière: an extensive trove of poems, newspapers, letters, and autobiographies by dozens of writers inhabiting all rungs of the lower and working classes, from elite artisans in the printing industries to day laborers and chiffoniers. There are, however, important differences between the two studies. Whereas La Parole ouvrière called attention to how artisans appropriated dominant discourses about labor as part of the “effort put forth by a class to name itself,” the writers featured in La Nuit des prolétaires seem to resist, if not entirely reject, their identities as artisans. They adopted the label ouvriers-​poètes or poètes ouvriers, unwieldy terms that both challenged and upheld the division between mental and manual labor, between the working hand and the lyric voice. As the locksmith Gilland puts it, “It seems to me that I have not found my vocation in hammering iron” (NL 3). In a letter to George Sand, who would later contribute a preface to his Conteurs ouvriers (1849), Gilland declares that his true vocation

6 Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1981); hereafter NP. Translated as Nights of Labor:  The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-​Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); hereafter NL.

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lies in the visual arts: “I would have liked to be a painter,” he affirms, adding that as an apprentice he would spend so much time staring at works by Gérard, Gros, and Horace Vernet on his way to work that he was regularly beaten by his masters for tardiness (NP 18). Gilland’s words echo through a corpus of texts that reject “love of work” (Le Philosophe et ses pauvres 4). The singular voice of the parole ouvrière, is here a plural and polyphonic chorus of writers and artists who did not set out to represent the collective interests of workers, but instead sought alternative, often fatally isolating paths to reach their individual goals. This explains, to a great degree, the disorientation that many readers feel when they first encounter La Nuit des prolétaires. As a work of social history, it marks a clear departure from approaches taken by labor historians like E. P. Thompson, whose classic The Making of the English Working Class7 described class consciousness and political agency emerging not from material conditions alone, but rather from the shared daily experience of groups of workers. Two decades later, in Work and Revolution in France,8 Sewell concentrated on the importance of language in the formation of a distinct artisan form of socialism and class consciousness which reached its apex in 1848. By tracking the transformation of corporate idioms into a new egalitarian language of association, Sewell traces the increasing recognition of an identity of interests among skilled laborers. As Sewell and Rancière’s subsequent exchange in the journal International Labor and Working-​Class History shows, the linguistic turn is arguably just as important to Rancière’s analysis, but he is above all attentive to what he calls “the ruses of words and the ruses of their relationships.”9 He cautions against reading workers’ words through the overdetermined lens of their material situation. Indeed, the texts he explores display an intense preoccupation with a poetic vocabulary that strays far from the workplace. He argues that these men and women were not searching for words to express workers’ common interests but instead struggled to find an appropriate vocabulary in which to make their bid for autonomy and equality. In the words of Saint-​Simonian songwriter Pierre Vinçard, if anything united this disparate group of artisans, it was their hope “to bid an eternal farewell to the past” and to build a new vision of a future society where equality would 7 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963). 8 William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 9 Jacques Rancière, “The Myth of the Artisan. Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History,” International Labor and Working-​Class History, 24 (Fall 1983): 8.

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dominate.10 Indeed, the dream to which La Nuit des prolétaires refers in its subtitle was inextricably tied to the utopian and socialist movements that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century under the leadership of Enfantin, Bazard, Fourier, and Cabet. Drawing from Saint-​Simonian archives, including the fonds d’Eichtal and fonds Enfantin at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsénal and the fonds Gauny at the Bibliothèque municipale de Saint-​Denis, La Nuit des prolétaires is also a detailed account of what many historians still refer to as pre-​Marxist socialism.11 This investigation takes readers deep inside the self-​anointed new religions and against the grain of most scholarship on socialist utopian thought. The workers who joined Saint-​Simonian communities in the early 1830s did not hail from the elite trades who saw in the new religion an extension of their own associationist ideals. Unlike what historians like Sewell had suggested, Rancière claims that the majority of the plebeian converts came from those workers who found themselves adrift and lacked a strong vocational pull and refers instead to “the dispersion of individuals whom no family or territorial law rivets to the place where they reside, whom no tradition or vocation has destined for the craft they exercise” (NL 144). While still other recruits had managed to advance in their trades and save their way into a relative degree of comfort, they were nonetheless well aware of the contingency of their gains:  at any moment, illness or an economic downturn could push them back into poverty. It was the instability and precariousness of their everyday lives, rather than the belief in the redemptive promise of labor, that drew workers to the Saint-​Simonian movement where some found fulfillment while many others confronted disillusionment and contradiction. Rancière’s journey through the archives of utopian movements in La Nuit des prolétaires is decidedly nonlinear. While loosely chronological, it refuses to organize the characters, events, and texts that characterize this particular moment in social utopian experimentation into a master narrative written from the perspective of twentieth-​century French socialism. This strategic refusal helps him to convey the dynamic constellation of ideas that accompanied the rise and eventual dissolution of these movements as members dispersed outside of France where they tried—​and mostly failed—​to establish new societies. Rancière revisits some of the more well-​known episodes from the 1830s

10 Ibid., 5. 11 For a recent example see Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists before Marx (Montreal: McGill-​Queens Press, 2000).

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and 1840s, from the schism between Enfantin and Bazard in 1831, to the closing of the community at Ménilmontant, Enfantin’s subsequent imprisonment and departure for Egypt, and to the development of alternative utopianisms of Fourier and Cabet. Yet Rancière’s most salient and significant contributions to this history lie in his focus on the experiences recounted by plebeian recruits to the Saint-​Simonian cause, including Gauny, Vinçard, and Voilquin among dozens of others. Looking at their memoirs and correspondence, Rancière shows how they actively debated the movements’ changing doctrines while taking careful stock of the material consequences wrought by utopia’s aporias, from the personal sacrifices they made to join the group to their frustrations at the hierarchies that persisted in spite of the leaders’ claims of inclusion and equanimity. Their writing thus bears witness to the challenges and contradictions navigated by self-​sustaining communities seeking to establish themselves along principles of equality. The most obvious and notable of these challenges, to which I’ll return later, involves questions of gender. The tensions between the community’s leadership and its members also took place around its distribution of the new social roles that Saint-​Simon had prescribed: that of scientist, artist, and industrial worker. In porcelain painter Bazin’s pithy formulation: “When, in the midst of my work, I ponder the beauties of Saint-​Simonism, my hand stops” (NL 211). Bazin expresses his predicament in explicitly temporal terms: the new religion was built on an age-​old distinction between those who can spare the cost and the time needed to pursue artistic and intellectual pursuits, and those who cannot. The reference to nighttime in the title La Nuit des prolétaires calls immediate attention to the specificity of Rancière’s approach. At its most basic, the archival investigation he launches attempts to make sense of workers’ experience as individuals outside of “the time spent in the servitude of those who have nothing to do but work” (NL 26–​27). He finds that those who found time to record their experiences in writing were less interested in denouncing “the poverty, the low wages, the uncomfortable housing, of the ever-​present specter of hunger,” but more often took aim at “the anguish of time stolen every day by the need to work with wood or iron” (NL vii). Here, it is not the worker stealing time away from his employer but instead the conditions of labor which impose and impinge upon an individual’s right to freely distribute the hours of the day to include work, leisure, but also learning. Rancière locates the radical nature of their claim to equality in the temporal aspect of their protest: the conscious desire to disrupt the central capitalist premise according to which value is understood as socially necessary labor-​time. When the replication of class relations inheres in the

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extraction of surplus labor-​time, that is, in the careful policing of other people’s time, temporal redistribution is crucial to attaining equality. The relationship between temporality and equality are woven into the main argument in The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière’s critique of a Western philosophical tradition that originates in Plato, and is echoed in Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu. This tradition invests in philosophical and sociological authority by insisting on the segregation between mental and manual labor, separating those who have time to think from those who do not. The hierarchy of classes described in Plato’s Republic results in the hyper-​specialization of labor, in which workers must spend all of their time in their workshops, each repetitively producing the one object which they have been trained to produce, in order to serve the needs of the educated philosopher-​kings. This structure is inadvertently replicated in Marx’s scientistic intervention on behalf of the proletariat who make history without knowing that they do so, in Sartre’s insistence in Critique of Dialectical Reason on the need for a Party to tend to the needs of all-​too-​tired workers, and in Bourdieu’s “Sociologist-​King.” Behind all of these theories lies the assumption that the uneducated masses must depend for their own emancipation on a master thinker who has spent necessary time learning the abstract theories that allow him to decipher the surface of things. Rancière redefines emancipation as the resistance to these temporal prohibitions against thinking: Emancipation consisted, to begin with, of taking, in the place where one works for another’s benefit/​on another’s behalf, the time for a self-​reflective look that distances oneself from the direction imposed upon one’s limbs and to claim for oneself the dispossessed workplace, to win back from the night destined for continued labor the time to read, to write or to talk: to write or to talk not as a worker but as everyone else.12

Even as they were interpellated as workers, the nineteenth-​century writers to which Rancière refers resisted their exclusion from the literary field by giving up hours of work in order to take up literacy in the way that one might take up arms. However, in order to remain viable, this scenario demands a radical reinterpretation of education that allows learning to take place outside of the institutions that reproduce social hierarchies. Indeed, Rancière’s theory of equality goes hand in hand with a critique of pedagogy that extends all the way back to his break with Althusser. As numerous critics have pointed out, Rancière’s

Jacques Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), v. 12

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critique of Althusser is “an argument against pedagogy,”13 or perhaps more specifically, an argument against a certain kind of pedagogy that would insist on instruction as a unidirectional phenomenon in which a master teacher holds all the keys to the knowledge needed for students to progress. Rancière finds an example of an alternative educational practice in the nineteenth-​century pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. The majority of the writers who left testimonies of their experiences as worker-​ poets were partial or complete autodidacts; many had some informal schooling as children but write more thoroughly and passionately about the education they sought out for themselves as adolescents or young adults, often in homegrown workshops led by other artisans. In her memoirs, Suzanne Voilquin mentions that her first husband, who had training in architecture, held drawing classes for workers in their apartment on the Tixeranderie.14 Similarly, in Mémoirs de Léonard, ancien garçon maçon, Martin Nadaud recounts how he taught young construction workers to read and to write.15 Jacotot, the ignorant schoolmaster of Rancière’s title, seems in certain ways an odd choice. Trained as a lawyer, Jacotot taught rhetoric, language, chemistry, and mathematics, served as substitute director at the École polytechnique, and made his way into the Empire’s political machine until the Restoration forced him into exile. While teaching French in Belgium, he developed a theory of intellectual emancipation based on the idea that learning must begin by assuming equal status between students and teachers so that study becomes self-​motivated. The teacher is not expected to transmit knowledge, but rather to promote self-​confidence and encourage study. In this way, as Alain Badiou points out, he “institutes a new relation to knowledge, in the creation of the possibility of knowledge or its distribution in unanticipated spaces.”16 The Ignorant Schoolmaster brings Rancière’s complex approach to equality most clearly into focus. Jacotot takes exception to the centralization of knowledge in the hands of a few; instead, he assumes equality between all individuals from the outset. Following Jacotot, Rancière declares that equality is a given,

13 Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 7. 14 Suzanne Voilquin, Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple ou la saint-​simonienne en Égypte, ed. Lydia Elhadad (Paris: Maspero, 1978), 114. 15 Martin Nadaud, Mémoires de Léonard, ancien garçon maçon. Par Martin Nadaud. Ancien Questeur de la Chambre des Députés (Bourganeuf: A Duboueix, 1895), 104. 16 Alain Badiou, “The Lessons of Jacques Rancière:  Knowledge and Power after the Storm,” trans. Tzuchien Tho, in Jacques Rancière:  History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Phil Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 43.

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not a goal. More precisely, equality is simultaneously a condition and a process that functions, albeit apparently tautologically, in “the creation of a new social ordering for equality.”17 Yet this same slippage between condition and process risks obscuring existing challenges to social and political reordering. In Jacotot’s case, for example, the Flemish students he mentored were clearly a self-​selected group: having made it as far as the university in 1818, they were arguably more self-​motivated than most of their peers. Moreover, they were Flemish-​speaking students in a Belgian university that was at the time under control of Dutch-​ speaking authorities. How did the geopolitical circumstances and attendant politics of language affect their motivation to learn French? We do know that the Francophone Jacotot, who enjoyed the privilege of speaking what was then a dominant language, was himself never motivated to learn Flemish or Dutch from his students.18 All things being equal, nothing is equal:  Jacotot did not feel the same pressure to engage in translation as did his students. Thus, if a declarative equality goes a long way toward laying bare the links between power and knowledge, it also risks leaving unacknowledged the stealthy and steadfast forms of power that inhere in various forms of relationality involved in historical and global processes of recognition and redistribution. A brief return to the shoemaker and poet Savinien Lapointe serves as one example here. The notes accompanying his letter to Victor Hugo reprinted in La Parole ouvrière introduce him as “one of those worker-​poets who are generally quite deferential toward the great names in contemporary literature” (LPO 193). His response to Hugo thus reads as an exceptional reaction on the part of a writer who, at most other times, looks to curry favor from established writers. To be sure, his poem “De mon échoppe à Eugène Sue,” published in the December 1843 issue of L’Union, seems to suggest as much.19 At first glance, the two-​hundred-​line ode to the newly crowned king of the serial novel seems little more than a transparent homage from an artisan in his workshop to the famous novelist who inspired him. However, the word échoppe carries a secondary definition that lends the poem a different meaning: as a sharp engraver’s tool, the

17 Ibid., 42. 18 Jacques Rancière, Le Maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 28. 19 This was, indeed, part of his reputation among his contemporaries. George Sand remarked pejoratively that he was too focused on ingratiating himself with the “bourgeoisie . . . qu’il fréquente et singe.” George Sand, Correspondance 6, ed. Georges Lubin (Paris:  Garnier, 1962–​95), 411. Lapointe republished this ode in his collection of poems entitled Une voix d’en bas (Paris: Au bureau de l’imprimerie, 1844) the following year, adding around a dozen new lines to the original poem.

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échoppe helps the militant worker-​poet carve out his place in the literary field. This explains why the ode honoring Sue opens improbably with a number of autobiographical stanzas in which Lapointe recounts his own artistic suffering. He details his ongoing struggle against the elitism of critics who claim that “one did not enter into the world of the arts wearing a smock.”20 In response to this interdiction, Lapointe marshals forth a series of metaphors of poetic freedom and endurance: the poet is a bird perched on a branch of steel, his song a brazen attack on injustice that disregards all criticism and takes “savage” flight in spite of the obstacles placed in his path. It soon becomes clear that Lapointe welcomes “the social novel gleaned from the streets,” not because it speaks for him, but because it sheds light on a cultural revolution already in the works—​and in the words—​of worker-​poets like himself. From stanza to stanza, Lapointe’s poem functions as a reading of Sue’s novel that paradoxically directs attention away from Sue toward Lapointe himself. As he would have it, The Mysteries of Paris creates a space for the poet to advance his own work: “by the light [the novel] sheds, I can bring my own verse to light.” Between the lines of his ode to Sue, Lapointe forces his way into a literary field whose contours were in the process of shifting. In the process, he turns the traditional form of an ode into a critical attack on the literary system that shuns innovators who do not hail from its ranks. For Lapointe, equality is not a given but must instead be seized. His militancy consists in using language like a sharp tool in order to carve layers of meaning into the everyday experience of the worker, reader, and writer. The échoppe thus denotes both the space of the worker’s oppression and also an emancipatory tool in a hermeneutically driven critique. Above all, perhaps, Lapointe’s ode recognizes an existing community of workers, readers, writers, and critics who make up a thinking “proletarian class.” His may be one singular voice from below, but his text traces the multiple, intersecting discourses that circulate on the edges of movements and communities. It is precisely at these boundaries that processes of inclusion and exclusion challenge the assumption of equality that Rancière places at the center of his rethinking of politics and pedagogy. The question that arises, then, becomes how best to transmit the experience at the edges where individual voices are so often hard to discern. In this sense, Lapointe’s ode

This line is a direct jab at Eugène Lerminier, whose savage take down of worker-​poets (including Lapointe himself) appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes the previous year. Revue des Deux Mondes, 28 (December 15, 1841): 955–​76. 20

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shows what Rancière’s focus on singular experiences of emancipation almost overlooks: the relational dynamics of recognition and redistribution in a public sphere where not all voices are presupposed to be equal. Questions of equality take center stage in Rancière’s works from the 1990s, including On the Shores of Politics, in which he attempts to reimagine democracy and community in ways that go beyond the struggles associated with identity politics. In the process proper to democracy which he calls le politique, subjects are emancipated not by asserting their right to be recognized as different—​a move that only reaffirms the categories and hierarchies he associates with the narrow politics he calls policing—​but instead by laying claim to equality, and then verifying this claim through deliberate action. As Todd May puts it, “[T]‌o engage in the presupposition of equality is at once to reject one’s classifications and to create oneself as a subject: an actor with no name other than that of being equal.”21 Taking the Paris strikes of 1833 as an example, Rancière argues that the Parisian tailors’ bid for emancipation began with their recognition of the syllogism that the word equality “has all the power originally given to it,” as a word. “Equality exists somewhere,” he adds, “it is spoken of and written about.” Through careful interpretation and analysis, the tailors of 1833 pointed out inconsistencies in dominant discourses laying bare where the equality promised to them by the monarchy’s Charte was being actively disregarded while organizing strikes that proved they were “capable of opposing reason with reason and of giving their action a demonstrative form” (PLF 47–​48). Their bid serves as a model for a kind of emancipation that doesn’t start from the proclamation of a proletarian identity separate from the larger community, but operates instead through the assertion of a commonly held notion of equality. Rancière’s gamble provocatively “assumes a world of shared meaning” within which equality is a given to be asserted (PLF 49). That not everyone agrees on this meaning is also a given, and there is indeed symbolic (and potentially real) violence involved in affirming equality, but the ensuing conflict is productive whereas the conflicts over recognition of identity, Rancière argues, effectively undo politics in its proper sense. And yet, one might counter that this theory chooses the presumption of equality as its point of impact where, in fact, it is the process of untangling and debating contested meanings that requires further attention. Indeed, meaning is developed relationally not just between words and

21 Todd May, “Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality,” SubStance, 36, no. 2 (2007): 31.

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discourses, but between different languages as well. Rancière’s theory suggestively acknowledges, but without fully exploring, that politics is also a process of translation. Words carry different valences depending on the languages to which their speakers have access. However, just as Jacotot did not feel the need to learn Dutch while teaching his students French, translation does not always support equality. Rancière insists that “those who say on general grounds that the other cannot understand them, that there is no common language, lose any basis for rights of their own to be recognized” (PLF 50); at the same time, the alternative he proposes, that one must act in the name of presupposed equality whose meaning is always shared and commonly understood glosses over the imperative and selfsame impossibility of translation. This position was explored by nineteenth-​century women like Claire Démar and Suzanne Voilquin, for whom recognition began from a gendered position of inequality. One of the criticisms most often levied against Rancière, particularly in relation to La nuit des prolétaires and The Ignorant Schoolmaster, is that it is often difficult to tell where his voice ends and that of the individuals about whom he writes begins.22 In spite of his suspicion of Marxist ventriloquizing, Rancière’s strategically anti-​explanatory style comes close at times to conflating the subject and object of his critique, blurring the boundaries between the theoretical present and the exceptional figures whose experiences he unearths from the past. The resulting questions come to the fore in an especially revealing way during the three-​way debate between Rancière, Geneviève Fraisse (with whom Rancière had founded the groundbreaking journal Les Révoltes logiques), and Lydia Elhadad.23 The second issue of this journal included a review article by Fraisse and Elhadad on Valentin Pelosse’s edition of Saint-​Simonian journalist and feminist Claire Démar’s writings. In Fraisse and Elhadad’s estimation, his presentation of L’affranchissement de la femme provided access to an iconoclastic figure in the history of feminist thought but ultimately did Démar and feminism a disservice. Fraisse and Elhadad contest Pelosse’s insistence on Démar’s state of isolation and despair that led to her suicide in 1833. They argue that the portrait Pelosse paints glosses over the political aspects of her revolt, remaining instead overly focused on her apparent dependence on Enfantin, turning her into a victim and Andrew Parker makes this point in reference to La Nuit des prolétaires in his introduction to John Drury’s translation of Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. Andrew Parker, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), xiii. 23 Oliver Davis offers a concise summary of these exchanges (Jacques Rancière 46–​48). 22

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ultimately silencing her altogether. Two years later, Rancière revisits their review as a way of responding to Elhadad’s edition of Voilquin’s memoirs published in 1978. The silencing of women’s voices is hardly the privilege of men alone, he argues, taking Elhadad to task for “the rather unkind way in which [she] puts Suzanne Voilquin in her place—​that of a Parisienne raised in the school of master-thinkers.”24 He accuses Elhadad of not being able to accept Voilquin’s exceptionality, the uniqueness of her discourse, and of reading her text from a feminist perspective that distorts the singular exceptionalism and individualism of this nineteenth-​century thinker. In his urgency to call attention to the master discourses of twentieth-​century feminism, Rancière misses the real point of Fraisse and Elhadad’s critique. For them, Pelosse’s presentation of Démar falls short in that it unwittingly adopts the perspective of the male Saint-​Simonian leadership in its portrayal of Démar’s solitude and demise. Pelosse fails to account for the relational experience within Démar’s immediate family, in the Saint-​Simonian family at large and within the increasingly gendered divisions of bourgeois French society. Even as they fought for recognition, women like Démar and Voilquin, were subordinate not only to dominant gender norms, but also to the male Saint-​Simonian leadership. As Enfantin and his disciples searched for the utopian communion with the Mother, they most often failed to recognize the actual women in their ranks.25 Indeed, Voilquin’s memoirs narrate this very point on numerous occasions, referring to the “unjust distribution of male-​driven justice”26 that lay serious challenge to her fight for equality, but also the divisions and differences that so often put her at odds with other women, from the superstitious nuns with whom she studied as a child to the imperious bourgeois wives of many Saint-​Simonian leaders. The differences and distances between words and deeds, between socialist discourse and egalitarian practice are expressed less in terms of gender imbalance than in the challenges posed by communication and translation. She sums this up in her account of a split with her traveling companion, who abandons her right before boarding the ship to Egypt: “nous ne parlions pas la même langue et nous ne pouvions nous comprendre” (we didn’t speak the same language and we couldn’t understand each other).27 Here, the woman in question is French but of 24 Jacques Rancière, “A Troublesome Woman,” in Staging the People. The Proletarian and His Double, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 93. 25 On the role of gender in French Romantic Socialism, see Naomi Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006). 26 Rancière, “A Troublesome Woman,” 115. 27 Ibid., 150.

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an entirely different background, but as Voilquin makes her way from Paris to Provence to Cairo, the potential impasses onto which translation opens increasingly take center stage. The consummate insider/​outsider, Voilquin limned the edges of the communities in which she sought recognition—​as a woman in the ranks of the Saint-​Simonians, as a working-​class individual among the ranking bourgeoises in the utopian organization, as a Parisian who could not see the residents of Cairo as they saw themselves or as they saw her. This constant movement from inside to outside of these different communities carries meaning that Rancière’s partage du sensible does not fully recognize as a translational experience steeped in reciprocity and relationality. From La Nuit des prolétaires to The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière’s approach to the archives of working-​class movements has done much to reveal the specificity and uncanniness of workers’ daily (and nightly) lives. He brings their texts to light under the assumption of a radical equality that nonetheless asks a modern public to read them for their uniqueness and singularity. In this way, Rancière successfully avoids the ventriloquizing tendencies of the Marxist description of the Worker. At the same time, however, I have argued earlier that at times his approach comes uncomfortably close to glossing over the unevenness of the translational structures that inhere in the various interpersonal, familial, and broader kinds of community formation. Indeed, for Lapointe and Voilquin, their hermeneutically driven critique called into question the possibility of a new social order based on the serial aggregation of individuated and individualized selves if only because they were so often misrecognized as individuals themselves. These writers suggest that if equality is to be understood as something more than a state of exception, these unheard voices must be recognized in their interconnected translationality.

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The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Intellectual Emancipation in Circular Form Leon Sachs

Jacques Rancière begins The Ignorant Schoolmaster by relating the real-​life case of Joseph Jacotot, the early-​nineteenth-​century French education reformer and polymath. A popular professor of literature at the University of Louvain where he was living in exile during the Bourbon Restoration, Jacotot found himself in a curious situation. He was faced with the challenge of giving lessons to a group of Flemish students who, though eager to study under the renowned master, could not read or speak French. And Jacotot knew no Flemish. As chance would have it, a bilingual edition of François Fénelon’s 1699 Les Aventures de Télémaque had recently become available. With only this translation at his disposal, Jacotot had the students repeat and memorize passages from the book. They eventually learned to read and write in flawless French and convey to their teacher—​in his language—​their thoughts on what they had read. More remarkable perhaps than what the students achieved by themselves was Jacotot’s own realization: the students had learned, yet their master had taught them nothing. He had communicated none of his knowledge. This raised the radical possibility that the master could be ignorant, or more radical still, that the master should be ignorant. Over the course of the next two decades, until his death in 1840, Jacotot would explore both the practical and theoretical implications of this revolutionary pedagogy founded on the premise that teacher and student could be intellectual equals. He called this pedagogy “universal teaching.” By retelling Jacotot’s intellectual adventure, Rancière relates his own singular reflection on modern education and society. Historical account, philosophical musing, polemical essay, and literary work merged into one, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, as Kristin Ross observes in the introduction to her 1991 translation, defies generic classification. Its form is as unorthodox as the pedagogical

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theory it develops. It dissolves boundaries between the academic disciplines of history, philosophy, literature, and political science just as it challenges our most categorical assumptions about education, intelligence, truth, and equality. Rancière published The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1987 at a time of virulent debate about education in France.1 Reformers imbued with the liberalizing mindset of May 1968 and armed with sociological studies of systemic class bias in the schools clashed with traditionalists who defended a model of public schooling inherited from France’s Third Republic (1870–​1939). A century earlier, in the 1880s, French leaders under the direction of education minister Jules Ferry had instituted a sweeping system of universal, free, secular education grounded in scientific learning. Proponents of what to this day is known as l’école Ferry (Ferry’s school) claimed it would train future citizens devoted to Enlightenment rationalism and the democratic, egalitarian values of France’s first republican regime of 1792. The republican school, as they saw it, was a bulwark against a return of the inegalitarian political and social order of the ancien régime (the Church and the Monarchy) that the Republic sought to supplant.2 A  century later, during the school debates of the 1980s, the traditionalists—​sometimes referred to as orthodox republicans—​viewed themselves as the custodians of this republican egalitarian legacy.3 At the same time, however, many had come to question whether the school was indeed true to its professed egalitarianism. The work of sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-​Claude Passeron had convinced large sectors of the education community that the republican school, despite its egalitarian claims, actually perpetuated social inequality because its curriculum at every level posited elite, bourgeois culture as normative. The school thus left working-​class students and the growing population of children of immigrants, who lacked access at home to what Bourdieu called cultural capital, unprepared to succeed academically 1 Since its publication in 1987, Le maître ignorant has been reprinted ten times and has been translated into eleven languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Slovenian, Danish, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, German, and Japanese). I  am grateful to Jennifer Bartlett at the University of Kentucky Library for providing me with this information. All page numbers refer to Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); hereafter IS. 2 For a general overview of the relationship between education reform and republican ideology in late-​nineteenth-​century France, see the introduction and first chapter of my The Pedagogical Imagination:  The Republican Legacy in Twenty-​ First-​ Century French Literature and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 3 Readers unfamiliar with the French republican tradition might want to consult several of the essays in Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (eds.), The French Republic: History, Values, Debates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

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and unable to understand the underlying cause of their scholastic inferiority. Bourdieu’s analysis was a driving force behind the progressive reform measures implemented in the early 1980s that aimed to improve the academic success of these groups of struggling students. The reforms were met with fierce opposition from orthodox republicans. The backlash was expressed most famously by Jean-​Claude Milner in his 1984 polemic De l’école.4 Milner derided reformist pedagogues for promoting feckless policies that diluted the disciplinary rigor of the curriculum and undermined the institution’s mission to produce intellectually autonomous republican citizens. He specifically decried policy changes that relaxed teacher qualification standards regarding disciplinary expertise, a move symptomatic, in his eyes, of a denigration of scholarly knowledge and a belittling of the teacher’s intellectual authority at all levels of schooling. He also lamented curricular modifications designed to train students in nonacademic pursuits—​for example, as Milner puts it, the teaching of crêpe-​making instead of spelling5—​or that addressed emotional well-​being instead of purely cognitive development. In sum, Milner complained that the reformers’ concern for what we might call the “whole person” (as opposed to only the student’s intellect) challenged the boundaries—​ sacred for orthodox republicans—​between school and home, or intellectual instruction and moral education. Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster reads in part like a rejoinder to Milner.6 Its title obviously flouts the idea of disciplinary knowledge and intellectual authority that Milner and other like-​minded republicans championed. Rancière demonstrates how Jacotot’s universal teaching dissolves the boundary between home and school, and he exposes the institution of the school as an impediment to true intellectual freedom and equality—​precisely those values the republican school has long claimed to promote. It would be a mistake, however, to situate Rancière’s book too squarely in the camp of post-​1968 progressive pedagogues. Its position in school debates, like its generic identity, defies easy categorization. For instance, returning to a topic treated in previous works such as La Leçon d’Althusser7 and Le Philosophe et ses pauvres,8 The Ignorant Schoolmaster contains a (thinly 4 Jean-​Claude Milner, De l’école (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984). 5 Ibid., 13. 6 In ­chapter 1 of La Haine de la démocratie (Paris: Fabrique, 2005), Rancière tilts again with Milner, this time quite explicitly denouncing De l’école as a paean to a republican intellectual elitism that undermines true democratic egalitarianism. 7 Jacques Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 8 Jacques Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Fayard, 1983).

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veiled) critique of the way leftist academics, the putative champions of progress, decry inequality but do so in a manner (often owing to their privileged institutional status) that paradoxically perpetuates that selfsame inequality. The book’s position in school debates eludes the labels progressive and conservative; it is simultaneously traditionalist and ahead of its time. For this reason, moreover, the reader need not be overly concerned with the particularities of the school debate in the 1980s.9 If Rancière’s book should be read and reread, it is because it offers a reflection on education that transcends the historical moment of its publication. It engages with debates about the relationship between schooling and French republican ideology that date back (at least) to the Revolution and that remain alive today. More importantly, it addresses the relationship between schooling and egalitarianism in radically refreshing ways that speak to any reader, anywhere, concerned with the question of democratic education. The Ignorant Schoolmaster is divided into five chapters that treat increasingly abstract topics. Beginning with the concrete facts of Jacotot’s life and pedagogical experiment, they go on to address questions such as the role of the book in Jacotot’s method, the immaterial nature of intelligence, and the implications of universal teaching for society and politics. The fifth and final chapter returns to the events of Jacotot’s day, relates a few details of his death, and briefly remarks on the relative success and failure of his legacy. It is nevertheless misleading to discuss the book in terms of its arrangement by chapters because these prove to be remarkably porous organizational units in the case of this work. Just as the book defies generic categorization, its various topics are hardly contained within the confines of chapters. Rancière’s thinking appears at times to meander. He pursues topics as if following a circuitous path that doubles back on itself, returns to earlier points, sets off in another direction only to return again to a previous train of thought. This is not to say that the book is without form. On the contrary, its unique shape and its loose yet deliberate organization are part and parcel of Rancière’s reflection on Jacotot. As Oliver Davis observes, Rancière’s thought manifests itself through form and style.10 It is worth noting in this regard that the book begins and ends with details of Jacotot’s life. In other words, it forms a circle. In fact, it is instructive to think of 9 For useful overviews of education debates at the end of the twentieth century, see Antoine Prost’s Education, société et politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1992) as well as Ralph Albanese and M. Martin Guiney’s issue of Yale French Studies 113, entitled French Education: Fifty Years Later (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 10 Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), ix–​x.

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the book as encyclopedic (from the Greek kuklos (circular) and paedeia (child) suggesting the idea of all-​encompassing education) in both form and, as we shall see, purpose. It proceeds in cyclical fashion and resists linearity. Rather than present an argument sequentially, it develops a network of ramifications and cross-​references that could be compared, mutatis mutandis, with the arborescent structure of Diderot and d’Alembert’s great eighteenth-​century monument to learning.11 The Ignorant Schoolmaster is also encyclopedic in its aspiration to be all-​inclusive, to embrace everything. It is a book that is totalizing in its scope. Beginning with the relatively obscure historical detail about a chance pedagogical discovery in 1818, Rancière explores and elaborates until from this historical fact grows a theory of equality, education, society, and politics that, while French, transcends time and place. By teasing such a broad reflection out of a largely forgotten historical episode, Rancière remains faithful to one of Jacotot’s own mantras: “everything is in everything.” Some readers may find Rancière’s distinctive writing style, in particular the frequent changes in voice and structure, disorienting. The protean and eclectic style serves a purpose however. It reduces the domination of any single voice and diminishes the exclusive authority of Rancière’s own perspective. We see this, for instance, in the way Rancière obscures the identity of the narrational voice, or speaker, in a manner resembling the techniques of free direct and indirect discourse. As a result, the reader is often left unsure as to who exactly is speaking or to the source of the ideas expressed. Consider, for example, Rancière’s depiction of Jacotot’s lessons. Instead of offering a third-​person description of Jacotot’s method (e.g., “Jacotot had his student do this” or “Jacotot asked his student to do that”), Rancière stages a conversation between the unorthodox Founder of universal teaching and a (penniless) student. The reader observes the lesson as would a spectator of a theatrical performance: The madman—​the Founder, as his followers called him—​comes on stage with his Télémaque, a book, a thing. Take it and read it, he says to the poor person. I don’t know how to read, answers the poor person. How would I understand what is written in the book? As you have understood all things up until now: by comparing two facts. (IS 22) 11 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 191–​214.

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In this passage, after announcing Jacotot’s stage entrance, the speaker or narrator (Rancière’s voice) gradually disappears, yielding the floor to the invented characters of Jacotot and his student. The reader witnesses directly what seems like a live exchange between teacher and student. The author’s seeming disappearance is achieved through other techniques as well. Take the discussion of Fénelon’s Télémaque, which Rancière introduces with these abrupt and somewhat jarring sentence fragments: “The book. Télémaque or another one. Chance placed Télémaque at Jacotot’s disposal; convenience told him to keep it” (IS 20). The conspicuous absence of subject and verb in these first two fragments gives the reader the sense that he has stumbled upon bits and pieces of language, linguistic objects, or things lying there on the page. Though we know of course that Rancière wrote these words, the grammatical paucity of the lines obscures the presence of the author and places the reader before the sheer facts of language and of the book. As with the earlier dramatization of Jacotot’s conversation with a student, here again the text creates for the reader a direct, unmediated encounter with the object of study. The Ignorant Schoolmaster attempts to create through techniques of form a reading experience that is free from authorial control, a topic to which we return later in our discussion of the central status of the book in Jacotot’s pedagogy. In the continuation of the aforementioned staged dialogue, Rancière incorporates in the Founder’s comments to his student a passage from one of Jacotot’s actual publications, the Journal de l’émancipation intellectuelle of 1835–​36: In order to [read the words on the page] you must tell me everything you see there. There are signs that a hand traced on paper, signs whose type was assembled by a hand at the printer’s. Tell me [here begins the verbatim insertion of the real Jacotot’s prose] “the story of the adventures, that is, the comings and goings, the detours—​in a word, the trajectory of the pen that wrote this word on paper or of the engraving tool that engraved it onto the copper.” (IS 23)

Interpolations of this sort pervade The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Long passages taken from Jacotot’s original writings fill pages of Rancière’s book. Rather than explain to the reader Jacotot’s thought, Rancière places the reader in direct contact with the words of the original ignorant schoolmaster. Even when not quoting Jacotot verbatim, Rancière’s own voice appears to imitate that of Jacotot. The reader thus finds it difficult at times to determine where Jacotot’s voice stops and Rancière’s begins. Their voices blur together. Rancière, one might say, shares the

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stage with Jacotot; he places himself on equal footing with the ignorant schoolmaster. He thus puts into practice in his formal technique the very notion of equality that his book explores conceptually.

Translation versus explication What Jacotot had done in placing the bilingual edition in the hands of the students is remove himself—​or, more precisely, his intellectual authority—​from the teacher-​student relationship. The process by which the students learned French through the study of Télémaque was the same as the one they had used to learn their mother tongue:  “observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, [.  . .] relating what they were trying to know to what they already knew” (IS 10). Every child performs this activity when trying to respond to someone who speaks to him or her with unfamiliar words. As Jacotot puts it, “Everyone has done this experiment a thousand times in his life” (IS 16). This “natural method of the human mind” (IS 105) is universal because it has been practiced intuitively by everyone everywhere since time immemorial. It “has existed,” wrote Jacotot in 1836, “since the beginning of the world” (IS 16). In learning to relate unknown French words to familiar Flemish words and then by communicating their opinion of Fénelon’s book in French (i.e., another’s language), the students were simply producing another version of the same text, a variation of the original. Their understanding of the text was thus demonstrated in the act of providing a copy of a model. For Rancière, this is fundamentally an act of translation. But translation, as he conceives it, is more than a matter of equating words in one language to those of another. It is also a matter of relating individuals to other individuals on the basis of equality. Jacotot’s students, equipped with a translation of Fénelon, became “translators” themselves insofar as they related, communicated, or conveyed what they thought about the book in a language that another (their schoolmaster, Jacotot) could understand, and this other was their equal since he had not transmitted to them any of his knowledge that would establish him as intellectually superior. The students had merely offered the equivalent—​a translation—​of the text to an equal to whom they wished to respond. Translators abound according to Rancière’s understanding of the concept. Fénelon himself is a translator:  the author of Télémaque uses the myths of the ancient Greeks to communicate

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a radical political message about the French monarchy to his young charge, the Duc de Bourgogne. He is thus a translator of Greek myth. And Rancière clearly sees himself as a translator as well; he relates Jacotot’s writings to today’s reader in order to communicate a radical political message about educational and, by extension, sociopolitical inequality. This is one of the reasons why, as mentioned earlier, Jacotot’s own writings are quoted at such length in Rancière’s book and why, as a result, it is often difficult to tell where Jacotot’s voice ends and Rancière’s begins. Rancière’s book repeats Jacotot’s words just as Jacotot’s students repeated those of Fénelon. It thus mimics the translation exercise performed by the Flemish students. As such, it aims to repeat and thereby perform (in the double sense of the French verb répéter) the experiment lying at the center of Jacotot’s pedagogy. The Ignorant Schoolteacher is an instantiation of universal teaching. Repetition and imitation play an important role in Jacotot’s pedagogy and in Rancière’s idea of translation, both of which place greater value on establishing equivalencies between languages, texts, epochs, and individuals than on originality of thought. The craft of communication—​of relating one’s thoughts in a language another can understand—​is held in higher regard than creative genius. Here we encounter an example of the way Rancière’s book transcends the categories of progressive and conservative. A common argument in the history of progressive education is that the student, en route to becoming an autonomous thinker, must not parrot, imitate, or learn by rote. Related to this is the position of many nineteenth-​century progressive educators who held that the study of the experimental sciences and their methods should displace the study of oral and written expression in the curriculum, a change that would necessarily reduce the importance of ancient writers as models to emulate. By insisting on repetition and imitation as he does, Rancière defies a centuries-​old mainstay of progressive educational thought. Artisans are also translators in that, like Jacotot’s students, they observe, repeat, and memorize other models. The equivalent of such models takes form in the copy produced by the artisan’s own hands. Great artists and poets like Racine are no different. The playwright, notes Rancière, learned the ancients by heart, translated them, and then related to others via his plays his own understanding of them. Rancière proposes such an expansive idea of translation in order to subvert the usual social hierarchies that view learned writers or scholars as intellectually superior to, say, ‘ignorant” artisans or workers. What matters for Rancière is that they be viewed as equals: not only are they all engaged in the

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production of copies or (near) equivalents, but they also employ the same basic techniques that Jacotot identified as the core of universal teaching. Just as consequential as the discovery that students can learn from an ignorant schoolmaster is the realization that the lessons of a learned schoolmaster might be pernicious. Jacotot’s teaching exposes a dark underside of one of the most unassailable orthodoxies of education:  the idea that the knowledgeable master, by transmitting his knowledge to the ignorant student, enlightens the latter and thus frees him from the subordinate condition defined by his ignorance. Rancière shows, on the contrary, how the learned master, despite the language of progress and enlightenment that shrouds his instruction, actually consigns the student to a perpetual state of intellectual inferiority. Explication is the basic flaw at the heart of the learned master’s transmission of knowledge, and it necessarily leads to what Rancière calls stultification, the subordination of one intelligence to another.12 To explicate something to someone is to show the latter that he is unable to understand it on his own (IS 6). In the explication of words on the page of a book, for instance, the teacher makes it known to the student that the written words cannot be understood without the assistance of the teacher’s own words. The teacher’s spoken words intercede between the student and the book’s words to reveal hidden meaning and thereby give the student access to otherwise inaccessible knowledge. The practice, however, undermines the student’s confidence in his own reason; the student identifies the master as possessing intelligence superior to his own. This division of intelligence into two kinds—​superior and inferior—​is the root of the deficiency of the explicative order and the source of intellectual inequality that spills beyond the classroom and, we shall see, pervades society and politics. Universal (emancipatory) teaching breaks the “stultifying” relationship by making the book instead of the teacher the location of intellectual authority: the book’s “intelligence” replaces that of the master. Engaging with the book directly See the translator’s note on page 7 of The Ignorant Schoolmaster for an explanation of the decision to translate the French word abrutir as “stultify.” For the sake of consistency with Kristin Ross’s translation, I have decided to use the word “explication” as the English translation of the French “explication,” which could also be translated as “explanation.” One should be careful however not to equate too readily Rancière’s discussion of explication with the well-​known secondary school exercise of close reading known (in English and in French) as explication de texte. Space does not permit a discussion here of whether the exercise of explication de texte, a product of the scientistic education reforms of France’s Third Republic, is guilty of reinforcing the inequality of intelligence that Rancière attributes to the structure of explication. One could make the case, as I  have in The Pedagogical Imagination, that the literary exercise is primarily inspired by a commitment to experiential learning and object lesson pedagogy, which, in theory if not always in practice, is arguably consistent with Jacotot’s universal teaching. 12

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without the master’s intervention, the student gives an account of his own understanding of the words on the page. His task is not to seek what lies behind the words but rather to communicate to another what he understands of the words before him:  “There is nothing behind the written page—​no false bottom that necessitates the work of an other intelligence, that of the explicator” (IS 9–​10). The assertion that nothing is hidden behind the written page is significant. Apart from what it says about the status of the book in Jacotot’s method, it also gives us insight into the formal idiosyncrasies of Rancière’s own text. As we previously saw in the examples of the theatrical staging of Jacotot’s lesson, the interpolation of Jacotot’s prose, and the use of sentence fragments to signal the words on the page as linguistic objects independent of a speaker, Rancière experiments with form to create the impression that the author has disappeared. Such experiments suggest, at the very least, an effort to reduce the role of the author and thereby his agency and authority. They draw attention to the surface of the text, to the form rather than the content, to how the text functions rather than what it says (which is not to say, as some too readily assume, that content is unimportant). Rancière’s techniques of form and style give the reader the sense of having a direct encounter with the “materiality”13 or “palpability”14 of language. Rancière thus places the reader in immediate contact with the book’s intelligence as opposed to that of its author. The Ignorant Schoolmaster does not only relate Jacotot’s story, it attempts to enact universal teaching. This point bears repeating: The Ignorant Schoolmaster performs the emancipation that it also recounts. The insistence on the text’s surface, on the fact that it hides nothing and thereby augments the reader’s role in the production of meaning highlights a connection between Jacotot’s pedagogy, Rancière’s text, and a staple concept of twentieth-​century literary theory, criticism, and production. A heightened concern for how texts function at the level of form and language rather than what they say about the world beyond the page (including the author’s original intention) is a prevalent characteristic of modernist and postmodern literature from, say, Mallarmé to David Foster Wallace and, in one way or another, a mainstay of literary studies from Russian Formalism to post-​structuralism. It is arguably Roland Barthes’s influential essay “The Death of the Author” that expresses 13 Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 327. 14 Peter Hodgson, “Viktor Shklovsky and the Formalist Legacy:  Imitation/​Stylization in Narrative Fiction,” in Russian Formalism:  A  Retrospective Glance, eds. Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy (New Haven: Slavica Publishers, 1985), 195.

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most concisely this modern(ist) idea of textuality.15 By reviewing key moments of modern literary experiment (symbolism, surrealism) and linguistic theory (Saussure’s semiotics), Barthes tells the story of the liberation of language from the author’s control. No longer the source or guarantor of the text’s ultimate meaning or truth, the author “dies” or cedes his place to the reader who brings the text to life in each individual act of reading. Barthes describes the reader’s encounter with the linguistic surface of the text in terms that strikingly prefigure Rancière’s assertion that nothing is hidden behind the written page: “the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced,” writes Barthes, “there is nothing beneath.”16 The remarkable coincidence of Jacotot’s universal teaching, Rancière’s experimental translation of it for today’s reader, and the idea of textuality that has so dominated literature and literary theory for more than a century suggests important linkages between modern pedagogy and literary studies. The Ignorant Schoolmaster stands out as a starting point for further investigation of this relatively unexplored relationship.17 A final word about form. In presenting The Ignorant Schoolmaster to first-​ time readers of Rancière, one runs the risk of explicating the work, of revealing its hidden features, or underlying truths, that the reader might well not find on his or her own. One thus risks addressing the reader in a manner that reproduces the structure of explication and thereby committing the very error that Rancière’s text denounces as an underlying cause of institutional inequality. In the present essay, I have attempted to avoid this pitfall by insisting on Rancière’s conspicuous manipulations of form and style. In other words, I  have tried to keep my reader focused on the surface of the text, on those features that are part and parcel of the reading experience and that any attentive reader will necessarily encounter. In this way, I attempt to remain faithful, however imperfectly, to the spirit of Rancière’s egalitarian project. One might be tempted to see Jacotot’s emancipatory teaching as simply a variant of the progressive student-​centered learning associated with the antiauthoritarian, reformist spirit that emerged in the wake of the events of 1968. But Rancière repeatedly cautions the reader against viewing universal teaching as lax

15 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (New York: Longman, 1988). 16 Ibid., 150. 17 It is precisely this relationship that I develop in The Pedagogical Imagination. I argue, however, that it is modern object lesson pedagogy, a pillar of republican educational theory if not always practice, that heralds the rise of the modern autonomous reader identified by Barthes and others.

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or permissive. The ignorant schoolmaster is still a master, but of a different kind. He cedes intellectual authority to the book, but he retains moral authority by placing the student in a position of wanting to learn and wanting to communicate to another. He asserts his superiority over the student’s will and commands that the student attend to the book: [Jacotot’s] mastery lay in the command that had enclosed the students in a closed circle from which they alone could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book. [. . .] A pure relationship of will to will had been established between master and student: a relationship wherein the master’s domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and that of the book—​the intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between master and student. (IS 13)

A situation thus arises in which the student must submit to the will of another in order to be intellectually emancipated. Rancière repeats that universal teaching brooks no laziness: “The emancipatory commandment knows no compromises. It absolutely commands of a subject what it supposes [the subject] is capable of commanding of itself ” (IS 38). The ignorant schoolmaster or the parent (because the latter is equally qualified to impose his or her will) ensures that the student has been attentive to the object of study, that he or she has searched, that the student has made his or her intelligence “obedient to itself ” (IS 13).

Bibliocentrism and the totality of the book The book—​any book, not necessarily Fénelon’s Télémaque—​occupies a central position in universal teaching. The kind of attention required of the student searching in the book and the kind of relationship to others that this search occasions constitute the methodological and structural core of universal teaching. Rancière—​as always, echoing Jacotot—​envisions the book as a totality: A book [. . .] is a totality: a center to which one can attach everything new one learns; a circle in which one can understand each of these new things, find the ways to say what one sees in it, what one thinks about it, what one makes of it. This is the first principle of universal teaching: one must learn something and relate everything else to it. (IS 20)

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In poetic language redolent of the infinite sphere described most famously by Pascal, Rancière has us imagine the book as both middle point and circumference. As a center, it functions like an anchor or pivot upon which all else hinges, a primary source of knowledge from which all knowledge thereafter emanates ad infinitum. Of course, we are not meant to believe that each book literally contains all there is to know. The engagement with the book, rather, like the natural method by which a child learns his or her native tongue, sets in motion a process of inquiry—​observation, repetition, memorization, relating the known to the unknown and verification—​that is fundamentally the same as that needed to acquire all subsequent knowledge. In this sense, the book—​any book—​does contain in potential terms everything; it is thus a “totality.” Not only a site from which knowledge emanates, the book-​as-​circle is also a site in which the search for knowledge occurs. The image in the earlier passage of a limitless opening outward from the center is set off with that of enclosure, of bounded activity. The figure of the circle here recalls a point made elsewhere by Rancière that this emancipatory teaching depends on constraints. The book is a confined intellectual space, an arena of sorts, in which the student, commanded by the superior will (but not superior intellect) of the master, searches. He liberates himself by means of his own effort, his own desire—​or will—​to learn. Perhaps the most important element of the book’s (again, any book’s) totality emerges from the Pascalian overtones in Rancière’s description. The conflation of center and periphery has us imagine the book in terms that violate usual categories of geometry. The book’s totality unifies that which rational analysis requires us to keep separate (e.g., centers and circumferences). The circularity motif returns here in yet another guise, for the image of the book is doubly “revolutionary” (from the Latin revolutio meaning cycle, revolving, or turning). It overturns our idea of geometric order and, by replacing the master with the book as the source of intellectual authority, it proposes a radical (or “revolutionary”) challenge to our customary idea of the educative order. The significance of the circularity and totality motif becomes more apparent when contrasted with the linearity of the explicative order. As we have seen, in the pedagogy of explication, the learned master, by teaching the student that he cannot learn on his own, simultaneously teaches the student that his intelligence is inferior to the master’s. At each stage the abyss of ignorance is dug again; the professor fills it in before digging another. Fragments add up, detached pieces of an explicator’s knowledge

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The explicator holds out his knowledge, like an enticement, to lead the student down a path leading to truth or mastery. But the knowledge the master offers is always only partial. Upon arrival at this fragment of knowledge, the explicating master reveals that there is more to know and thereby reinforces the student’s sense of his own ignorance. The student advances in piecemeal fashion toward knowledge, thanks only to the master who reveals or unveils step by step each stage in his progress. The student repeatedly discovers intellectual inequality and the hierarchy of superior and inferior minds. This deferral has no end; it is teleology without telos. To proceed down this path is to deepen and cement intellectual inequality, the division of intelligences into superior and inferior. In sum, the totality of knowledge made accessible through the book-​as-​circle contrasts with the forever partial, fragmented understanding of one’s relationship to knowledge stemming from the linear form of explicative—​and thus intellectually stultifying—​teaching. Even Socrates, the archetypal ignorant master, is guilty of this stultifying pedagogy. Despite his professed ignorance and application of a method that supposedly guides students to discover knowledge on their own, Socrates in fact only feigns ignorance and shows instead that the pupil doesn’t have the power to teach himself. Though Socrates’s questioning leads the pupil to discover knowledge that already lies within him, it also teaches the student that he is unable to find this knowledge by himself, that he relies on Socrates to guide him. The master thereby reasserts his own intellectual superiority. He stultifies in spite of himself. Socrates’s mistake, says Rancière, is that he still interrogates the student as would a scholar and not as would an individual to his equal: “[W]‌hoever wishes to emancipate someone must interrogate him in the manner of men and not in the manner of scholars, in order to be instructed, not to instruct” (IS 29). In this criticism of Socrates, Rancière also appears to be pointing a finger indirectly at more recent intellectual masters, such as his own former teacher Louis Althusser, as well as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-​Paul Sartre, who, despite their professed Marxist commitment to egalitarianism, actually delivered their lessons in a manner that kept their students and others who might benefit from their thought in a perpetual state of intellectual inferiority.

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The book as bridge The intellectual equality resulting from this “bibliocentric” structure has wide-​ ranging political consequences that challenge the notions of French republican identity and collective identity more generally. To grasp these political ramifications, we must first conceive of the book, as Rancière does, as a material object serving as “a bridge of communication between two minds” (IS 32). The student’s “translation” of his opinion of the book in the language of his interlocutor establishes a kind of verbal bridge between two equal intelligences. The book is also a bridge, Rancière insists, because it maintains a fixed distance between these two minds, thereby preserving their independence. This constant distance guaranteed by the book’s centrality contrasts with the learned master’s manipulation of distance. As a material object between two equal minds, the book is also an objective “source of material verification” (IS 32). The master verifies that the student has paid attention to the book, that he has applied himself to searching in the book. Because this verification requires no scholarly knowledge, the act of verifying can be performed by any examiner, specifically, notes Rancière, a mother or a father. This reconceptualization of the ignorant master’s role as equivalent to that of the parent, both of whom serve as unlearned verifiers of the student’s (child’s, examinee’s) attentive engagement with the book undermines a basic article of faith of republican educational ideology. It dissolves the boundary between school and family, the state institution and the home, the public and the private: “[T]‌his new relation undoes the stultifying relation of intellectual instruction and moral education” (IS 38). As mentioned earlier in our discussion of Milner’s De l’école, a core tenet in orthodox republican ideology—​dating back to the education debates of the Revolutionary period—​is that instruction should be distinct from education. The former, it is said, concerns the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, science, and the cultivation of reason. It is the preserve of the school and overseen by the learned master. By contrast, the home is the location where one receives moral education, which traditionally takes the form of religious education. False belief or opinion learned at home, the classic republican argument supposedly goes, is corrected by the rational study of verifiable truth pursued at school. In theory, this Enlightenment-​inspired rationalist instruction, when applied universally, should be emancipatory, training each and every schoolchild in the autonomous use of his or her own reason.

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Rancière observes, however, that this division between school and family reproduces yet another version of intellectual inequality; it establishes the school as the location of intellectual superiority and the home as the site of incapacity. Rancière has in mind here the mixed message that this division produced during the nineteenth century in the minds of schoolchildren from working-​ class backgrounds. The technologically superior learning available at the school pointed up the inadequacy of education received at home—​whether this be traditional artisanal production processes or unscientific beliefs, values, and practices handed down through the family. Regardless, the school became the place of true scientific knowledge and the home identified with error. The division teaches the student that what he is by birth is inferior to what he could become via the school’s instruction. What is remarkable about Rancière’s understanding of this division is that it looks back to the earliest days of republican schooling and reaches beyond the 1980s to the school situation in France today. One need only think of the controversies of recent years regarding the gap between the mission of the republican school and its ability to accommodate or integrate an increasingly multicultural student population.18 The centrality of the book—​or, rather, the structure of the educational relationship that the book’s centrality puts in place—​undoes the division between school and home. It erases the notion that there is one place for intellectual instruction and another for moral education. With the book as the site of intellectual authority, the mother or father performs the same function as the ignorant schoolmaster. They all have equal authority in commanding that the child search in the book and in verifying that he or she has indeed searched. By establishing this relationship of intellectual equality, “[t]‌he family unit is . . . no longer the place of a return that brings the artisan back to the consciousness of his incapacity. It is one of a new consciousness, of an overtaking of the self that extends each person’s ‘own affair’ to the point where it is part and parcel of the common reason enjoyed by all” (38–​39). It is worth insisting here on the radical implications of Rancière’s thought for republican ideology. After all, a basic principle of republican universalism is that each citizen of the Republic must be conceived as an abstract individual, whose identity is independent of cultural determinants or accidents of birth. Moreover, the republican school is the place where one

18 Such conflicts are captured quite vividly in recent French films such as Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive (2003), Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (2008), and Jean-​Paul Lilienfeld’s Journée de la jupe (2008).

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cultivates one’s reason so as to forge one’s own identity and thereby free oneself from contingent components of identity (such as one’s class or ethnic origins). Rancière’s vision of universal teaching and intellectual emancipation makes this distinction untenable and exposes it as an impediment to equality.

Veracity’s orbit and the immateriality of intelligence Intelligence, for Rancière, is immaterial. It lacks physical properties like other material objects and thus cannot be weighed, measured, divided up, combined, or objectively compared. A fallacy of the explicative order is to treat intelligence as if it were a material thing of which one can have more or less. The mere existence of institutions of government and education, argues Rancière, suggests the dubiousness of intellectual inequality. If intelligences were clearly unequal, he says, superior minds would not try to prove their superiority:  they would be content to dominate and would not need institutions that demonstrate to inferior minds their inferiority. The belief that one can have more or less of an immaterial entity like intelligence is the basic contradiction of superior minds, one that makes their position fundamentally irrational. The distinction between truth and veracity—​a crucial premise in Rancière’s thinking—​follows from this idea of the intelligence’s immateriality. The intelligence does not have direct access to truth. “Veracity” is the term Rancière uses to describe intelligence’s relation to truth. It is the path of the intelligence circling around the “absent center” (IS 58) of truth without attempting to know it or approach it. Again, Rancière has recourse to the circularity motif. Veracity is an “orbit” (IS 77) around truth but unlike planetary motion, in which bodies of mass are drawn by gravity toward the central star, veracity’s orbit—​because of the immateriality of the intelligence—​is not subject to the force of gravity. In Rancière’s cosmic intellectual system, truth, while a vital “foyer” (IS 58) around which veracity orbits, constitutes an impediment to equality when it is conceived as a pole toward which individual intelligences are expected to converge. Unlike entities that have mass, the emancipated intelligence cannot be “driven off course by universal gravitation toward the center of the material universe” (IS 77). Only the intelligence (erroneously and irrationally) conceived as a material thing can fall toward truth. Once again, circles are opposed to lines. Veracity’s orbit around truth is emancipatory; the direct line to truth, like the learned master’s explicative trail, constitutes inequality.

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Rancière finds this misguided materialist view of intelligence everywhere. We reinforce this explicative fallacy unwittingly in our most ordinary and benign habits of behavior and thought. For example, even expressions of modesty, Rancière observes, perpetuate a division of the world into superior and inferior intelligences. As is often the case in pronouncements of modesty, one concedes another’s superiority and one’s own inferiority with respect to one domain, but this often implicitly serves to reaffirm one’s superiority in a different domain. Modesty thus becomes a form of pride and an expression of intellectual inequality. It is a form of trading, or commerce, in intelligence as if it were a material thing. Rancière, we have seen, has us imagine two different kinds of planetary motion—​one in which immaterial intelligence follows veracity’s orbit around truth (without converging on it) and another in which material intelligence is subject to gravity and falls to truth. Because it is unreasonable to think that the intelligence has physical properties, the first of these orbits—​the trajectory of emancipation—​is rational, and the second—​the downward, gravitational path of explication—​is irrational. With this metaphor of cosmic order, Rancière exposes yet another shortcoming of traditional republican ideology. Republicanism, imbued as it is with the spirit of rationalism, relies upon the idea of everyone’s convergence around a single, central truth. A founding tenet of modern republicanism holds that individuals, once trained in the autonomous use of reason, would share the common means to discover the same scientifically verifiable objective truth, thereby freeing them from superstitious reliance on revealed truth. But this collective convergence toward truth, as Rancière sees it, and despite appearances, again reproduces intellectual inequality because it constitutes an aggregation of individual intelligences under one collective identity. The belief in a political body of rational citizens defined by their convergence around truth commits, again, the mistake of treating intelligence as a material entity, a thing that can be amassed, collected, accumulated, and combined. Our earlier discussion of the book as bridge illuminates this republican shortcoming from a different angle. Understood as a bridge connecting two equal intelligences, the book, we recall, also maintained a fixed distance between them. The communication—​or translation of thought through language—​occurred because they remained separate. Paradoxically, they were connected because they were disconnected. It is not truth that unites people, says Rancière: “what brings people together [. . .] is nonaggregation. [. . .] People are united because they are people, that is to say, distant beings [des êtres distants]. Language [. .

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.] makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate—​but also puts them in a community of intelligence” (IS 58). In other words, the republican project produces inequality because it attempts to aggregate intelligences, the equality of which depends, however, on their remaining apart. It is through the act of translation and not aggregation that they form an egalitarian bond.19 Despite its pretensions to be a society of equals, republican citizenry cannot be egalitarian since the educational institution charged with bringing forth such a society is destined to fail. Institutions, by definition, produce inequality because, like the explicative order itself, they impose a hierarchy on that which cannot be measured or categorized; they aim to emancipate people—​that is, aggregates—​instead of individuals: “Every institution is an explication in social act, a dramatization of inequality. Its principle is and always will be antithetical to that of a method based on equality and the refusal of explications. Universal teaching can only be directed to individuals, never to societies” (IS 105). This is one of the reasons why Rancière repeatedly reminds the reader in the final chapter that Jacotot himself understood that universal teaching “would never take.” It is a method that even the most well-​intentioned, progressive reformers have always failed to spread because the very means they have used to do so betray a fundamental misunderstanding or inability to grasp its root principle of equality. To illustrate this, Rancière relates the case of Count Lasteyrie, a philanthropist and contemporary of Jacotot. A zealous adherent of universal teaching, Lasteyrie, in an effort to spread the method, submitted it for approval to a learned society. But the very fact of relying on a learned society’s endorsement reveals an underlying distrust of individual families’ ability to assess the method. The Count started from the assumption of the unlearned’s intellectual incapacity. Lacking formal learning, ordinary fathers and mothers were deemed intellectually inferior. In sum, despite his professed enthusiasm for Jacotot’s method, the Count demonstrated his inability to put faith in the method’s first principle—​ that all intelligences are equal. Rancière cites numerous examples of progressive educators who were nevertheless unable to implement Jacotot’s method due to a fundamental inability to accept the presuppositions—​ludicrous in the eyes of most—​of the master’s ignorance and the equality of intelligence. The method 19 The opposition here between, on the one hand, the egalitarian bond between two distinct individuals and, on the other, the aggregation of individuals, which denies their individuality in a political order prefigures the opposition between true (egalitarian) “politics” and “police” that Rancière develops in his later political writings, most notably in La Mésentente:  politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995).

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could not take in part because it simply smacked of madness. Moreover, the concept of progress itself is suspect from the perspective of Jacotot’s emancipatory method. For progress functions according to a logic of delay by which one is always behind—​and thus inferior to—​where one ought to be, a perpetually deferred and always unattainable end. Progress—​and particularly progressive education—​is, despite appearances, simply another manifestation of the explicative order that reinforces intellectual inequality. But if the founder presciently knew that universal teaching would not take, he also knew, as the last line of the book asserts, “that it would not perish” (IS 139). It would not perish because, even if it could not be institutionalized and spread to a social order, it would necessarily survive insofar as it is always reenacted in the way that every child learns his or her mother tongue, by repeating and relating what he does not know to what he does know and then expressing—​ or translating—​his thoughts into words that another equal intelligence could understand. This is, after all, why the method is universal: it has always and will always be practiced by everyone.

Lasting lessons What lessons are we to take from The Ignorant Schoolmaster? Readers who want to believe in the school as a vital institution for creating a more egalitarian society will likely come away disillusioned by Rancière’s assessment. After all, one of the book’s arguments is that institutionalized education, because it is necessarily hierarchical and thus treats intelligences as material things, inevitably reproduces the inegalitarian order. Moreover, those readers, such as teachers and students, who depend on educational institutions in very immediate and material ways may see such a pessimistic and defeatist view of the school as cause for great consternation. Read in a certain light, The Ignorant Schoolmaster provides grist for opponents of institutionalized education.20 The Ignorant Schoolmaster, however, is not a call for a radical shakedown of the school as we know it. It is quite explicit on this point. Rancière remarks that although universal teaching “cannot be propagated in and by social institutions” (i.e., schools), “[t]‌he emancipated are undoubtedly respectful of the social order. 20 The classic reference for this position is, of course, Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

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They know that it is, in any case, less bad than disorder” (IS 105; emphasis in the original). There would thus appear to be a kind of resigned coexistence between these two educational or pedagogical practices, one institutional and the other distinctly non-​or anti-​institutional since it can only occur between two equal individuals freed from their institutional roles. Jacotot’s pessimistic prediction notwithstanding, it is not certain that universal teaching—​teaching that presupposes intellectual equality between teacher and student—​will never take. The present-​day proliferation of learner-​centered pedagogy (e.g., the flipped or inverted classroom) in which the teacher’s disciplinary expertise plays an increasingly subsidiary role in the student’s learning suggests a step, however small, toward the egalitarian pedagogy extolled by Jacotot and Rancière. What is more, as Michel Serres argues in his hugely successful (and controversial) essay Petite Poucette,21 the digital revolution has placed all knowledge directly at the fingertips of today’s student. An adept explorer of the internet and global information networks, she (Serres’s archetypal student is a girl) is liberated from her dependence on the intellectual authority of the traditional teacher. The latter no longer enjoys the intellectual authority he once did from the dais of an amphitheater, leading Serres to proclaim that the classroom of old is dead.22 Though it would be premature to say that today’s schoolmasters (university professors and school teachers alike) have embraced ignorance in bold Jacotist fashion, the reduced role of traditional forms of intellectual authority in contemporary pedagogy indicates, arguably, the advent of something akin to intellectual equality. The Ignorant Schoolmaster is not prescriptive. Its lessons are not handed down in authoritarian fashion. It would not, of course, be Rancière’s style to do so. Perhaps style itself holds the key to the book’s lessons. Rancière’s style of writing, the work’s literary form, may be where The Ignorant Schoolmaster’s most lasting lessons lie. I have insisted from the start on the work’s striking form. The leitmotif of circularity (present in the overall arc of the story Rancière tells, in the image of the book as an encyclopedic totality, in the orbit of veracity, etc.) gives quite literally tangible shape to the concept of universal teaching—​of which the end goal, equality, must also be, like a circle, its starting point. I have also drawn attention to the narrational techniques that diminish the author’s presence, blur the voices of Jacotot and Rancière, and place the reader in more direct contact 21 Michel Serres, Petite Poucette (Paris: Éditions le Pommier, 2012). 22 Ibid., 40.

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both with Jacotot’s language and the linguistic, formal surface of Rancière’s text itself. Rancière-​the-​author aims to mimic Jacotot-​the-​teacher. He attempts to remove his own (as Jacotot would say) intelligence from the relationship with the reader and require that the reader “grapple [directly] with [the intelligence] of the book” (IS 13). It is thus through its formal technique and the demands that this places on the reader’s attention that The Ignorant Schoolmaster enacts the principle of universal teaching. As we discussed earlier, the work’s foregrounding of form, the attention it draws to the surface of the text—​to textuality tout court—​invites us to place it in the modernist literary tradition. A work of history, philosophy, and sociopolitical critique, it is perhaps as a literary work that its impact is most directly felt. For, in the end, it posits formalist reading as an instance of pedagogical practice and identifies literary experience as a site of intellectual emancipation.

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Literature as Rancièrian Film Fable Margaret C. Flinn

Deleuze and Godard both repeat Jean Epstein’s dramaturgy, they both extract, after the fact, the original essence of the cinematographic art from the plots the art of cinema shares with the old art of telling stories.1 The first third of Jacques Rancière’s most recent collection of essays on film, The Intervals of Cinema [Les Écarts du cinéma] explicitly addresses the relationship of cinema and literature, under the subheading “After Literature.”2 In his preface, as well as the chapters of “After Literature,” Rancière seeks to demonstrate how cinema strives to exceed the literary narrative models upon which it draws. As has been typical for Rancière’s late work, this grouping of essays functions as a response, a corrective, and an extension to his previous writings. Rancière engages in an ongoing dialogue with himself and his readers, where questions posed in one set of essays are elaborated on in future essays. In Intervals, Rancière asserts that “literature is not just a reservoir of stories or a way of telling them, it is a means of constructing the very world in which stories can occur, events link with one another in sequence, appearances arise” (IC 12).3 Such assertions of cinema’s differentiation from literary narrative models in Intervals would seem to suggest that Rancière had perhaps not adequately articulated this relationship

1 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New  York:  Berg, 2006), 6. Referred to parenthetically hereafter as FF. “Chez Deleuze comme chez Godard opère la même dramaturgie qui marque l’analyse de Jean Epstein:  L’essence originale de l’art cinématographique est prélevée après coup sur les données fictionnelles qui lui sont communes avec le vieil art des histoires.” Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique (Paris:  Seuil, 2001), 12. Referred to parenthetically hereafter as FC. 2 Jacques Rancière, Les Écarts du cinéma (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011); and The Intervals of Cinema, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 2014); hereafter, EC and IC respectively. 3 “Car la littérature n’est pas qu’un réservoir d’histoires ou une façon de les raconter, c’est une manière de construire le monde même où des histoires peuvent arriver, des événements s’enchaîner, des apparences se déployer” (EC 19).

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in previous writings. What I will undertake in this chapter is to return to the 2006 Film Fables [La Fable cinématographique] to see how literature is used in this volume, before the elaboration and corrective undertaken in Intervals. I will argue that to understand the stakes of literature in this book on film, we can consider Rancière’s treatment of literature as a Rancièrian fable in and of itself. In Film Fables, literature is a carrier of stories and, because of the privileged relationship between fable, fiction, and story, literature functions as cinema’s Other. Ironically, while insisting that literature is more than a repository for plot, Rancière often seems to limit it to this function. Before going any further, it is important to note that Film Fables is made up of a series of case studies.4 Each of them examines one of the titular fables as seen in the work of a single director, each of whom is a good European or Hollywood “auteur.” But what exactly is a film fable? The collection could have been subtitled “Paradoxes of 20th Century Modernist Cinema,” and in a single phrase, we could say that Rancière’s film fables are productive contradictions. The Rancièrian film fable is always animated by a double movement. The author proposes an argument, a technique, a position, a line of thought, or an interpretation only to expose almost immediately a simultaneous opposition within the work itself. This is not an impasse; rather, Rancière consistently identifies these perpetual chassés-​croisés as the foundational condition of the seventh art. Such contradictions are what produce film’s meaning and condition the relationship that cinema has with its era.5 Indeed, Rancière concludes his prologue with the assertion that the film fable is always thwarted: “the art and thought of images have always been nourished by all that thwarts them” (FF 9).6 This prologue, entitled “A Thwarted Fable” [“Une fable contrariée”], is perhaps the most commented upon chapter of the book, but it merits revisiting: on the one hand, because the essays in the collection—​at their origin, independent 4 For more comprehensive summaries of the ensemble of Film Fables or for particularly insightful approaches to the film fable, see:  Tom Conley, “Cinema and Its Discontents,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 216–​28; Nico Baumbach, “Jacques Rancière and the Fictional Capacity of Documentary,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8, no. 1 (March 2010): 57–​ 72; Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA:  Polity, 2010); Hassan Melehy, “Film Fables” in Jacques Rancière:  Key Concepts, ed. Jean-​Philippe Deranty (Durham, UK:  Acumen, 2010), 169–​82; Joseph J.  Tanke, Jacques Rancière:  An Introduction, Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum, 2011); Paul Bowman, ed., Jacques Rancière and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 5 See La parole muette:  Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris:  Hachette Littératures, 1998), for Rancière’s take on how this is a continuation of what literature does from 1800 onward. 6 “l’art des images et sa pensée ne cessent de se nourrir de ce qui les contrarie” (FC 28).

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articles—​owe the prologue their manifest coherence; on the other hand, because it is in the prologue that we find the framework of the relationship between literature and cinema that colors the rest of the essays. Let us therefore start by recalling the main points of argument articulated in the prologue. As an entry point to his topic Rancière chooses a long citation from foundational film critic (and filmmaker) Jean Epstein’s Bonjour Cinéma of 1921 (here slightly abridged): Cinema, by and large, doesn’t do justice to the story. And “dramatic action” here is a mistake. The drama we’re watching is already half-​resolved and unfolding on the curative slope to the crisis. The real tragedy is in suspense. It looms over all the faces; it is in the curtain and in the door-​latch. Each drop of ink can make it blossom at the tip of the pen. [. . .] Expectation. We can’t see a thing yet, but the tragic crystal that will turn out to be at the center of the plot has fallen down somewhere. Its wave advances. Concentric circles. It keeps on expanding, from relay to relay. Seconds. The Telephone rings. All is lost. Is whether they get married in the end really all you want to know? Look, really, THERE IS NO film that ends badly, and the audience enters into happiness at the hour appointed on the program. Cinema is true. A story is a lie. (Cited in FF 1)7

This passage attracts Rancière’s attention because it is symptomatic of the thought articulated by theorists of so-​called pure cinema at the apex of modernism. To elaborate his vision of cinema and to “attest to its power,” Epstein does not base his argument in an episode taken from avant-​garde or experimental cinema, but rather from a banal melodrama starring Sessue Hayakawa, called The Honor of His House (William C. de Mille, 1918). Epstein, Rancière explains, “extracts the theoretical and poetical fable that describes the original power of the cinema from the body of another fable, from

7 “Généralement, le cinéma rend mal l’anecdote. Et ‘action dramatique’ y est erreur. Le drame qui agit est déjà à moitié résolu et roule sur la pente curative de la crise. La véritable tragédie est en suspens. Elle menace tous les visages. Elle est dans le rideau de la fenêtre et le loquet de la porte. Chaque goutte d’encre peut la faire fleurir au bout du stylographe. [. . .] Attente. On ne voit encore rien, mais le cristal tragique qui va créer le bloc du drame est tombé quelque part. Son onde avance. Cercles concentriques. Elle roule de relais en relais. Secondes. Le téléphone sonne. Tout est perdu. Alors, vraiment, vous tenez tant que cela à savoir s’ils se marient au bout. Mais IL N’Y A PAS de films qui finissent mal, et on entre dans le bonheur à l’heure prévue par l’horaire. Le cinéma est vrai. Une histoire est un mensonge” (Epstein, cited FC 7, abbreviated here).

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which he erased the traditional narrative aspect in order to create another dramaturgy, another system of expectations, actions, and states of being” (FF 5).8 The “anecdote, dramatic action,” and “story” that Epstein scorns in fact furnish a defining moment for the film, upon which he will build the rest of his arguments about the medium, hereby establishing a fundamental contradiction in Epstein’s logic that nonetheless becomes the groundwork upon which the remainder of his thinking unfolds. In fact, the sequence described by Epstein and the spectatorial experience that it implies present a striking resemblance with what Élie Faure had written one year earlier in his essay “On cineplastics” [“De la cinéplastique”]: I remember the unexpected emotions I received, seven or eight years before the war, from certain films the scenarios of which, as it happens, were of an incredible silliness. The revelation of what the cinema of the future can be came to me one day; I retain an exact memory of it, of the commotion that I experienced when I observed, in a flash, the magnificence there was in the relationship of a piece of black clothing to the gray wall of an inn. From that moment I paid no more attention to the martyrdom of the poor woman who was condemned, in order to save her husband from dishonor, to give herself to the lascivious banker who had previously murdered her mother and debauched her child. I  discovered, with increasing astonishment, that, thanks to the tone relations that were transforming the film for me in a system of colors scaling from white to black and ceaselessly commingled, moving, changing on the surface and in the depth of the screen, I was witnessing a sudden coming to life, a descent into that host of personages whom I had already seen—​motionless—​on the canvases of El Greco, Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer, Courbet, Manet. (My emphasis)9 8 “La fable—​théorique et poétique—​qui nous raconte la puissance originelle du cinéma est prélevée sur le corps d’une autre fable dont Epstein a gommé les aspects narratifs traditionnels pour composer une autre dramaturgie, un autre système d’attentes, d’actions et d’états” (FC 11). 9 Élie Faure, “The Art of Cineplastics,” in Film: An Anthology, ed. Daniel Talbot (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 6. “Je me souviens des émotions inattendues que m’ont procurées, sept ou huit ans avant la guerre, certains films—​français, ma foi !—​dont le scénario était d’ailleurs, d’une incroyable niaiserie. La révélation de ce que pourra être le cinéma de l’avenir me vint un jour, j’en ai gardé le souvenir exact, de la commotion que j’éprouvai en constatant, dans un éclair, la magnificence que prenait le rapport d’un vêtement noir avec le mur gris d’une auberge. Dès cet instant, je ne prêtais plus d’attention au martyre de la pauvre femme condamnée, pour sauver son mari du déshonneur, à se livrer au banquier lubrique qui a auparavant assassiné sa mère et prostitué son enfant. Je découvris avec un émerveillement croissant que, grâce aux relations de tons qui transformaient pour moi le film en un système de valeurs échelonnées du blanc au noir et sans cesse mêlées, mouvantes, changeantes dans la surface et la profondeur de l’écran, j’assistais à une brusque animation, à une descente dans la foule de personnages que j’avais déjà vus, immobiles, sur les toiles de Gréco, de Franz Hals, de Rembrandt, de Velasquez, de Vermeer, de Courbet, de Manet.” Élie Faure, Fonction du cinéma: de la cinéplastique à son destin social [1953] (Geneva: Gonthier, 1963), 25; my emphasis.

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The reader will have noticed that Faure shares Epstein’s scorn for the dramatic or in fact melodramatic story that nonetheless furnishes him with the very idea of what cinema might be—​indeed, an idealized vision of the cinema hits him in this “Eureka!” moment. Rancière is of course familiar with the writings of Faure, so one might wonder why Epstein snatches the place of honor at the opening of Film Fables. I  would hazard that the answer lies in the fact that Faure is not, like Epstein, a theorist of pure cinema, but rather someone who embraces hybridity. Faure’s text would provide a much less satisfactory example of unacknowledged contradiction, since Faure’s own conscious exploration of contradictions might deprive Rancière from exposing those contradictions himself. It is as if Faure does not contradict himself enough to suit the purposes of an argument that requires contradiction, a priori. Moreover, even if Faure denigrates the anecdote of the banal melodrama that furnishes him with his “Eureka!” moment, he situates the discussion of that anecdote in a discussion of pictorialism. We might say that Faure’s text is characterized by a positive movement, toward painting (and indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Faure’s cineplastics finds itself almost completely realized in the graphism of contemporary digital animation).10 In contrast, by pushing toward a pure conception of cinema, Epstein’s text is characterized by a negative movement, against literature or at least against the literary. Yet, thanks to the very title of the collection, a certain literariness presents itself as the privileged Other (the alter ego?) of cinema in Film Fables. Because, as Rancière writes, cinema discards the “fable” in the Aristotelian sense: the arrangement of necessary and verisimilar actions that lead the characters from fortune to misfortune, or vice versa, through the careful construction of the intrigue [nœud] and denouement. The tragic poem, indeed the very idea of artistic expression had always been defined by just such a logic of ordered actions. (FF 1–​2)11

In fact, at two different moments, Rancière defines the fable in Aristotelian terms: the fable is muthos or fabula, the story, the fiction mobilized by action, character, and events. I  will come back to the second of these definitional passages later. 10 See Margaret C. Flinn, “The Prescience of Elie Faure,” SubStance, 34, no. 3 (December 2005): 47–​61. 11 “C’est la ‘fable’ au sens aristotélicien, l’agencement d’actions nécessaires ou vraisemblables qui, par la construction ordonnée du nœud et du dénouement, fait passer les personnages du bonheur au malheur ou du malheur au bonheur. Cette logique des actions agencées définissait non seulement le poème tragique mais l’idée même de l’expressivité de l’art” (FC 8).

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Two chapters of the collection, “A Silent Tartuffe” [“Tartuffe muet”] and “The Missing Shot: The Poetics of Nicholas Ray” [“Le plan absent: Poétique de Nicholas Ray”] are essentially studies of literary adaptation, even if the expression is avoided. In each case, literature is called on not only as the source material for the adaptation in question, but also for its specific linguistic and narrative qualities. The Tartuffe in question is of course that of Molière, but Rancière’s heavy emphasis on language and story over performance or mise-​en-​scène is why Tartuffe serves as literature writ large here and not theater as a separate case.12 In this essay, Rancière asks how one can, in a silent film (that of Friedrich Murnau, 1925), show that which is enunciated in the play, particularly when it is precisely thanks to language that the hypocrite reveals himself. Rancière demonstrates, then, how this problem of narrative strategy—​impossible in silent cinema—​sees itself transposed to the question of producing, or rather, the rendering material of shadow. Given that the magic of cinema is that which allows it to call up and give life to shadows, to be obliged to dissipate shadows fundamentally contradicts this fable. In “The Missing Shot: The Poetics of Nicholas Ray,” Rancière examines how Ray refigures the realist narrative of Edward Anderson’s eponymous source novel for They Live by Night (1948). The meeting between Keechie and Bowie, the titular lovers, takes place in the novel through a back and forth between interiority and exteriority, thanks to the interplay between narration and interior monologue. According to Rancière, such interplay embeds individual story in the shared social context. It makes sense that literature should create this sort of intimacy between the internal and the external monologue and stereotype, as that is how it compensates for the weak sensible powers of its medium, how it puts the flesh of shared experience on the words of the made-​up story. Literature creates a continuum between the language of intimate emotions and the neon signs of a highway, and in that continuum we see the story of the individual fates of the characters imprinted on the shared canvas of a society. (FF 97–​98)13

Rancière gives theater more of its due in the second chapter of The Intervals of Cinema. 13 “Cette forme d’intimité du dedans et du dehors, du monologue et du stéréotype convient à la littérature. Elle appartient aux moyens par lesquels elle commence le faible pouvoir sensible de son médium et donne aux mots du récit inventé la chair de l’expérience commune. Entre le langage des émotions intimes et celui des enseignes lumineuses de la voie publique, elle instaure cette continuité qui permet de prendre l’histoire de destins individuels dans l’étoffe commune de la peinture d’une société” (FC 130). 12

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Rancière goes on to specify that “the cinematographic invention has to be constructed against the grain of literary cinematographism. Cinema has to put strangeness in the bodies it presents, introduce a distance between those it brings together” (FF 98).14 Therefore, in Ray’s version of the story, the meeting between Keechie and Bowie can only happen once again through a sort of transposition of the situation. To establish the intimacy of the protagonists’ meeting without recourse to a literary procedure (which, to my mind, would be something like the free indirect discourse used by Bresson in A Man Escaped/​Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, 1956), Ray establishes a scene that is made up of two incompatible spaces. Keechie and Bowie are at once isolated and encircled (not by a shot reverse-​shot) but by framing that isolates them within a series of images that confines them to their small society. It is thus as the carrier of story that literature appears and is conceived of in the film essays of Rancière, and this, in spite of the fact that the author insists on the moments where literature surpasses or exceeds its narrative function to “enfable itself ” (“s’affabuler”). The symbolist poets would thus have, according to Rancière, anticipated theorists of “pure” cinema: they were part of the same regime of art, that which Rancière calls the aesthetic regime. Among these we also find Flaubert, always dear to the philosopher for having dreamed of realizing “a book without subject or matter, a book that would be held together by nothing more than its ‘style’ ” (FF 8).15 But the description of Emma at her window contemplating beanpoles knocked over by rain is taxed by Rancière for “micro-​narration” (FF 9/​FC 16). “Micro” perhaps, but all the same “narration”—​ so, story is important even for Rancière’s discussion of literature that hopes to escape it. In his chapter “From One Manhunt to Another: Fritz Lang between Two Ages” (“D’un chasse à l’homme à un autre: Fritz Lang entre deux âges”), it is Victor Hugo who takes the place of Flaubert: The issue here is not one of narrative suspension, but of poetics. Aristotle’s requirement that the narrative must lead the criminal to the point where he’ll be caught and unmasked runs into a new, and conflicting, requirement: the aesthetic requirement for suspended shots, for a counter-​logic that at every turn interrupts the progression of the plot and the revelation of the secret. In these moments, we experience the power of empty time, the time of goals held in 14 “l’invention cinématographique doit se construire contre ce cinématographisme littéraire. Le cinéma doit mettre de l’étrangeté dans les corps qu’il présente, de la distance entre ceux qu’il rapproche” (FC 130). 15 “une œuvre sans sujet ni matière, ne reposant sur rien d’autre que le ‘style’ de l’écrivain” (FC 16).

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Margaret C. Flinn abeyance when young Cosettes contemplate the dolls of their dreams, and when those condemned to “misery” delight in a simple moment of reconciliation with a world wholly indifferent to them and from which all one really wants is the chance to share in a novel quality of the sensible. “Action too has its dream moments,” says the author of Les Misérables, and rightly so. (FF 49–​50)16

Thus at every turn one must be attentive to how the two regimes of art (the representative and the aesthetic) would conceive in opposite manners the way in which a story unfolds, what are the film narratives’ internal tensions, indeed, of what good are the very notions of story, narrative or plot. At these moments, in order to make advance his arguments about the cinema, Rancière returns to a literary text—​the literary thus systematically serves as film’s analogue, its textual other. Moreover, with “action too has its dream moments,” Rancière has found in Hugo a much more concise version of the lengthy citation of Epstein. The only difference here is that Rancière’s reading of Aristotle suggests that narrative suspension makes up the poetics of a text for the secret and dream-​life of characters, whereas Epstein’s reverie was that of the spectator. In both cases, though, film and literature as narrative-​based media suffer irruptions of empty time or timelessness where the loss of narrative movement becomes constitutive of the work’s very poetics.17 Rancière repeatedly turns to literature, and in so doing, he specifically evokes its stories: the stories of an adulterous woman, of an orphan, of a hypocrite, of lovers. Nonetheless he resists the temptation to say that modern thought (that is to say the theory of the interwar avant-​gardes of which Epstein is emblematic) represents nothing but the triumph of the image over narrative or plot. Returning to the prologue we read: This is why the art of moving images can overthrow the old Aristotelian hierarchy that privileged muthos—​the coherence of the plot—​and devalued opsis—​the spectacle’s sensible effect. It isn’t that the art of moving images is an art of the visible that managed to annex, thanks to movement, the capacity for narrative, 16 “Ce n’est pas là simple affaire de pause dans un récit. C’est affaire de poétique. Aux exigences artistotéliciennes du récit qui conduit le criminel au point où il sera saisi et démasqué vient se mêler et s’opposer une autre exigence: l’exigence esthétique des plans suspendus, celle d’une contre-​ logique qui interrompe toute progression d’intrigue et toute révélation de secret, pour faire ressentir la puissance du temps vide: ce temps des fins suspendues, où les petites Cosette contemplent leurs poupées de rêve et où les ‘misérables’ en sursis goûtent le simple moment de la réconciliation avec un monde qui ne vous veut rien et dont on ne veut rien sinon le partage d’une qualité inédite du sensible. ‘L’action a ses moments de rêve,’ dit justement l’auteur des Misérables” (FC 72). 17 See Jacques Rancière, Le fil perdu and Chapter  7 in this volume for a discussion of narrative in literature.

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or that it is a technique of visibility that replaces the art of imitating visible forms. It’s just that the art of moving images provides access to an inner truth of the sensible that settles the quarrels for priority among the arts and among the senses because it settles, first and foremost, the great quarrel between thought and sensibility. (FF 2)18

This resolution may occur precisely because the cinema is already that to which literature aspires. According to Rancière, the painter or the novelist attempts the “becoming passive” (“le devenir-​passif ”), whereas the “mechanical apparatus” (“dispositive machinique”) suppresses the very possibility (for the filmmaker) of becoming passive, since the camera already is passive (FF 9). Thus Rancière posits that cinema has an even more paradoxical relationship to “the aesthetic revolution that made it possible” (FF 11). He goes on to explain that while, on the one hand, the art of cinema has been forced to assert its art against the demands of a certain industrial context, on the other, the visible process by which it thwarts these [industrial] tasks only hides a more intimate process: to thwart its servitude, cinema must first thwart its mastery. It must use its artistic procedures to construct dramaturgies that thwart its natural power. There is no straight line running from cinema’s technical nature to its artistic vocation. (FF 11)19

Not having a straight line is not here a weakness. It is in fact, as we have seen, in its contradictions and paradoxes that the cinema draws strength—​therefore, in his preface to Intervals, Rancière will go on to explain that cinema “draws its narrative models” from literature and yet “seeks to emancipate itself ” from literature and those models (IC 11).20 Such a construction, where film simultaneously emerges from and struggles against literature, is precisely that of the fable as Rancière tells it in Film Fables—​a productive contradiction upon which 18 “C’est pourquoi l’art des images mobiles peut renverser la vieille hiérarchie aristotélicienne qui privilégiait le muthos—​ la rationalité de l’intrigue—​ et dévalorisait l’opsis—​ l’effet sensible du spectacle. Il n’est pas simplement l’art du visible qui aurait annexé, grâce au mouvement, la capacité du récit. Il n’est pas non plus une technique de la visibilité qui aurait remplacé l’art d’imiter les formes visibles. Il est l’accès ouvert à une vérité intérieure du sensible qui règle les querelles de priorité entre les arts et les sens parce qu’il règle d’abord la grande querelle de la pensée et du sensible” (FC 8–​9). 19 “L’art du cinéma n’a pas seulement été empiriquement contraint d’affirmer son art contre les tâches que l’industrie lui proposait. Cette contrariété manifeste en cache une autre plus intime. Pour contrarier sa servitude, le cinéma doit d’abord contrarier sa maîtrise. Ses procédures d’art doivent construire des dramaturgies qui contrarient ses pouvoirs naturels. De sa nature technique à sa vocation artistique, la ligne n’est pas droite. La fable cinématographique est une fable contrariée” (FC 18–​19). 20 “C’est d’abord le rapport du cinéma avec cette littérature qui lui fournit ses modèles narratifs et dont il cherche à s’émanciper” (EC 18).

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Rancière will base his articulation of film’s place within the regimes of art. Thus his own theorizing of the cinema engages in a process of fable-​making. While literature and cinema share in the conjoined power of narrative and poetics, for the purposes of comparison with cinema, Rancière seems to need literature to serve above all else the function of narrative repository, even when that reduction would appear to run counter to his specific claims about how literature functions.

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Spinelessness is hardly a quality associated with the thought of Jacques Rancière, but a version of it, in a critique of Lord Jim from 1900, allows him to articulate the difference between his own thought and that of other thinkers of modernism and spectacle. Rancière cites the journalist reviewing Conrad’s novel for The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, who complained that “it lacks vertebration. The want of a backbone paralyses the book.”1 This lack of a beginning-​middle-​end structure, which shocked the nineteenth-​century reviewer, refuses causal relations between events, and that refusal opens up potential for disrupting the status quo and trying out new distributions of the sensible in society. In The Emancipated Spectator, the spectator is posited as neither the ignorant cave dweller content with illusions that Plato imagines nor the malleable citizen helped in the way of reason by the probable sequences of events that play out in theater according to Aristotle. Instead, the spectator—​any spectator—​makes sense of what he or she experiences. Modernist art, be it fiction or photography or theater, assumes such participation when it refuses to be structured by relations of causality. A propos of the effects on the reader of Conrad or Flaubert’s strategies of plotlessness, Rancière, in contrast to Marx or Debord, for example, refuses to see alienation, reification, or spectacle: In modern revolutions in fiction, an entire progressive tradition has seen a process that fragments human totality and that dethrones action to the benefit of the passivity of things. The following pages invite us to see something else:  a destruction of the hierarchical model which subsumes the parts to the whole and divides humanity between the elite of active people and the multitude of passive beings.

1 Cited in Jacques Rancière, Le fil perdu (Paris: La Fabrique, 2014), 7; hereafter FP.

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Cary Hollinshead-​Strick I would locate the politics of fiction, then, not in what it represents, but in what it does: the situations it constructs, the populations it summons, the relations of inclusion or exclusion that it institutes, the frontiers that it traces or erases between perception and action, between the state of things and the movements of thought; the connections it establishes or suspends between situations and their significations, between juxtapositions or sequences and chains of causal relations. (FP 112–​13)2

Modern revolutions in fiction, then, invent means of expression that assume the interpretive competence of those who will encounter them. Rancière’s modernism is both French in its proximity to the idea of technological and social modernity and contrarian in its will to refute Anglophone modernism’s privileging of self-​referential form and of avant-​gardes. The last sentence of Rancière’s Aisthesis (whose title was chosen to contrast with Auerbach’s Mimesis) argues for a historicized form of modernism which starts in the late eighteenth century. For Rancière, a productive period of folding technical and social innovation into aesthetics comes to a close with Clement Greenberg’s famous 1939 essay on kitsch. Of Greenberg and his followers, Rancière says: But what they are really proclaiming the end of is broader historical modernism, the idea of a new art that is synchronous with all the vibrations of universal life; an art capable of taking up the accelerated rhythms of industry, society, and urban life, and of giving infinite resonance to the most ordinary minutiae of daily life. Ironically, posterity would come to call this desire to get it over with by the name of that which it proposed to destroy. It would be called modernism.3

Rancière refuses to separate the “desire to get it over with” (la volonté d’en finir), the idea that modernist authors structured their work to make it inaccessible to the vulgar masses, from the actual experience of those readers, for masses were composed of people whose emancipation was both historical (following the various revolutions from 1789 on) and intellectual (after 1830 workers participated more fully in defining their own roles in French society). By writing an elitist anxiety about half-​formed taste into literature, writers such as Conrad and Flaubert still end up taking the people whose taste it is into account more than their predecessors did.

2 All translations are my own. 3 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis, Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris:  Galilée, 2011), 306; hereafter AS.

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Modernist authors wrote under the assumption that their readers would be competent. In his discussion of “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed” Rancière demonstrates that nineteenth-​century anxiety about keeping Art distinct from its cheap imitations is written into Flaubert’s novel. It is, in fact, the reason Emma had to be done away with.4 She embodies the misunderstanding of the aesthetic that locates beauty in knickknacks. The Art with which dust motes play in the novel’s sunlight, along with the implied denigration of characters’ inability to attend to them, is the Art that Flaubert created with words. Rancière parts ways with other thinkers of modernism by insisting that although Flaubert’s prose differentiates between middlebrow approximations of the aesthetic and its own more careful craft, its distinctions are as available to anyone who can read as dust or sunlight is to anyone who can see or feel. Flaubert was no progressive, but he did not engage in the sort of condescension (abrutissement) that Rancière associates with schoolroom pedagogy and with misguided theories of spectatorship. In his more recent expansion of this line of thought in Le fil perdu, Rancière sees a broader modernist pattern in the fictional sacrifice of the autodidact. Modernist expansion of subject matter ensures that Woolf can write about Septimus Smith, and Flaubert can make Emma Bovary his main character, even if both figures are killed off by the end of the novels in which they appear (FP 67). The link between what Rancière sees as a modern lack of writerly condescension to the reader and his refutation of passive spectatorship came about when Mårten Spångberg invited him to open the Internationale Sommer Akademie in Frankfurt in 2004 by talking about the spectator in relation to The Ignorant Schoolmaster. That move from education to theater was accompanied by a change in language, for “The Emancipated Spectator” was first presented and first published in English. Rancière begins “The Emancipated Spectator” by saying that in writing The Ignorant Schoolmaster “I thought it necessary to revive [Jacotot’s theory] in the 1980s in order to stir up the debate about education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic dialogue, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine, and Poussin?”5 Ideas which began as dissensual examples from the history of education and revolution in France (for Jacotot’s ideals were those of the late eighteenth century) were extended, at the request 4 Jacques Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Critical Inquiry, 34, no. 2 (2008): 233–​48. 5 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” ArtForum, XLV, no. 7 (March 2007): 271.

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of a Swedish choreographer working in Germany, to the aesthetic experience of contemporary art (and then to art more generally in later works). Rancière, faced with adopting an enlightenment-​era teacher’s strategies of analysis to late-​ twentieth-​century art decided that he needed to “piece together the network of presuppositions that put the issue of spectatorship at a strategic intersection in the discussion of the relationship between art and politics and to sketch out the broader pattern of thinking that has for a long time framed the political issues around theater and spectacle.”6 To do this, Rancière refuses both the Platonic assumption that to see is not to know, and the assumption that to see is not to act. These preconceptions about the passivity of the spectator’s role reminded Rancière of the educational power dynamic that Jacotot was able to undo. Briefly, Jacotot noticed that schooling was predicated on the idea that knowledge had to be imparted to students who knew very little. But his own experience and principles indicated that they knew a great deal and were, in fact, capable of gaining knowledge for themselves. In “The Emancipated Spectator,” Rancière extends Jacotot’s logic to spectatorship more generally. Having revisited the logic of spectatorship in light of his earlier critique of stultification or abrutissement in schools, Rancière applies his insights to twentieth-​century artwork. Distinguishing his approach from those of multimedia artists looking to draw in spectators, and of postmodern artists trying to raise viewer awareness of the fragmented state of the world, Rancière proposes: The third way—​the best in my view—​(which) does not aim at the amplification of the effect, but at the transformation of the cause/​effect scheme itself, and at the dismissal of the set of oppositions that grounds the process of stultification (abrutissement). It invalidates the opposition between activity and passivity as well as the scheme of “equal transmission” and the communitarian idea of theater that in fact makes it an allegory of inequality. The crossing of borders and the confusion of roles shouldn’t lead to a kind of “hypertheater,” turning spectatorship into activity by turning representation into presence. On the contrary, theater should question its privileging of living presence, and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and the reading of a book. It should be the institution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of performances would be translated into one another. In all those performances, in fact, it should be a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display

6 Ibid., 271.

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their competences and spectators who are looking to find what those competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people.7

The foundational model of rationality Rancière examines can, if the spectator is assumed to be competent, work similarly for theater or images or text, given that each is translated by the person reading it or seeing and hearing it. In its first publication in the March 2007 issue of ArtForum, “The Emancipated Spectator” was accompanied by four pages of images, a total of thirty-​one pictures, drawings, photographs, images of performances, of stages, of crowds. The following year, the essay appeared in French as the first chapter of a volume called Le Spectateur Emancipé. This book, published by La Fabrique, no longer included the ArtForum images, but it did add chapters drawn from other papers Rancière had delivered between 2004 and 2008. While the ArtForum article laid out general principles, and was illustrated by images from ancient Greece, seventeenth-​century Versailles, and twentieth-​century performances (among others), the book included fewer images, all of them twentieth-​or twenty-​first-​ century photographs except one from 1865. This longer volume was, in turn, translated into English and published as The Emancipated Spectator by Verso in 2009 The chapters added to make up the French volume take issue with assumptions about the reactions of spectators to various aesthetic experiences. Rancière criticizes the idea of theatrical estrangement (there is no guarantee that being aware of a difficulty will make spectators want to address it)8 and the facile conflation of proliferating images and the expanding population consuming them, differentiating his politics of the aesthetic from those of Brecht or of postmodernists (SE 95). He points out the ethical difficulties engendered by the continuing prevalence of thinking about photography in terms of mimesis, and makes a multimedia case for the importance of distance in an aesthetic experience. In Aisthesis and in Le fil perdu Rancière proposes that partial sculptures and portraits from the distant past are aesthetic because cause-​effect relations have been suppressed by time and separation from the societies that gave life to those works. The passage of time has undone assumptions about how their production and their impact are related. To bring that salutary disconnect to contemporary art, as he is trying to do in The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière argues for the resources of an art of pensivité, or pensiveness, an art that allows medium and 7 Ibid., 280. 8 Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur Emancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), 95; hereafter SE.

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context to be patched together into inventive figures whose movement is translated by spectators. By refusing the causality in Aristotle’s model and by making the spectator an active participant in defining the meaning of a play, Rancière replaces mimesis with translation. In a passage highlighted by Samuel Chambers, Rancière explains that [u]‌nderstanding must be understood in its true sense: not the derisive power to unveil things, but the power of translation that makes one speaker confront another . . . Despite what the Phaedrus teaches us, there are not two kinds of discourses, one of which could be deprived of the power to “help itself ” and be condemned to stupidly repeat the same thing. All words, written or spoken, are a translation that only takes on meaning in the counter-​translation.9

In such an understanding of language, fear of the insincerity of the actor or worry about the influence of theater on groups is evacuated—​everyone sharing a space and a language is constantly translating. The global ambition of the model proposed may explain why Rancière does a great deal of thinking about works from a variety of places and languages without commenting much on the implications of changes in language. Quite a lot of his close readings are of English, German, Norwegian, and American works, but if all aesthetic experience involves translation, then language of origin may be of secondary importance. One of the few places where Rancière does comment on translation is in a discussion of how La Nuit des prolétaires became Nights of Labor in English. The play on assumptions that La Nuit suggests (in fact it is not the dark period of labor, but rather the nights when workers of the 1830s published and performed and engaged in nonwork activities) was replaced by a hopeful editor’s sense that Nights might have echoes of Knights. The editor may not have realized that nights of labor were just what the subjects of the book were not engaged in, and “he probably did not know that the French title had been chosen in reference to La Nuit des Rois, the French translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”10 The reference to Shakespeare, however convoluted it is here, plays on the gender-​ bending intrigue and improbable circumstances of Twelfth Night, whose spirit of carnival does mix up social roles. In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was

9 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 64, cited in Samuel Allen Chambers, “The Politics of Literarity,” Theory & Event, 8, no. 3 (2005): III.4. Emphasis added by Chambers. 10 Jacques Rancière, “Work, Identity, Subject,” in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene, ed. Jean-​Philippe Deranty (London: Continuum, 2012), 206.

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famously Stendhal’s preferred alternative to Racine, Hugo’s model for romantic drama, and Guizot’s choice for peaceable social cohesion for audiences of varied classes. The Emancipated Spectator explicitly rejects the idea from that era that an audience ought to cohere, but Rancière retains an affection for Shakespeare as a source of examples of what can be done in theater. Looking back on his archival work on nineteenth-​century workers and their writing, Rancière says, My analysis defined ideological and political struggle as a struggle for the appropriation and the redirecting of words. It did so perhaps at the price of replacing the meaningless struggle between two vocabularies with a struggle between two uses of language, always capable of being referred to two separate worlds: the established culture of the leisurely class, and the fluid, performative culture of the working class. In order to escape this struggle between competing identities, it was not sufficient to emphasize the performative dimension of identitarian construction. It was necessary also to unveil a gap at the heart of this performativity, to rethink the very opposition of work and leisure out of the material points where they come together and come apart.11

Thinking through the extent to which workers in the 1830s refused to identify themselves via their work, Rancière decided that the “aesthetic experience abolishes oppositions between work and leisure, activity and passivity, etc.” Schiller’s spiel, Kant’s finality without end, and Rousseau’s reverie, then, become models for emancipatory movement.12 The multiplication of roles for workers who spent their evenings discussing philosophy and writing poems constitutes another chapter in the refusal of Plato which is foundational for The Emancipated Spectator. For in The Republic everyone does his job and does not interfere with other activities. What Rancière realized as he read workers’ writings was that [t]‌here was no gap to bridge between intellectuals and workers, actors and spectators; no gap between two populations, two situations, two ages. On the contrary, there was a likeness that had to be acknowledged and put into play in the very production of knowledge. Putting it into play meant two things. First, it meant rejecting the borders between disciplines. Telling the (hi)story of these workers’ days and nights forced me to blur the boundary between the field of “empirical” history and the field of “pure” philosophy. The story that those 11 Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” 279–​80. 12 Ibid., 215.

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Cary Hollinshead-​Strick workers told was about time, about the loss and reappropriation of time. To show what it meant, I had to put their account in direct relation with the theoretical discourse of the philosopher who had, long ago in the Republic, told the same story by explaining that in a well-​ordered community everybody must do only one thing.13

The texts Rancière was reading were from the 1830s and 1840s, the July Monarchy, when “[w]‌orkers did not at first speak to complain or to threaten, they spoke to be understood. If, soon after 1830, they could name their identity and affirm their requirements forcefully, this is surely because the July days had shown that in the end it was they who made and unmade kings.”14 Worker demands for what was “just and reasonable” were, between 1830 and 1851, part of “the interweaving of discourses and practices in which a class had started to think its identity and claim its place” (PO 8). If all language is translation and counter-​translation, then in the 1830s the pool of translators increased considerably. During this period, Hugo, according to Rancière, managed to get Life in its more inclusive form onto stage, “[b]‌ut life is not just a flow that spreads freely when one has lifted the barriers. As a dramaturgical principle, life requires a redistribution of the forces that have been restrained. And this is the heart of the problem: theater is not just a metaphor for a social order, it is also a metaphor for thought” (FP 119). Thought, and the theater that resembles it, must avoid foregone conclusions. To make his move from Hugo to modernist theater, Rancière turns to Buchner, who translated Hugo and who manages to escape causality in his La mort de Danton. Not only do the later events of the revolution lend themselves to a noncausal perspective, but the play also juxtaposes Danton’s and Robespierre’s inaction and action. Like Hamlet, says Rancière, Danton “follows the indolence of the flesh” (FP 124), whereas Robespierre, like Macbeth, moves. Porous boundaries between act and stillness and reason and madness characterize the theater to which Rancière pays attention. Acts are thought given flesh in Rancière’s revisiting of theater in Le fil perdu: Thought is not the unity of the several as opposed to the distinct succession of facts. It is, itself, an unruly succession of “facts of thought.” And the acts determined by this succession have as many reasons to be as not to be. The model for this is provided by the great Shakespearian murderers, but also by the “faits divers,” which take over as the new models for novelistic narrative and for the 13 Ibid., 280. 14 Jacques Rancière and Alain Faure, La Parole ouvrière (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007), 9; hereafter PO.

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plots of plays just at the moment when the people are occupying the streets of Paris and when the French poet dreams of the great stage of coexistence of everything with everything. (FP 124)

Le Fait divers, like modern theater, “frees itself from the causal chains according to which the current state of affairs reproduces itself ” (FP 124). Photography, too, can be a visual equivalent of the fait divers, of which Balzac famously claimed that “[i]‌n fiction nothing can equal the ‘young woman who throws herself from the Pont des arts.’ ”15 With news stories about unusual events happening to ordinary people entering literature, and with mechanically produced images of the world becoming art, the modern period is one of aesthetic patchwork. Rancière characterizes photographers as “new artists with a new tool for bringing together art and non-​art, a mechanical eye that knows nothing about making art or making beauty” (AS 59). In The Emancipated Spectator and then more extensively in Aisthesis, Rancière traces the importance of separation of art from use value, while nonetheless remaining attuned to the historicity of objects (SE 127). The challenge for the contemporary images analyzed in The Emancipated Spectator is to achieve aesthetic play without the helpfully decontextualizing effects of centuries of time. To facilitate the disjunction between use and image that he deems helpful, Rancière relies on the camera’s capturing of images that are then repurposed. Art and life, for Rancière, can only make up a patchwork [the word is given in English even in the French Spectateur émancipé] there is no separation between the two: There is no “reality effect” that comes along and replaces old-​fashioned verisimilitude. There is a new texture of the real produced by the transgression of frontiers between forms of life . . . It is this fabric woven of perceptions and thoughts, of feelings and acts which will from then on constitute the lives of Zola’s proletarian characters, as well as of those of Woolf ’s bourgeois women. It started out as the new music of the lack of distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary which treats the lives of country servants the same way it does those of the great ladies of the capital. (FP 6–​7)

In Rancière’s vision of emerging events and constant translation, there is no mimesis from which modernism needs to depart. In his discussion of Maeterlinck’s Intérieur, Rancière sees unexplained banalities not as Barthes’s reality effect, but as “the imperceptible frontier between an uneventful life and a life

15 Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, cited in FP 72.

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thrown into the abyss” (FP 129). When suicides and coronations can share space on a newspaper page, and anyone with a little money can be photographed like high society, dreams and falls are common to people and to fiction. Theater is no longer the domain of the powerful: “What the theater must show is the invisible from which ideas and acts come or in which they lose themselves—​a place that resembles a non-​place which has to be inhabited, structured by that non-​place. It should be shaped by its relationship to the invisible which surrounds it, by screens and doors, and windows” (FP 128). Maeterlinck’s Intérieur shows characters inside a house who are as yet unaware that a girl has killed herself. Their reality and hers have diverged, with spectators left to make sense of the situation. Dreams and madness in fiction can play a similar role to the one played by architecture here, marking friable frontiers between experience that is common and that which differentiates one character’s perception from another’s. Edward Gordon Craig is the Shakespeare critic Rancière cites, and he does so for Craig’s focus on ghosts in the plays (FP 132). In a conjunction of dream and architecture, a dream throws Solness, in Ibsen’s eponymous The Master Builder, into doubt with regard to his own sanity. The other characters see him as successful, brutally so, even, but not as mad. Worried that his dreams may have predictive force, he acts fatally on the dream of Hilde, who shows up wanting him to fulfill a promise he made to her as a child. Having built a castle in the air, a new house to replace the one he and his wife lost their children in, Solness accedes to Hilde’s demand that he put the wreath atop it, knowing that his dizziness will make the project a mortal one. Already Solness takes after Coupeau, Zola’s roofer from l’Assommoir, whose injuries after falling from the hospital roof he was working on lead eventually to his alcoholism. In The Emancipated Spectator the aesthetic potential of madness and falls reemerges through Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant in a film by Pedro Costa, who is sublime in his extraneousness after he falls in a building project. He is filmed aesthetically, an illegal immigrant no longer able to work because of the head injuries incurred in the fall, shown profiled against the monumental walls of the Gulbenkian Foundation he helped to construct (SE 89). Ventura’s letters to his girlfriend, along with those of the other immigrants followed in the film, are intercut with the letters Robert Desnos sent to Youki as he traveled to the camps where he would die. What sews the patches together, the editing in the film, creates a figure, a movement between one structure of feeling and another. Likewise, the falls in which gravity suddenly brings dream and social condition, monument and impending death (or alcoholism or

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diminished mental capacities) together, achieve surprising connections between social expectations and architecture, the aesthetic and the urban. By portraying the damage of those falls, Zola and Ibsen and Costa also illustrate the capacity of the aesthetic to expand the category of those who are visible parts of society. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the fact of having learned to speak makes students the equals of their teachers. Falls expand such logic past language, for the injuries they occasion impair characters’ speech. Pedro Costa and Zola show individual arcs away from participation in society. Ibsen and Woolf and Maeterlinck silence their characters with suicidal falls, showing perhaps not just modernist anxiety, but also the inexpressible motives and perceptions which it is part of the aesthetic’s role to invoke. A pensée en acte or thought in action can function as a figure, a move between two politics. While Rancière draws the term from rhetoric, its linkage between regimes of representation invites comparison to sewing and to braiding and to falls whose effects form the basis for literature and film (SE 91, 104). Rancière is interested in reconfigurations—​of bodies in space, of words in speech—​openings to alternate possibilities. While he does not privilege the communal element of spectatorship, he nonetheless is interested in theaters as structures for feeling. His anecdote about watching Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Théâtre de Chaillot in 1954 is revealing in this sense. Unlike the Comédie française, with its great variety of positions and its obstructed sight lines from the cheap sets, all seats at Chaillot have direct views on a huge uncurtained stage. The staging was an announcement to the public that what happened there was not entertainment, but rather an experience of grandeur which was the essence of theater and which “drew a dash (a trait d’union) between the assembled public and the movements unfolding on the stage” (FP 115). And yet, what stayed with Rancière, what he later identified as formative, was Gérard Philippe as Richard II sitting down and saying “[M]‌y friends, Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings” (116) as he let the great action of the play pass by. Their small conversational circle coexisted with, but was separate from, surrounding history. This breakdown in action, taking a seat outside of history, is, for Rancière, constitutive of a new space. The sitting, combined with the ends of kings and the heroically egalitarian theatrical space—​the sitting and the setting—​contributed to the sort of shift that Rancière sees as emancipatory, at least in his own experience as a spectator. Another performance that Rancière himself would not have attended, but which forms part of the archive of proto-​cinema, is Loïe Fuller’s danse serpentine.

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A chapter in Aisthesis is devoted to how Fuller worked with cloth and electricity to open new sorts of space for her audiences. Fuller consulted with Edison about using electricity on stage, and unsuccessfully tried to patent her projection of light onto veils. Rancière says the patent application failed because of her performance’s very novelty; it staged becoming, but was evaluated on whether it told a distinct story. There was, for the patent officer, no narrative structure to set her dance apart from other sorts of performance. Instead of telling a story, Fuller invented a figure: “A figure is an act that makes a place, creating a unique theater of operations. What goes on in this theater is called fiction” (AS 126). The narrative logic according to which Fuller’s dance was evaluated by the patent office was modeled on Aristotle’s idea of fiction being based on the articulations of the body: But if forms of dance eliminate plots it is in order to serve a superior mimesis; they use artifice to reinvent the very forms in which experience offers itself to you and comes together to make a world. The “transition” from music to cloth is the mimetic gesture itself taking on the power of abstraction, the power of muteness, of music. The body abstracts itself, it dissimulates its own form in the spreading of wings which depict the flight rather than the bird, the tumult rather than the wave, the blossoming rather than the flower. That which is imitated of each thing is the event of its apparition. (AS 127)

As is often the case in Rancière’s writing, the aesthetic experience is to be found in the moment when the body pauses within its physical and historical context. Fuller moved, but it was the veils she put in motion that created abstraction. Builders laid tile and wood, but their falls and their daydreams characterize their participation in the aesthetic. The electricity whose projection through filters colored Fuller’s veils is reminiscent of the electric current that theater censors had long feared would pass from performers to audiences if the content of plays was not monitored.16 Incorporating electricity into a performance may not have polarized spectators as the censors’ metaphor assumed theater could do, but in Rancière’s scheme, Fuller’s innovation brought modernity (electricity) to a place of mediation and experimentation. In a new society of art and science conjoined “electricity is the spiritual form of matter, or the material form of spirituality” (AS 136). 16 Odile Krakovitch, Censure des répertoires des grands théâtres parisiens (1835–​1906) (Paris: Archives nationales, 2003), 10.

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Dancing with electricity repurposes an anxiety about the effects of theater. Pensive attention to scenes in which death is a forgone conclusion or hurt immigrants who pass before the museums they have built are ways that modernism braids together the experiential strains of work and madness, architecture and movement. When images are still, the pensive ones create what Rancière calls a “knot between several indeterminations” (SE 122). Those indeterminations often involve inhabited or inhabitable space. The shantytown interiors beautifully filmed by Pedro Costa, Walker Evans’s image of a kitchen wall, and Flaubert’s broken barometer “float the properties of social identification” (SE 126). Costa assumes that an illegal immigrant can inhabit a space that is capable of looking like a Vermeer. Evans, too, sees the aesthetic in the sparseness of means at the disposition of the Alabama sharecropper, while Flaubert’s broken barometer in “Un cœur simple” gestures to Félicité’s relatively recent move indoors from the world of the farm and from an age when a person of her class would not have been imagined to have passions of the intensity of those which govern Félicité’s life. The images show traces of lives lived while refusing to interpret them. The sheer attentiveness with which each scene is presented suggests meaning, but the viewer or reader is left to determine what that meaning might be. The pensive image emancipates the visual from “the unifying logic of the action” (SE 129), says Rancière. Human places without humans in them, rich portraits of awkward unknown people, letters from immigrants combined with those that Desnos wrote to Youki—​these are moments of metonymy in which the viewer is invited, not simply to infer the ways that images extend the experiences they display, but also to be stretched and shaped by the forms that such extensions have taken. Be it in theaters, or looking at photographs, or reading, Rancière’s spectators are able to connect movements and images into figures that create new kinds of space. The hallmark of the aesthetic event, particularly the modernist one, is that it is not entirely determined by what has preceded it. As Kristin Ross reminds us, for an event to exist, it needs to be recognized as such.17 Assuming that spectators are capable of such recognition, as Rancière does, emancipates them to translate the patchwork of material that is art and life.

17 Kristin Ross, “Historicizing Untimeliness” in Jacques Rancière:  History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Philip Watts and Gabriel Rockhill (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009), 29.

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Mute Speech: The Silence of Literature in Rancière’s Aesthetic Paradigm Giuseppina Mecchia

First published in 1998, Mute Speech is the first full-​blown analysis of an artistic form written by Jacques Rancière, who until then had stayed closer to political philosophy and historical commentary. As a powerful discussion of the historical and theoretical meanings attributed to the literary form, this book is crucial to the understanding of the different articulations of Rancière’s thought. In the years since its first publication, Jacques Rancière has become a much commented upon figure in academic and to a certain extent larger intellectual circles, even more so after the English translation of his main works in the early 2000s has made him a figure of reference for Anglo-​American academics. Mute Speech itself has been the object of several commentaries, and its main theoretical articulations are already part of current debates about Rancière’s contributions to aesthetics and criticism. This is why, rather than simply summarizing and commenting on its main theses, I  will consider the book from a mainly retrospective point of view, according to the different levels of what I consider its own historicity. This seems all the more necessary since Rancière’s philosophical and critical positions straddle a principle-​based and a historical perspective, so that the articulation of terms such as “politics,” “democracy,” “equality,” and in this case “literature” oscillates between a purely “evental” and a “historicist” definition. In a way, then, posing the problem of the historicity or the eventality of literature such as Rancière defines it in Mute Speech also allows us to glance at some of the tensions essential to Rancière’s way of practicing philosophy. In the pages that follow, I will consider this issue along three main axes: the book’s own historicity in French literary criticism and philosophy, its place within Rancière’s own temporality as a philosopher, and last the place that history itself is given in the definition of the question “what is literature” that is at the core of Mute

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Speech. This last part is in a way the most important but also the most difficult one, because my aim is not only, or maybe not so much, to assign Mute Speech a place within French intellectual history—​although, as we’ll see, Rancière’s resistance to this model needs to be addressed—​but to formulate a more precise account of its main theses and the reasons for their enduring appeal in today’s debates about the political import of aesthetic practices.

Literature in a fraught critical terrain The main object of Mute Speech is to retrace the shift that occurred around the end of the eighteenth century in the theory and practice of what came then to be called literature, as opposed to the preceding practice of belles lettres. This shift is, in fact, nothing less than “a silent revolution.”1 The turning point coincided with the theories expressed by the German Romantics in the late 1790s, and, according to Rancière, its tenets had yet to be reversed at the end of the twentieth century. The pre-​romantic practice of literature was dominated by four main principles, derived from “a particular idea of the relations between speech and action” (MS 44): fiction, genre, propriety (convenance),2 and authorial presence. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, fiction has been replaced by expression and mimesis by an expanded understanding of poiesis. This movement, in turn, ruined all generic conventions and their traditional expectations in terms of propriety, representation, and authorial accountability. I will go back to these differences very soon, but before doing so we need to pay attention to the way in which Rancière builds not so much his argument, but the critical space in which it needs to be received. My intent is not to establish influences or intellectual debts, but to present the stakes of Rancière’s intervention in a specific critical conjointure. As is often the case for a philosopher who has always kept a polemical bent, Rancière’s point of departure is a book published in 1991 by Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction.3 Genette started his own excursus into the res literaria 1 Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press 2011), 35; hereafter MS. 2 In his excellent translation, Gabriel Rockhill translates the original French convenance as decorum. I find the Latin word less polysemic than “propriety,” which implies that a certain treatment of a subject is both proper and appropriate. 3 For the English translation, see Gérard Genette, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

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questioning the wisdom of trying to answer the question famously raised by Sartre in 1948: what is literature? While Genette goes on defying all fear of ridicule, and does in fact end up proposing a remarkably coherent understanding of the different kinds of literature that can be practiced, Rancière only retains the challenge posed by Genette’s ironic comment: There are some questions we no longer dare pose. Recently an eminent literary theorist said that one would have to have no fear of ridicule to call a book What is Literature? Sartre [. . .] at least had the wisdom not to answer the question. For, as Gérard Genette tells us, “a foolish question does not require an answer; by the same token, true wisdom might consist in not asking it at all.” (MS 29)

Genette, in fact, had proposed an approach to the question that Rancière decides not to engage with at all:  as it behooves a formalist critic greatly influenced by pragmatic linguistics, Genette structures his description of the literary object in terms of linguistic inflection, that is, of literariness “understood as that ‘which makes a verbal message a work of art.’ ”4 Genette is faithful to the structuralist tradition and gives a purely descriptive list of aesthetic techniques—​such as metaphor, voice, or narration—​that characterize certain uses of language as a work of art. The historical-​philosophical characterization of literature in the singular does not interest him, since he is quite happy to recognize that this word covers “several things at once, things that are connected, for example, by the rather loose bond of what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblance’ and are difficult [. . .] or perhaps [. . .] impossible to consider simultaneously.”5 Rancière chooses instead to talk in fact about literature in the singular, following the lead of other contemporary French theorists, whose own tenets are closer to his own—​speculative and historical rather than pragmatic—​way of argumentation. The most immediate reference is another, older book, published by Jean-​Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe in 1978, L’absolu littéraire,6 which is an essential point of reference for Rancière, as his understanding of the Romantic theory of literature is essentially a repetition of Nancy and Lacoue-​Labarthe’s theses. Accordingly, a description of the literary object as the product of a linguistic techné is sorely insufficient from a philosophical 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 See Jean-​Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe, The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1988).

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perspective heavily inflected on the one hand by Kant’s theory of the subject and its reprisal in German idealism, and on the other by Heidegger’s reading of modernity and Derrida’s critique of the presence of speech. It is within the group of the Athenaeum, between roughly 1796 and 1802, that something as literature in the singular comes into being: instead of a linguistic practice, literature becomes both a subject and an object of speculation, defined not by certain works that can be assigned to it, but as a subjective, all-​encompassing project, although condemned to infinite deferral and incompleteness. According to this model, “philosophy, then, controls romanticism.”7 It should be clear that Kant is a far more powerful antecedent for Rancière’s embracing of literature than Heidegger: in fact, it becomes clear quite soon that one of the most important aspects of German romantic theory is its conception of literature and art in general as free play of the imagination, whose subject operates not the representation, but the creation of a world.8 For Rancière, whose interest in the literary fact is mostly tied, as we will see, to issues of emancipation and community creation, this is an essential passage: The passage from a poetics of representation to a poetics of expression overturns the hierarchy of relations among them. In opposition to language considered as an instrument of demonstration and exemplification, addressed to a qualified auditor, it promotes a conception of language as a living body of symbols, that is, expressions that both show and hide what they say [. . .], that not so much show a particular determinate thing as the nature and history of language as world—​or community-​creating power. (MS 63)

It is because of a new faith in the power of literature to express if not the fullness of an idea, at least its freely produced fragments that the relation between the writer and his or her work changes irreversibly during the Romantic era. There is even an anarchist, subversive aspect to the way in which literature deals with language: it comes as a surprise to see Rancière take up almost literally the reading given by Derrida of Plato’s rendition of Socrates’s account of the origins of writing in the Phaedrus, without however ever mentioning it.9 It 7 Ibid., 29. 8 See the discussion of transcendental imagination in ibid., 30–​32. 9 In the footnotes, one finds direct references to Lacoue-​Labarthe and Nancy, but Derrida does not appear at all. The echoes from “Plato’s Pharmacy” are however so clear that they cannot be considered coincidental. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), 62–​172. The essay had originally appeared in Tel Quel in 1968.

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is in fact through the issue of the “orphaned utterance” contained in the tablets presented by Theuth to King Thamus that the potentially revolutionary power of the “destruction of any restricted scene of speech” comes about (MS 94). Because it can be appropriated by anybody and everybody, writing goes against the “republican symphony” enacting what Rancière calls “democratic anarchy” (MS 95). We will see very shortly that this is a fundamental aspect of Rancière’s interest in literature, as it comes at a crucial moment in his articulation of the relation between the political and the aesthetic realms. It is impossible to discuss the missed opportunity, on the part of Rancière, to engage openly with Derrida’s concept of writing: suffice it to say that Rancière avoids the issue entirely, conflating without any explanation writing and literature. To a limited extent, Derrida is replaced by one of his favorite predecessors, Maurice Blanchot, who, for Rancière, is the latest incarnation of the romantic belief in the unique character of the “literary work” in its relation with the absolute-​as-​absence sketched in The Book to Come.10 Presented as the “anti-​ Genette” par excellence, Blanchot emphasizes the unresolved, not-​ quite-​ dialectical tension between presence and absence that guarantees both the integrity and the freedom of the literary project, although Rancière seems to consider Blanchot’s use of the word literature quite “extraordinary” (MS 33). Radical or not, Blanchot is nonetheless presented as a twentieth-​century incarnation of romantic aesthetics, and in fact it is from Blanchot’s own literary pantheon that Rancière chooses the majority of his own writers: Mallarmé, Flaubert, Proust, the Surrealists, and Antonin Artaud. However, Blanchot’s rarefied, non-​referential perspective on the literary fact is not what Rancière needs the most among the contemporary voices that, in France, are talking about literature as an aesthetical-​political project. It is clear, in fact, that for Rancière what is essential is to maintain the “democratic,” or even “anarchist,” perspective on literature opened up by a certain reading of Romanticism or even of writing tout court. This is all the more important as it is at this theoretical juncture that Rancière will finally be able to elaborate a holistic political theory of aesthetics.

10 See Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). While the French original was published in 1959, it is remarkable that Rancière would refer to Blanchot as a contemporary author without specifying that Le livre à venir is part and parcel of a rather early Heideggerian, post-​phenomenological tradition. I will come back to this issue in my section about Rancière’s version of literary history.

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Literature in Rancière’s philosophical trajectory It should not come as a surprise that Rancière’s first sustained forays into aesthetics should mainly address the literary fact. As is well known, the archival documents pertaining to the journals and the poetic works published by socialist workers in the mid-​nineteenth century had been key in insuring Rancière’s theoretical escape from Althusser and other Marxist theories of ideology. In fact, among the young philosophers that had coauthored Lire le Capital, Rancière is not the only one to have tried to tie literature to the question of political agency. In particular, Pierre Macherey had written in 1966 a materialist discussion of literature, significantly titled A Theory of Literary Production, which had fully inserted the writer in the web of capitalist production of ideology and social organization.11 While Rancière does not mention it at all in his dialogue with his contemporaries, one might say that Mute Speech is a bit of an “anti-​Macherey,” which takes as a point of departure an incontrovertible archival discovery: for the workers who taught themselves how to read and write, literature had indisputably been a place of emancipation and discursive freedom. These archival experiences and the reflections that they sparked in Rancière were the object of his earliest independent works, notably The Nights of Labor, originally published in 1981 and The Philosopher and His Poor, which followed in 1983. Without going into the details of Rancière’s arguments, the most important results of his inquiries “into the land of the people” were that the workers were even more ostracized for their literary and philosophical output than for their strikes or political rebellions. According to Rancière, behind the negative judgments given in the name of taste or artistic ability, the literature produced by the workers was criticized because of its “unseemliness”: it is just not proper for a worker to write poetry at night. The very fact that the workers did indeed do so was a political act much more shocking than any labor-​ related demand, because it implied a deeper sharing with the privileged classes than financial privilege: the relation with language and understanding. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière clarifies how the ability to master language and all the arts fostered by this basic human faculty is the guarantor of a fundamental and always retrievable equality, and in Dis-​agreement he proceeds to evince the political consequences of this discovery, showing how the ability of the people 11 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London and New York: Routledge, 1978).

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to think and speak has always been the object—​from the Greeks to postmodern societies—​of negation or at least of containment on the part of all kinds of state apparatuses and social organization. It is only natural, therefore, that in the 1990s Rancière would start interrogating the oldest of language arts, literature, in the context of the different ways that political power tries to forget the ultimate truth of the absolute equality guaranteed by the access to language. While the details of the articulation of the politics of language in general are not in the purview of this chapter, it is nonetheless clear that they explain at least two important aspects of Rancière’s interest in the literary fact and his way of approaching its historicity: first of all, they establish the centrality of literature in the discussion of political matters, and second, they insert the historical configuration of literature in the history of the people’s struggle for equality. The publication of Mute Speech, therefore, with its periodization of the literary form, reproduces in fact another kind of periodization, which however is interestingly expunged from it. For reasons that I analyze later, there is no mention, in the book, of any political context or event: the older, “classical” aesthetics founded on the four main principles of fiction, genre, propriety, and authorial presence is presented in an auto-​referential theoretical context, and not to the politics of various forms of rigid class and political assignation during various periods of the Ancien Régime. Similarly, the aesthetics of freedom and autonomy promoted by Kant, Schiller, and the German Romantics at the turn of the nineteenth century is not analyzed in connection with the sudden visibility of the people during the French Revolution. This peculiar omission notwithstanding, two things are clear: not only does Rancière need literature in order to bolster his own understanding of politics, but he needs the “democratic” literature theorized by the German Romantics, and even most importantly, he needs to affirm that the possibilities opened by their theories still defined literature at the end of the twentieth century. And in fact, the possibility for the people to speak freely has constantly been reaffirmed by Rancière also in his later works:  from The Politics of Aesthetics (2000) to Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004), he will actually expand his periodization to other artistic practices, theorizing what is now one of his most widely known concepts—​the “distribution of the sensible” that is allowed by certain sociopolitical regimes and the artistic practices that they authorize. The temporality assigned to these different political and aesthetical regimes reproduces the one assigned to literature: the era of belles lettres coincides with the larger representative regime, while the new age of literature inaugurated by the

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German Romantics becomes the harbinger of the aesthetic regime, where “the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making, but it is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products [. . .] and frees it from any specific rule.”12 Rancière’s refusal, in all of his later works, to designate the aesthetic regime under the more common appellation of modernity has the distinct advantage of allowing Rancière to disassociate himself from many of his contemporaries, and notably the French theorists of postmodernity, such as Jean-​François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, but also other thinkers of the political apocalypse, such as Giorgio Agamben. As long as literature is still the place for the appearance of the equality of all things and subjects inaugurated by the “aesthetic revolution,” represented mainly by the novels of the nineteenth century, and the autonomous, although inevitably defective project of the Book by Mallarmé and Proust, it will have a fundamentally affirmative presence in the public arena. In Mute Speech as in Rancière’s later writings, the literary enterprise of the aesthetic regime needs to be reaffirmed because of its radically democratic, egalitarian nature: Literature is the system of possibilities that determines the impossible agreement of the necessity of language with the indifference to what it says, of the great writing of living spirit with the democracy of the naked letter. [. . .] The work’s distance from itself, its reference to what is beneath or beyond it, is in fact an essential component of the definition of its autonomy. (MS 172)

Quite importantly, Rancière will extend this ability even to the visual arts and cinema: for him, the essentially linguistic nature of our apprehension of visual phenomena, such as images and sequences, prevents us from ever becoming a completely passive consumer of ideology and so-​called popular culture.13

Literature between historicity and the event Now that we have retraced the history of Mute Speech within a certain contemporary critical context and the stakes of its theorization for the political

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:  Continuum, 2004), 22–​23. 13 These theses are mostly developed in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Eliott (New York: Verso, 2007), and The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Eliott (New York: Verso, 2009). 12

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concerns that are at the core of Rancière’s philosophical career, I would like to sketch at least the main contours of the peculiar, even paradoxical kind of literary history practiced by the book. The paradox of Rancière’s approach resides in the temporal unfolding that he assigns to the very concept of literature while situating it in a vacuum of sorts, detached from other material phenomena that also unfold temporally, such as sociopolitical institutions, technical innovation, the evolution of capitalist modes of production, mass public education, and so forth. Of course, I am not the first one to notice a tension that often verges on contradiction. Gabriel Rockhill, in fact, has expressed a critique of Rancière’s positions on literary aesthetics along the very same lines. Rockhill finds that Rancière develops a history of theoretical principles, according to a “historical logicism” that omits “the specificities of practices and institutions in the broadest sense of the term.”14 The same criticism, in fact, can be made of Rancière’s account of the history of democracy and the dissensual practices that it implies.15 Indeed, I believe that even the apparent resemblance between Rancière’s delineation of literary and aesthetic regimes and Foucault’s discontinuous épistémès first presented in The Order of Things (1966) is in fact less determining than it appears. It is true that the two thinkers share an equal reluctance to rely on Marxist categories such as ideology and a deep fondness for the archival find, and they both insist “on the necessity of examining practices in conjunction with the theoretical discourses that establish the conditions by which these are perceived.”16 However, there is a fundamentally affirmative, empowering thrust in Rancière that is absent from Foucault’s sober and indeed quite bleak assessment of the progressive affirmation of knowledge-​as-​power in the modern era. While in the 1960s Foucault’s debt to Blanchot and a vision of literature as an attempt precisely to escape the inevitable authoritarian dérive of language and epistemic systems is in fact quite strong, Foucault never subscribes to a post-​Kantian theory of the autonomy of the aesthetic fact. In fact, his later writings all seem to go in the opposite direction, even though, of course, his premature death in 1984 prevents us

14 Gabriel Rockhill, “Introduction: Through the Looking Glass,” in Mute Speech, 25–​26. 15 For a thorough discussion of the issue, see Giuseppina Mecchia, “The Classics and Critical Theory in Postmodern France:  The Case of Jacques Rancière,” in Jacques Rancière:  History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 67–​82. 16 Rockhill, “Introduction: Through the Looking Glass,” 6.

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from knowing how his thought might have evolved and possibly intersected with Rancière’s. In fact, what Rockhill has called the “radical historicism”17 of Rancière’s spare rendition of the battle between opposing “partitions of the sensible” is historical more in its argumentative unfolding than in its constitutive material contexts. In fact, we see that time and again this battle is already located in the Greek polis, where, as we have seen, the anarchist potential of the letter, far from first revealing itself to the German Romantics, is already subjected to a full critique by Plato. Since, differently from Foucault, Rancière never gives an account, however brief or hypothetical, of the impact of Christianity in the constitution of the modern man, there is an unavowed tendency in his historical practices to abandon the historical understanding of certain material facts in favor of what I will call here—​for lack of a better word—​their “eventality.” It is, I believe, this tendency that allows him to treat the emergence of the Romantic concept of literature and its presumed contemporary survival without addressing any issue related to the socioeconomic determinations that, for instance, remained at the core of Pierre Macherey’s theory of “literary production.” Similarly, Rancière’s critique of Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Proust at the end of Mute Speech is in fact related to the supposed adherence, on the part of Proust, to a post-​romantic concept of literature. Thus, while in the second edition of Proust and Signs (1970) Deleuze had underscored the centrifugal impetus that continuously threatens and even overwhelms Proust’s declared intention to build a fully coherent, Mallarméan book about the aesthetic apprehension of time, Rancière says that “there are no grounds for constructing a coherence of Proustian schizophrenia that would neglect the architectural will” (MS 160). This is not the place to discuss Rancière’s relation to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, but it is quite clear that for Rancière it is important to detach the theorization of literature and aesthetics in general from unconscious categories, as they would tend to question and possibly to undermine the freedom and autonomy of the linguistic subject. This is why, I believe, it is important to turn to a staunch proponent of the evental constitution of the subject of speech—​that is, unfolding in time but

17 Ibid.

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ultimately detached from its purely material context—​such as Alain Badiou, who has declared after decades of philosophical enmity a deep affinity with some of Rancière’s theses and the need “to salute this extraordinary gesture of the activation of the archives, something that, in my opinion, is more efficient and less melancholic than Foucault’s earlier achievements.”18 Badiou has spent the better part of the last four decades in the elaboration of a complex and idiosyncratic, mathematics-​based theory of the event as the main modality of subjective constitution, being in regard to politics or the aesthetic fact. What Badiou defines as processes of truth, that is, fundamental encounters with the permanent validity of revelations that occur in historical settings but maintain their value in a semi-​Platonic temporality that is both past and future, might indeed be closer to Rancière’s understanding of the autonomy of the literary subject so powerfully conceptualized by the German Romantics. In Being and Event (1988), Badiou had said that “the ideal recollection of a truth and the finite instance of such a recollection that is a subject in my terms, are therefore attached to what I will term generic procedures (there are four of them: love, art, science and politics).”19 While Rancière, after a common engagement in the political movements of May 1968, took a completely different philosophical route than Badiou, it is evident that for him at least two of the generic procedures of subjective constitution identified by Badiou are also not only central but always historically retrievable. This is why, I believe, they share at least one fundamental literary reference, that is, the poetry of Mallarmé, who more than anyone else—​at least in France—​exemplifies the effort to “fix Spirit upon the page, to assure the materiality of the idea by identifying the space of performance with the space of the book” (MS 142). Despite the historical unfolding of literary works, neither Badiou nor Rancière assign Mallarmé’s project of the book, the very epitome and the most coherent expression of the Romantic understanding of literature, to a context, or even to certain conditions of possibility. Affirming that beyond the spurious definitions of modernity or postmodernity the literature of the twentieth century is still in the horizon of literature as freedom, autonomy, and

18 Alain Badiou, “The Lessons of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power after the Storm,” in Jacques Rancière: Theory, Politics, Esthetics, eds, Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 35–​54, 48. 19 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 16.

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world-​creation affirmed by the German Romantics pushes Rancière’s “radical historicism” quite close to the point where expressive literature risks becoming not only the end, but almost the telos of a militant, fidelity-​based20 approach to politics and aesthetics alike. In this respect, Badiou might actually be justified when in 2009 he says that he and Rancière “are brothers”21 despite a long period of mutual misrecognition. And indeed literature, in Mute Speech, remains caught, as it were, between historicity and the event, a position that is shared by other concepts and material practices dear to Rancière, such as politics and the artistic gesture in general, from painting to cinema. Faced with the sheer power of his enduring conviction, it is hardly relevant whether we are fully convinced by Rancière’s definition of the Romantic project, let alone its persistence in the twentieth century. One might object that a work of literature in the sense given to it by Rancière has never been written at all, as books—​and works of art for that matter—​do not appear in a vacuum, but are produced, just as plays, television shows, and, more recently, YouTube videos. These considerations certainly alert us to an aspect of the materiality of literature that cannot be reduced to the simple manifestation of the infinitely retrievable nature of a potentiality of language, and to a certain extent even question this very potentiality. Still, I believe that there is a great political value in Rancière’s conception of a space for a rare, evental encounter with the autonomous subject of linguistic freedom, although this can only occur “at the cost of accepting the infinite shuttle between the constructed book and the printed book, between the plot of discovery and revealed truth” (MS 171). It is in literature that the project of actualizing “the coincidence between the trace of history, the sign of writing and the mark of the will to art” (MS 174). Whether this project finds its imaginary realization in the past or in the future, or indeed in no temporal realization whatsoever, is maybe less important than its survival in our imagination. In Rancière’s practice of a “heretical history” of literature, what is most remarkable may be his conviction that “democratic politics comes not from institutions,”22 but from evental actualizations of a project that belongs to all human beings.

20 In the dictionary of Being and Event, Badiou defines fidelity as “the procedure by means of which one discerns, in a situation, the multiples whose existence is linked to the name of the event (+) that has been put into circulation by an intervention (+)” (ibid., 507). 21 Badiou, “The Lessons of Jacques Rancière,” 30. 22 Philip Watts, “Heretical History and the Poetics of Knowledge,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-​Philippe Deranty (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2010), 104–​15, 104.

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For him, art therefore shares with philosophy the hopeful position that he summarized as follows: This critical practice [. . .] is an inseparably egalitarian, or anarchistic, practice, since it considers arguments, narratives, testimonies, investigations and metaphors all as the equal invention of a common capacity in a common language. Engaging in critique of the instituted divisions, then, paves the way for renewing our interrogations into what we are able to think and do.23

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 218. 23

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Le fil perdu: The Music of the Indistinct David F. Bell

On reading Le fil perdu: Essais sur la fiction moderne, a reader familiar with the body of Jacques Rancière’s work immediately recognizes essential elements that carry over from his preceding essays.1 Foremost, perhaps, is the centrality of literature, which has long played a critical role in the philosopher’s approach to conceptualizing democracy. We need return only briefly to Nights of Labor to verify this assertion. In that essay, Rancière chronicles the protracted struggles of a series of French Saint-​Simonian working-​class thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century to gain the right of entry into the domain of cultural production. To accept simply to become the subjects of certain novelists sympathetic to their cause (Victor Hugo, for example) meant to concede the right of literary creation to bourgeois writers. These working-​class thinkers sought instead to become writing subjects, and this meant to enjoy the leisure time experienced by bourgeois owners, investors, and professionals (who were their masters) in order to participate fully as creators of the new literary and artistic culture being forged after the Revolution. The dilemma posed by this ambition to accede to the status of writing subjects and thus to participate fully in the creative process of literature should be recognized as foundational in Rancière’s version of nineteenth-​century literary history. Democratization is always already a literary democratization, which affects not only the traditional circuits of literary production, but also literary forms. Reflection on the evolution of these forms is Rancière’s principal task in Le fil perdu, a series of essays that ought to be seen as an extension of an argument about democracy that began early in his career.

1 A translation of Le fil perdu, entitled The Lost Thread:  The Democracy of Modern Fiction, is forthcoming at Bloomsbury in September 2016. All translations from French in what follows will be my own unless otherwise indicated.

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If workers are more than the subjects of narratives of bourgeois hegemony, but can also become producers of culture themselves, the hierarchy of literature as it had been formulated by Aristotle’s theory of mimesis comes undone. This is a very significant strand of Rancière’s broad perspective on post-​Revolutionary literary history in Le fil perdu, but also in The Flesh of Words and Mute Speech, which already delved deeply into this question. Le fil perdu can easily be seen as an elaboration of positions fashioned in those and earlier essays in the 1990s. As Rancière presents it, Aristotle’s poetics is predicated on a social structure that distinguishes between those who can intervene and act effectively in the public sphere and those who live a life of humble subsistence, never to appear as subjects of history or literature: [T]‌here are active individuals, individuals who live with a sense of totality, because they are able to conceive of noble ends and to try to realize them as they confront the will of others and the whims of fortune. And there are individuals who simply wait for things to happen to them, one after the other, because they live solely in the sphere of the day-​to-​day reproduction of life.2

In Aristotle, then, the relation to music or rhythm is not the principal characteristic of poetry, rather, the essence of the poem is narration, how grand acts cohere and occur, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Exploiting narrative logic, literature illustrates those who hold political and social power, precisely because it represents their illustriousness. But what if the distinction between those who act in the public forum of a society and those who simply subsist were to disappear? The nature of literary form would itself be transformed, because literature’s Aristotelian function, to represent grand public acts, would no longer hold. The question arises: what, then, is or can be the topic—​and form—​of literary representation? The crisis of Aristotelian mimesis as narration marks the evolution of literature after the Revolution and comes to a head, predictably, with Gustave Flaubert. Rancière lingers on Flaubert for good reason (Madame Bovary [1857], Sentimental Education [1869], and “A Simple Heart” [1877], in particular). Literary modernists have regularly traced the genealogy of their writing back to Flaubert. What is it about Flaubert’s work that is so remarkable, both to his contemporaries and to later modernists? Rancière recalls a characteristic

2 Jacques Rancière, Le fil perdu:  Essais sur la fiction moderne (Paris:  La Fabrique, 2014), 22; hereafter FP.

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reaction to Sentimental Education exemplified in a critique of the novel written by one of Flaubert’s contemporaries, Barbey d’Aurevilly: “M. Flaubert . . . proceeds without any plan . . . not even suspecting that life . . . has logical and inflexible laws and necessary consequences . . . His work is an aimless meandering in insignificance, vulgarity and abjectness simply for the pleasure of walking about in them” (quoted in FP 21). Barbey cannot countenance the fact that Flaubert gets lost in the detail, wandering in pure description and removing action from the novelistic formula. The main character in Sentimental Education, Frédéric Moreau, seems never to do anything:  he cannot plan and execute an act that will truly transform a situation. Barbey criticizes Flaubert from within an Aristotelian framework, Rancière contends, where the narration of an action should be the guiding principle of the work. Not only does Frédéric not conform to this model, but the insignificance of Madame Bovary, for instance, the subject of Flaubert’s other great realist novel (the lowly wife of a country doctor, the daughter of a farmer, hardly more than a peasant on the rise), signals the arrival on the fictional scene of characters who do not accomplish grand acts on the public stage of history, but “live solely in the sphere of the day-​to-​day reproduction of life,” as Rancière puts it so aptly. Flaubert’s novelistic patterns exemplify the coming of democracy to literature in Rancière’s sense:  neither Emma Bovary nor Frédéric Moreau belongs to a social group from which main characters should be drawn to populate fictional texts. The insignificance of the details criticized by Barbey corresponds quite rigorously to the inconsequentiality of the fictional characters themselves. This perspective sheds a new light on the notion of bovarism that Flaubert created through his portrait of the fictional Emma Bovary. Emma is traditionally understood as a woman who suffers from her inability to make her aspirations and dreams of a sophisticated social life coincide with the reality of her everyday tasks. She reads too many novels, and they inspire her to try vainly to imitate the life of the fictional characters that fascinate her. This pastime leaves her open to a seemingly straightforward critique of her simplistic idealism: she should know the difference between dreams and reality. All such criticism assumes, Rancière argues, that the logic of action in an Aristotelian mode is the only conceptual scaffolding for understanding social life and, by extension, literary mimesis. In reality, the process of democratization has definitively undercut this logic: The story of Emma does not show the distance between dream and reality, as people always claim. It shows a world where the fabric of one is no different

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from the fabric of the other. The real is no longer a space in which to deploy one’s thoughts and one’s will. It is the chain of perceptions and affects that weaves together these very thoughts and will. This weaving itself defines the new texture of novelistic episodes. (FP 28)

This is an extraordinarily provocative perspective on the notion of bovarism. We can no longer measure Emma’s behavior against a norm that would allow one to distinguish between the grand and the petty. We are left with “the new music created by the absence of distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, a music that incorporates into the same tonality the life of country servants and the life of aristocratic women in the capital—​and this music expresses the capacity for anyone to feel any form of experience” (FP 29). Rancière waxes poetic here when he describes this new type of literary text as music whose tones can be shared by everyone. Because music is that aesthetic form from which action is banished (music neither originates in nor creates action), the musical metaphor is particularly appropriate. The direct sensual feeling, the uninterrupted flow of micro sequences, and a dreamlike confusion are all characteristic of Emma’s existence, and they are common to anyone who lives in the social structure emerging after and beyond the classic social distinctions of the Ancien Régime. I began by recalling Rancière’s study of working-​class writers who aspired to become writing subjects, and now we find the Flaubertian novel populated by characters heretofore considered too nondescript and unsuitable for literary mimesis. What exactly is the democratic process at stake in these parallel developments, or rather, how do they relate to one another? A central problem arises from the examination of Flaubert’s work, which Rancière summarizes thus:  “It does not follow . . . that fictional democracy goes hand in hand with political democracy” (FP 30). The appearance in the novel of characters like Frédéric Moreau or Emma Bovary and the focus on the small details and micro sequences composing their lives do not necessarily mean that they embody or could actually enact the political aspirations of people like them—​or of others who belong to the emerging working class, for that matter. At a moment when strategic political action is becoming a central social issue—​the enigma of how to channel working-​class energies toward political change—​the emerging nineteenth-​century realist novel “ceaselessly declared the bankruptcy of strategic action while showing us heroes who are methodically engaged in the conquest of society” (FP 31). Two paradigmatic novels, Lost Illusions by Balzac

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(1843) and The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830), are constructed around young men (Lucien Chardon and Julien Sorel, respectively) who consciously attempt to shape their future in the world, but both novels demonstrate the impossibility of this project. The main characters believe in the reality of the social distinction between actors and nonactors, but their failure to bridge the divide and to formulate effective deeds demonstrates instead the faulty nature of a belief that grand acts still characterize the historical situation in which they find themselves. It remains for Flaubert to create the novelistic paradigm for this new world. The novelist assumes the challenge of the social leveling he has observed by transforming it into a literary style through two operations. First, he “decomposes these manifestations of the capacities of anonymous individuals into the dust of impersonal micro events” (FP 32). The compressing of social structures that brings someone like Madame Bovary into the scope of literary mimesis requires breaking up action sequences, because it precludes the broad logic of grand actions that previously provided the scaffolding for the story. We are left with micro sequences, which are impersonal, lacking even a coherent psychology of character around which to coalesce. As a necessary consequence, Flaubert then “aligns the movement of writing with the very respiration of this fabric of the perceptible” (FP 32). Literary writing espouses the flow of the micro sequences, adheres to the whirling vortex of details that populate those sequences and, Rancière argues, appropriates the full potential of a system without the distinctions between those who count for history and those who do not. In a striking formulation, Rancière suggests that the writing style of the novelist reflects this new situation better than his own fictional character—​ Emma Bovary, who “lags behind the book that tells her story” (FP 35). She has not fully realized the very thing that the writing mimes, and this is epitomized in the famous scene in the novel when Rodolphe seduces Emma while the two look out over the festivities of an agricultural fair from a window. Noises, visual effects, bits and pieces of official speeches and other conversations are interspersed with Rodolphe’s platitudes about love, and the effect created by the novelist’s style is an atomistic collection of micro details that cohere only as “description.” The act of seduction is but a banal shell of an act, hollowed out by the tumult of minute particulars. Still trapped in what Rancière calls “the social forms of identification” (FP 34), however, Emma cannot yet grasp that there is little difference between her (daughter of a peasant, small-​town doctor’s wife) and Rodolphe (small landowner). Instead she comprehends Rodolphe’s

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seduction through schemas of identification that are undone by the very style of the novel. Rancière implies that Flaubert has absorbed the social lesson and transformed it into a writing style almost to the detriment of Emma’s consciousness of her own situation—​he has co-​opted the social analysis and removed its potential energy for change from the character herself, only to relocate it in the realm of his own style. Adventures in this social leveling of distinctions do not turn out well:  Emma’s suicide starkly highlights the despair provoked by the confusion and disappearance of traditional social categories once thought to be perennial. Flaubert plays a key role in Le fil perdu, but here, as elsewhere, Rancière is a perceptive reader of British literary texts. Unsurprisingly, Virginia Woolf comes to the fore in support of the analysis that emerges from Flaubert’s work. Rancière insists first on pronouncements made in Woolf ’s essay “Modern Fiction.” This famous short manifesto describes a kind of writing that corresponds to what Rancière perceives in his readings of Flaubert, because Woolf insists on a notion of life as unplotted, in close parallel with Rancière’s critique of the mimesis of action. Instead of being organized by and around conscious acts, life is “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall . . . they shape themselves into  . . . life.”3 One can immediately see the attraction for Rancière in such a statement: he speaks of micro sequences and infinite details easily assimilated to Woolf ’s atoms. The logic of action, overcome in Flaubert’s style, is precisely what Virginia Woolf specifically decries: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-​transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”4 Rancière cautions that this approach is not simply an attempt to pit the singular against a totality, but rather, to argue that at stake here is another kind of totality, “an atmospheric totality, a diffuse totality composed of discrete particles that replace the organic model of the whole” (FP 39). The danger would be to see the diffuse as the literary version of impressionism, suggesting that the details eventually meld together into a whole, like a pointillist painting viewed from afar. No whole is discernible, only the diffuse atmosphere that we experience in the moments we live, absent any sense of a narrative to tie fleeting configurations together into logical sequences with closure. 3 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 160, quoted in FP 38. 4 Ibid., 160 (partially quoted in FP 39).

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In Le fil perdu, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf become the inheritors and extenders of Flaubert. In Conrad’s work, in particular, Rancière suggests that the fabric of the new type of fictional style created by Flaubert effectively becomes a philosophical position, one that deems vain any attempt to align actions in an order leading to a planned realization. If one could detect in Madame Bovary’s seduction scene at the agricultural fair the remains of a plot that enacts both Emma’s sentimental dreams and Rodolphe’s prosaic designs, even these traces often disappear in Conrad’s fiction, replaced instead by “a revolution in the ontology of fiction, which removes the split between the real and the dream and thus replaces the order of possible sequences with a temporality of coexistences” (FP 51). In this radical aftermath of bovarism as Flaubert began defining it, cause and effect, plotted sequential temporality, and the distinction between dream and reality all collapse. Such would be the trancelike quality of certain moments in Lord Jim when the detail of the description provides a rhythm that cannot be structured by any other logic and becomes an end in itself. Virginia Woolf is inscribed within this tradition, as I suggested earlier, becoming a novelist for whom anything can be the subject of fiction, precisely because “there is no subject matter that properly belongs to fiction” (FP 60). This is, of course, another way of describing a democracy that allows anyone to be the subject of a novel, and what is more, anything that the character does to be incorporated into the leveling of action that results in a diffuse haze of atomistic experiences. In a second section of Le fil perdu, lyric poetry is incorporated into Rancière’s analysis of the post-​Revolutionary democratizing of literature, as was already the case in The Flesh of Words and Mute Speech. The section begins with an essay on John Keats, but the key remarks are devoted to Charles Baudelaire in another essay that directly confronts the powerful influence of Walter Benjamin’s work in Baudelaire studies. Benjamin’s analyses have dominated discussions of the poet’s essays on aesthetics and his lyric verse for over a quarter of a century, providing, in addition, the framework for countless studies of nineteenth-​century urban life in Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, as Benjamin called the city. Rancière briefly characterizes Benjamin’s perspective as the essay begins: [At stake is] the “loss of experience” produced by commodity reification and by the encounter with the city and the crowd. [This is] a modern experience of shock, to which belong the automated movement of the worker riveted to his machine, the disquiet of the pedestrian at every corner, the attention of the gambler to every move in the game and the click of the camera shutter. (FP 97)

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In short, Benjamin’s Marxian variation of the fetishized reification of commodities pits the force of inorganic commodities against the laws of organic experience, signaling the death of the latter in the hell of reification. Rancière wants to argue instead that there have been modifications “in the system of relations among the elements defining a form of experience: ways of being and of doing, seeing, thinking and speaking” (FP 97–​98). How does he flesh out this abstract formulation, which suggests a dense network of relational changes that must be specified? The famous Balzacian physiologies are an appropriate point of departure to get at what Rancière wants to describe. Proposed as a means for interpreting the social categories and roles of the countless unknown individuals one encounters in the streets of the city, the theory of physiology arose precisely in the wake of increasingly frenetic interactions in a compressed urban social space. Balzac quickly abandoned the idea because it created categories simply too general to provide useful knowledge leading to effective action. What actually prevents action is the vastness of this urbanized world, which renders the establishment of demarcations, boundaries, or limits nearly impossible: “The problem is not that the world has become too prosaic for elite souls to find satisfaction in it, but that it has become too vast” (FP 101). The everyday alienation provoked by the commodity fetish does not fully capture the dilemma that confronts a poet like Baudelaire. One must also take into account the fine-​grained detail of relations within a world that has become immensely complex—​by virtue of the sheer volume of experiences—​and therefore impossible to encompass. The framework of swirling detail and micro sequences underlying Rancière’s readings of the novelists analyzed in the first section of Le fil perdu is redeployed in this argument: urban life multiplies the micro sequences of everyday life beyond possible calculation. To act requires a context that can be grasped, a situation with defined parameters allowing the actor to understand when and where to intervene. For Rancière, the Aristotelian configuration has a key characteristic:  it is rarefied, purified of confusing detail. Baudelaire confronts a situation in which “knowledge has become too fine-​grained, too differentiated for action to find the conditions of rarity that befit it” (FP 101). Is an effective act possible when “the social world gets lost in infinite ramifications” (FP 103)? Rancière’s perspective produces two essential conclusions. First, the Benjaminian notion of shock, the encounter with commodities and strangers that provokes something like an electrical discharge, characterized by a tremor or startled muscular jolt, is transformed into a broader

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nervosisme (Rancière’s term), a general anxiousness resulting from the feeling that the sheer volume of the resonances of life in the urban environment exceeds the capacity to comprehend it. Rancière’s formulation is enlightening: “What is opposed to the organism is not the inorganic [commodity] but life as a force that pulsates through bodies, exceeds their limits and disrupts the very relation between thought and its effect” (FP 103). Nervosisme is a state of overload that confuses thought processes and prevents them from devising effective acts. It is the condition of a subject caught in a complex network humming with purposeless energy. Let us make no mistake. Rich and suggestive as Benjamin’s analysis of alienation became, through his legendary archival work and his reflections on the theory of history (oriented by the commodity fetish proposed by Marx in the first volume of Capital), Rancière questions it, insisting instead on his own notions of the continuous stream of minutiae and micro sequences, the diffuse cloud of innumerable atomistic occurrences that compose everyday relations à la Virginia Woolf. A conclusion follows logically from this premise: the acts Baudelaire calls heroic are a radicalized individualization of the principle of voluntary action. Undertaken on the spur of the moment to interrupt the flow of diffuse life, they are accomplished without preparation and without real effect. These are decidedly not the acts Aristotle had in mind for a narrative mimesis centered on those who could intervene on the stage of history. Baudelaire’s prose poem “Le Mauvais Vitrier” (“The Bad Glazier”) is a paradigmatic example. The narrator interferes with the delivery of a pane of glass strapped to the back of a glazier, who was sent out to deliver it. Pretexting absurd aesthetic reasons, the narrator curses the glazier and ultimately breaks the glass into a thousand pieces. Rancière sees this act as a nervous discharge without clear motivation or intended outcome. At stake is the generalized disruption of the “very relation between thought and its effect,” which corresponds quite strikingly to Baudelaire’s hashish experiences. The radicalized individualization of the voluntary act is also a way of describing Baudelaire’s poetry itself. By its nature, it consists of short interventions that crystallize certain moments: poetic work cannot be sustained more than briefly. Baudelaire cannot, in other words, be an epic poet; he can only be the poet of his historical moment, that is, a poet of the momentary. Rancière formulates this tellingly as follows: the poem “marks the singular encounter between a subject who is an infinite network of sensations and a sensory world [monde sensible] that exceeds the closure of strategic action” (FP 104). The sonnet may interrupt the flow in an instantaneous and fleeting fashion, but it can never transcend

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it and reach a metacritical position that incorporates the whirlwind of details into a broader project of interpretive closure. Hence the pronounced affinity for short forms and fragments, represented in Baudelaire’s corpus characteristically by the autobiographical notebooks, Fusées or Mon Coeur mis à nu. The German Romantics famously valorized the fragment in their turn away from systematic philosophy. Here the fragment takes on a new dimension: it becomes the symptom of the way of living in an urbanized democracy where the anxiousness of modern life has become a generalized malaise. A corollary follows from this analysis. Baudelaire’s flâneur/​voyeur/​observer is not Poe’s observer who, fascinated by a singular individual, decides to designate him for special attention, to follow and observe him, as the paradigmatic scene unfolds in “The Man of the Crowd.” To focus on singularity, as Poe does, is to turn away from the real nature of the present experience of life understood as an infinite array of sensations and relations. As Rancière puts it: “The model of the Baudelairian voyeur is the individual who surveys the crowd from afar and on high, with a look that renders it indistinct” (FP 107). The elusive modern beauty that Baudelaire pursues and attempts to define, in his famous essay on the painter Constantin Guys, for instance, is illustrated by the blurred lines of the artist’s compositions, where subjects flow into one another, losing their distinct outlines, and thus their singular identities, in the anonymous multitude of people observed in the urban contexts (Le Peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life] [1863]). Baudelaire’s insistence on the juxtapositioning of colors as the primary principle of painterly composition, to the detriment of lines, follows logically from the experience of nervosisme as Rancière describes it in Le fil perdu. Ultimately, certain elements of Benjamin’s approach to Baudelaire and to the urban environment are discernible here, but refashioned in a move beyond the key Benjaminian notion of alienation. The third and final part of Le fil perdu examines theater in light of the perspectives outlined in the two previous sections. Theater is the most difficult category of literary creation to imagine in a landscape in which detail, micro sequences, and the broad phenomenon of nervosisme now dominate. What can theater become if grand actions no longer occupy the stage of history, given that it has traditionally been the principal literary form illustrating a mimesis centered on such grand acts? Rancière turns immediately to Victor Hugo, whose flouting of theatrical conventions in the 1830s and 1840s launched a revolution in theater related in important ways to what Flaubert accomplished in the novel. Hugo’s ambition to break with classical theatrical unities (time, place, and

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action), to open theater to a more capacious view of life, in short, to become more Shakespearean, ultimately went beyond Shakespeare in its inclusiveness (see his William Shakespeare [1864]). Lowly figures confined to comedic roles in Shakespeare’s tragedies found themselves thrust into prominence as main characters: Ruy Blas in Hugo’s play Ruy Blas (1838) is the paradigmatic example. Despite attempts to reflect the leveling of social distinctions characterizing democratic life, however, theatrical form remained tightly constrained by “the minimum requisite to provide a beginning and an end, as well as a middle . . . But life is the middle in a new sense, not an interval between two extremes, but a fabric in which everything is infinitely interwoven” (FP 121). Even more striking is a subsequent statement about the mismatch between an expected theatrical narrative logic, with a beginning and an end, and the diffuse experience of modern life: “The model of life is now the nervous system, an unending network of fibers and synapses that do not allow themselves to be enclosed within the unity of an organism or to be mobilized in view of the unity of an action” (FP 121). These arresting metaphors, the woven fabric and the network of fibers, link back to analyses of the writers previously explored, reinforcing the idea that what happens to people in the world must be understood as a formless cloud of micro events that do not cohere. The time of action on stage, suggests Rancière, is now occupied by “an infinite regression toward the question of its point of departure,” rather than by a logic of its unfolding (FP 122). Beyond Hugo, important moments of Rancière’s reflection on the dilemmas posed by the contradictions of theatrical practice in the nineteenth century focus on Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death [1835]). The play broke with classical tradition by representing modern political events, with extensive use of documentary sources to incorporate Danton’s speeches into the flow of the representation. In the play’s dialogue Büchner tries to get at thoughts behind acts, but his attempt falls short of representing the micro sequences and details that compose the reticular experience of democratic life:  “Words are not there to announce or recount actions, but to create the sensation of the substance of a given context of experience, to allow us to perceive the unspoken that haunts words and can be expressed only by the silence that separates them” (FP 128). Rancière writes in a positively Mallarméan mode here, recalling the philosopher’s fascination with the French poet, to whom he had earlier devoted an extended essay:  Mallarmé:  The Politics of the Siren. Maurice Maeterlinck’s “theater of silence,” exemplified by his plays in the early 1890s and clearly influenced by Mallarmé’s poetic experiments, emerges as an example of

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what nineteenth-​century theater might be in a post-​Aristotelian mode. In his plays, Maeterlinck reduced dialogue to its suggestive minimum, prompting the audience to ponder the meaning of the silences that left much about the situations portrayed mysteriously unexplained (in Les Aveugles [The Blind] [1891] or Pélleas et Mélisande [1892], for example). Paradoxically, the most suggestive texts concerning how theater might represent the atomistic absence of form at the heart of Rancière’s analysis are not plays, but rather the drawings, notations, and musings of Gordon Craig or the stage lighting schemes of Adolphe Appia, in other words, incomplete sketches for a theater-​to-​come never fully realized: “The radical nature of the new theater embodying the new image of thought seems condemned to exist especially in programmatic texts and notebooks of drawings” (FP 133). As if the radically non-​narrative nature of modern democratic life were impossible to translate into a theatrical work. One figure, however, almost an aside in Le fil perdu but mysteriously reprised from Nights of Labor, emerges as something of an enigmatic cypher for how theater might convey the sense of democratic life at the heart of Rancière’s perspective. Jean-​Gaspard Deburau was a popular mime in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s in Paris, much admired by the French poet and critic Théophile Gautier and those in Gautier’s circle, including Baudelaire. Deburau created the dramatic character of Pierrot, greatly prized and often reinvested with novel significance by symbolists and literary impressionists of all sorts in the second half of the nineteenth century. A characteristically powdered white face and highly stylized white costume (baggy cotton pants and blouse), an air of ethereal wistfulness, puzzled naiveté, inquisitiveness and tragic misunderstanding, placed the Pierrot figure somewhere between the child and the clown. Appreciated by aesthetes and working-​class audiences alike, Deburau’s silent Pierrot conveyed feeling through gesture and expression, without speaking. Deburau appears in Rancière’s argument precisely because his performances rose to the challenge of a theater of nonaction that did not fall into the chatter of dialogue—​precisely by enlisting the suggestiveness of silence. At stake is the “identity between the autonomy of a self-​sufficient performance and its effect in the material space of representation” (FP 134). This voiceless theatrical persona “embodies neither the people demanding its place in the sun nor the people as a primitive expression of obscure forces. It does not embody the people at all. It creates a performance for a public, seeking nothing beyond its perfect realization, with no other end but the pleasure of the public” (FP 133). The Parisian working class, frequenting the Funambules Theatre where the mime performed, appreciated Deburau’s Pierrot

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and might very well have perceived him as a sympathetic figure. Rancière is more particularly interested in the innovative performance practice he developed, but the temptation in Proletarian Nights is also to see in him a link to working-​class life: “If . . . Deburau’s pantomime [was] special . . . the reason was that it was precisely the spectacle that the people offered to themselves.”5 We should pause for a moment to savor the fact that a stylized mime bridges the gap between the creative artists of a new literary culture and the Parisian working-​ class theater public, with whom they were objectively allied in their appreciation of a theatrical form that effectively eliminates both Aristotelian action and the dependence on dialogue, choosing to linger instead at the level of schematic gestures and micro sequences that do not cross the threshold into narrative logic. I began my reflections on Le fil perdu by suggesting that the articles it contains, brought together loosely as chapters in this collected version, surely ought to be seen as an extension of Rancière’s fascination with literature’s crucial signifying role in post-​Revolutionary history. Experimentation with new literary forms in works that recognize and attempt to represent the process of what Rancière calls democracy confronts an Aristotelian legacy that no longer quite fits a transformed historical context. Rancière explores this clash with a series of close readings deeply attuned to the innovations to be found in the works he studies. The novel is an indisputably appropriate category with which to begin, since, as Georg Lukács and M. M. Bakhtin argue, the end of the epic and the rise of the novel accompanied the emergence of a bourgeois society that had lost the sense of totality indispensable for epic literature.6 The novel was a genre-​ challenging literary form, moreover, and this means that it was by its very nature a puzzle from an Aristotelian perspective: rationalizing literary production by dividing it along the genre lines proposed by Aristotle simply no longer worked. If Rancière writes against certain Marxian perspectives (Sartre, Benjamin), as 5 Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-​Century France, trans. John Drury (New York: Verso, 2012), 24. Originally published as Nights of Labor, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). Deburau’s attempt in 1832 to bring his Pierrot into the more mainstream bourgeois theater venue of the Palais-​Royal Theatre was one of the most notable artistic fiascos of the first half of the nineteenth century in France. But Pierrot’s link to working-​class life might equally be seen as a fiction shaped by Marcel Carné’s 1945 film, Children of Paradise, in which the famous French actor, Jean-​Louis Barrault, created a people’s Pierrot—​Carné’s reinterpretation of Deburau’s original figure. Rancière is aware that the working-​class dimension of Pierrot was partially a creation of journalists and bourgeois critics of the 1830s. 6 See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, ed. Fredric Jameson, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); and Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3–​40.

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well as structuralist approaches (Barthes), he does not directly engage the legacy of Lukács or Bakhtin. It might be particularly instructive to do so, because Lukács’s The Historical Novel, for example, proposes explicit arguments about periodization that are absent in Le fil perdu. The sweep of Rancière’s argument covers a period roughly from Balzac to Virginia Woolf, from the rise of realism to modernism with little nuance concerning changing historical circumstances. Conspicuously absent is a more subtle assessment of earlier periods of literary history, which are amalgamated under the general banner of Aristotelianism. Rancière is not a traditional literary historian, or a traditional historian, and one should perhaps not hold him accountable for methodological approaches that are not his. The absence of some sense of the varieties and complexities of the literary tradition prior to the Revolution, however, flattens the perspective of the argument in Le fil perdu. Missing also is the world historical sweep of Fredric Jameson’s analyses of cultural and literary forms, exemplified most recently by his The Ancients and the Postmoderns,7 but also by his other extensive explorations of the phenomenon of modernism.8 For all the subtlety of the argument in Le fil perdu, and despite its often-​poetic formulations describing the effects of democratization on and in literature, one finds oneself searching for a broadening of its scope, an engagement with Marxism beyond Sartre, and some further reflections on the development of narrative in the context of the debate about distinctions between modernism and postmodernism.

7 Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns:  On the Historicity of Forms (London and New York: Verso, 2015). 8 Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London and New  York:  Verso, 2007); and his classic Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1991).

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Rancière and Aesthetics

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A Method of Equality: Rancière, Jokes, and Their Relation to They Drive by Night Tom Conley

At the beginning of Les Écarts du cinéma Jacques Rancière recalls how his love for the seventh art took form. In the winter of 1964 he saw Rossellini’s Europa 51 that had suddenly “thrown me topsy-​turvy.”1 It was a moment when wanting to learn film theory, Marxism, and Italian all at once, in the back room of an Italian bistro he saw projected on a loose sheet tacked against a wall James Cagney and John Derek speaking perfect Italian. It was “in a dubbed version, in black and white, of a film by Nicholas Ray titled A l’ombra del patibolo (for purists Run for Cover)” (EC 7). Coinciding with a first award he had been given since leaving high school, the memories remind him of three orders of a “play of meetings and deviations” by which he has since sought to inquire of film: “between cinema and art, cinema and politics, cinema and theory” (EC 8). He notes limpidly that the first involved cinephilia, a scramble of places and pleasures whose diagonal axis was drawn between film archives (cinémathèques), and a “democracy of entertainment and emotion” that called good taste in question, and that without saying so “contended that the greatness of film resided not in the metaphysical elevation of its subjects or the visibility of its plastic effects, but in an imperceptible difference in the manner of putting stories and traditional emotions into moving images” (EC 8). Adepts of passion, and not science, refusing to acknowledge the hierarchies of art or the genius of modernism, cinephiles embraced an ethic of equality. It was then that he was moved in watching how Will MacAdam (James Stewart), the hero of Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), sought justice in murdering his evil brother, Dutch Henry Brown (Steve McNally), or how

1 Les Écarts du cinema (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011), 7; hereafter EC. Here and elsewhere all translations from the French are mine.

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Colorado (Virginia Mayo), the savage woman (la sauvageonne) of Raoul Walsh’s Colorado Territory (1949), a remake of the same director’s High Sierra (1941), joined hands in death with Wes McQueen (Joel McCrea) after the loathsome forces of law have mercilessly riddled them with bullets.2 Born into the French left and shaped by dialectical materialism, Rancière asked himself why indeed these products of American capital afforded such pleasure. How was it possible to link these films with the battle the new working class was leading against the world of exploitation? The difference between cinephilia and communism could not be reconciled. As for film theory, it too seemed to have left him at a loss, yet in its recognition of the “ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in a society” (EC 12), it could also ground reflections on utopia, on how the future, just as in the nowhere at the other end of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon could also, in the movie theater, be spelled and spaced as now here.3 In other words, in the same way that Godard quoted the Lumière Brothers in a legend below the screen of a projection room in Le Mépris, “cinema is an invention without a future” because the future is forever here and now. It begins in what we “do with” and “make of ” what we see and, as Rancière tells his reader through his recollections, the art of “living with” the cinemas we have known. He calls the process a politique de l’amateur, a politics of the amateur:  coined to rhyme with—​and hence mark a deviation from—​la politique de l’auteur, his words are a foil to the rallying cry of the “moderns” of the New Wave, reviving the Querelle, who championed the genius of directors-​as-​auteurs, figures meshed in industries invariably under the sway of capital, in order to dethrone the “ancients” who were mired in the classical tradition of “quality.” For Rancière the politics of the amateur belongs not to a cultural war but “affirms that cinema belongs to all those who, in one manner or another, have traveled inside the system of deviations [écarts, that could also be turned as contradictions] of its name and that everyone can be allowed to trace a topography between one point or another, indeed a singular itinerary that enhances cinema both as world and as knowledge” (EC 14). For Rancière cinema of the past and present belongs

2 In a series of interviews titled La Méthode de l’égalité, eds. Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan (Paris: Éditions Bayard, 2012), 86, Rancière recalls how a friend had informed him that “real cinema was not Antonioni, Bergman, all that culturally legitimized stuff; no, you had to go and see Esther and the King [Walsh] or Giant of Marathon [Jacques Tourneur], and that was real cinema!” 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-​ce que la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1991), 96.

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to us, and it is up to us to do with it whatever we can for the better ends of things. The paragraphs that follow aim at doing just that by reading a film of utopian facture, of the type that turned Rancière into a troubled cinephile: with the difference that although also by Walsh, of utopian fabric, by way of contradiction or contrariety They Drive by Night (Warner Brothers, 1940) can be felt rehearsing the wars working classes would lead against the world of exploitation. The strategy involves bringing one of Freud’s preferred areas of investigation, wit and its relation with everyday life, into a political arena in which class conflict is both a fact and, at the very least in the classical era, a highly productive cinematic topos. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Sigmund Freud notes what good wit owes to economy. A  joke worth its salt, or a searing remark cum grano salis, is effective when it abbreviates the logic and process of Cartesian reason. The teller appreciates its wealth when realizing that some kind of saving or untapped energy is released (or explodes) in the performance of the punch line. On occasion, he notes, the perception of energy saved causes a person to smile when observing how a traditional milieu, suddenly under the dictates of new and more “efficient” technology, is dispensed from expenditure of earlier and often time-​consuming labor that had ruled in the past. When a Viennese apartment dweller flips an electric switch to brighten his early-​twentieth-​century living room he or she cannot fail to break a smile:  thinking of the savings of labor that had been expended in fetching matches and lighting a gas jet to gain clarity, Freud’s everyman reflects on what has been elided—​unlike the fabled Jewish mother, refusing to change a light bulb, who prefers to stay in the dark. Freud invokes the illumination to “venture on a comparison between psychical economy and a business enterprise” where, if the latter is sizable, “the importance of administrative cost diminishes,” and thus a “factor of relief takes the place of economy.”4 In his treatment of what seem to be “bad” jokes invoked to illustrate his argument for economy Freud argues that humor is found wherever the steps of a reasoned progression are omitted. Enthymemes are thus the bedrock of good

4 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud 8, ed. James Strachey (1905) (London:  The Hogarth Press, 1960), 157–​58.

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humor, not in the least when the hilarity of the most famous of all examples illustrating what an enthymeme (in Greek “to keep in mind”) happens to be has philosophical savor. Cogito ergo sum can be seen to be fabulously funny because ergo stands in place of a proposition that ought to figure between cogito and sum. “I” is an animal, but in the Cartesian order of things a man cannot be an animal because animals can’t think. The joke is on us no doubt because the philosopher, much like Melville’s Bartleby, would “prefer not to” be associated with a creature perched on a lower rung of the ladder of being. In cogito ergo sum suppression is tantamount to repression, the sign of which surfaces elsewhere in the author’s writing. Or, to revert to Freud’s bath-​jokes “which treat of the Galician Jews’ aversion to baths” (49), one of which surfaces somewhere in the Three Stooges: “Two Jews met in the neighborhood of the bath-​house. ‘Have you taken a bath?’ ‘What?’ asked the other in return, ‘is there one missing?’ ” (49). The enthymeme is found in what we surmise to be the first Jew’s unvoiced proposition that his friend stinks, while the second Jew’s response betrays a sudden feeling of guilt and fear for reason that he might be held accountable for having stolen a tub and having to pay for its replacement. Freud’s relation with wit is invoked to fashion a reading of audiovisual diagrams or intermediate configurations that bind the enterprise of They Drive by Night to a politics of equality in which history—​the turmoil of the year preceding the United States’ entry into the Second World War—​bears on matters of isolation and community. Beyond its mix of exuberant charm and noir-​like turn that invites repeated viewings, it is hard to tell to what genre the feature belongs or, in the end, what it does.5 In every event what it implies about economy is best found in the correlations of its form, that is, in its editing and performance that prompt cinephiles to wonder how They Drive by Night can be taken: a comedy, it broaches “serious” issues of unstated social and psychic implication; yet a melodrama, it refuses empathy and identification with the world it portrays. 5 Displacing the plot of Bordertown (1935), into the world of truckers and truck drivers through an adaptation of Albert Bezzerides’s The Long Haul (1939), a novel set on the highways of southern California, the film is known, writes Walsh biographer Linda Ann Moss, for “storytelling so dark that Walsh’s dark humor seeps through every scene—​also driving the story on” with “a relentless, driving, masculine energy, making it a rhythmic precursor to Walsh’s highly energized White Heat, which would come a decade later.” In Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 185.

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A zany story Two wildcat truckers, Paul and Joe Fabrini (Humphrey Bogart and George Raft), try to make a go at trucking with little wherewithal at their disposal. They pilot an antiquated truck that breaks down at its first turn. Joe hitches a ride to a café to call for help, to have the broken wheel repaired and get back to Los Angeles without undue delay. Returning in the night under a pelting rain, they pick up Cassie, a stunning redhead (Ann Sheridan), the waitress Joe had met in the café, who has escaped the clutches of a lascivious boss. Joe stops to drop off Cassie and deliver Paul, who is tired, to his newlywed wife. Energized by Cassie’s charms, Joe arrives in Los Angeles where he soon gets into a fight with a local trucker. Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale), owner of a large trucking firm, witnesses the fisticuffs. Ed welcomes Joe to his office where he meets Lana, a former flame, who puts a make on him. Blind to Lana’s moves, the ebullient Carlsen starts joking before proposing that Joe work for him and be assured of a steady wage, but Ed’s invitation is met with diffidence. Joe stubbornly wants to make a go on his own. Ed generously directs Joe to a load of lemons that, for cause of an outbreak of colds in San Francisco, he and his brother take north and sell at profit. Despite having seen friends die after falling asleep while hauling their goods, Joe drives against his brother’s wish to catch some shut-​eye. With a fresh cargo in tow, having taken over from Joe, the drowsy Paul misses a turn and drives over a guardrail. The truck rolls down a hillside and catches fire. The freshly purchased vehicle is demolished, profits are sent scattering, and worst of all, Paul, surviving, loses his right arm. Joe goes to work for Ed’s trucking company before Paul catches a job in the warehouse and dispatch unit. Delighted at having Joe as a new mastermind, Ed throws a party at his home to welcome the new employee to his team. Already scheming at catching Joe and double-​crossing her husband, Lana remains aloof but courteous. At a riotous party Ed shows the company a new gadget, an electric eye that opens and closes two sets of garage doors when a vehicle crosses a beam extending between two pylons near its entry. After displaying the invention, a plastered Ed takes his guests to a nightclub before passing out and, with Lana at the wheel, being driven home. Upon seeing the electric eye Lana realizes that she can be done with Ed by leaving the car to idle in the garage behind closed doors. The scheme works. Upon inheriting the business Lana appoints Joe its executive officer in what she hopes will reap returns on her investments. Business booms

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but affect suffers. Upon meeting Cassie, now Joe’s fiancée, Lana suffers a first breakdown. Her nerves frayed, an angry and spiteful Lana reports to the police that it was Joe, ambitious and self-​seeking, who killed Ed in a plot to rise to the top of the company. A second breakdown lands Lana in an asylum—​in walking toward an iron portal she crosses the beam of an electric eye that sends her reeling and screaming. Workers at the scene are amused and perplexed (“what’s the dame hittin’ high-​c for?”). The murder trial progresses, with the case for prosecution seeming so strong that nothing could keep Joe from being sent to the electric chair. A pale and frayed Lana falls into a state of lucid delusion under cross-​examination. Blathering, recalling how her drunken husband afflicted her with his “bad jokes,” she says that, concerning his death, “the doors did it . . . yes, the doors did it,” and lapses into a crazed cackle. The spectacle turns the case in Joe’s favor, and soon he want to leave the business and strike out on his own again. But his new spouse invites him to return to the firm where the team of employees, brother Paul included, boisterously cajole him to stay. Paul winks at the camera as the movie comes to its happy end. The plot is built upon three configurations or diagrams and their constitutive spaces.6 The first, inherited from the realist tradition of Depression cinema for which Warner Brothers was well known, tells of the travails of workers in an originary world where survival, if survival there can be, is awarded to the fittest:  the road, the office of the boss, the arenas where bustling and warring truckers assemble, and the gas station or diner where they take respite and find community.7 The second is Ed’s Beverly Hills hacienda, an opulent home that 6 “Diagram,” understood here in aesthetic and political terms, connotes an intermediate form in which a mix and mesh of language and graphic matter plots a condition of things and its metamorphosis or development. The aesthetic diagram could be what Gilles Deleuze finds in the paintings of Francis Bacon:  “the operative sum of lines and zones, of traces and asignifying and non representative blots” whose function is “to suggest” (Bacon) and “to introduce ‘possibilities of fact’ (Wittgenstein).” With words that are pertinent here, he adds that with the action of the graphic matter “the visual set [ensemble] will no longer be that of an optical organization, it will offer the eye another power [puissance], as well as an object that will no longer be figurative” (Logique de la sensation 1 [Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1996 edition], 66). For the philosopher the political diagram is a sum of maps that carries “in addition, to the points it connects, relatively free or unlinked points, point of creativity, or mutation of resistance” that could be of utopian design (Foucault [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986], 52). 7 The originary world is one where “drive,” Freud calls “Trieb,” stands in contrast to a less forceful condition of desire. “ ‘Human beasts’ inhabit its spaces where, under the aegis of ‘cruel Chronos,’ an originary image of time resurges,” notes Deleuze in Cinéma 1: L’image-​mouvement (Paris: Éditons de Minuit, 1983), 173–​75. Stroheim’s Greed would be emblematic of the originary world that is “a beginning of the world but also an end of the world, and the irresistible slope from the one to the other” (174–​76).

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could belong to the director, an unlikely setting for the meeting of Lana and Joe, where a large garage is the locus of murder and trauma. The third and final space locks into the tradition of the “trial” that also has originary trappings—​much like those of La Chienne, M, and Fury, or closer to 1939–​40, perhaps The Return of Frank James and Young Mr. Lincoln—​where the courtroom brings the film to the precipice of tragedy before ending in hilarity. Juxtaposed as they are, each of these components prompts simultaneous identification and—​latent Brechtian—​distanciation. The film speculates on itself, so to speak, through means that collapse its own force of illusion. If illusion there is, it is engineered in the laughing or joking relations it establishes among its virtual characters. The communities of the film are built upon relations defined by those who joke and those who don’t. Implicitly and very logically the latter—​Lana and Joe—​cannot belong to the society of equals, even though Joe, the self-​made capitalist, is pitched as hero.

The diner In the beginning, class conflict: driven recklessly, a convertible packed with rich youth causes the Fabrini truck to swerve off the shoulder of a two-​lane highway. Thanks to the bond shared among itinerant truckers Joe hitches a ride to a diner, a locus classicus of Depression-​era road movies, that in this film is a stopover, a site of respite, but also a battlefield where men and women jab and parry with words. The sequence begins with a pan swishing by the pumps of a gas station to follow the course of the truck on whose running board Joe is standing. As the truck exits right, Joe jumps off, quickly uttering “Thanks” to the nameless driver and hustles to the café. The camera reverses the direction of its panoramic, quickly moving in to set the man exiting the café next to Joe who enters. The trucker in the center lights a cigarette. Joe quips, “Hiya, Henry.” Henry responds, “Hello, Joe, how’s it goin’? Where’s your rig?” “Down the road. Busted wheel.” Lasting twenty-​one seconds, the shot is of extreme economy. It registers the attributes of the gas station; its movement sets the narrative into motion; it underscores a sense of community shared among a class of men trying to make ends meet. The shot includes a spate of ocular forms that play out unconsciously, “by night” as it were, in what follows:  headlights, windshields, rearview mirrors, pumps, a chassis, cans, and spigots comprise an “apparatus” belonging at

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once to the world viewed, to film, and to the bodies moving about and through them. For the sake of the narrative: that Joe is a skirt chaser, a trait crucial to what follows, is marked when, entering the café and turning about in a parting shot to a driver who is leaving, he blurts, “O Henry, write your wife. I hear she’s worried.” From a critical standpoint: the reactions of two men in the café, doubles or intermediaries of the spectator, one sitting on his stool and the other standing, in a way to make us take note of the double entendre. In terms of the community: out of the frame, Henry, voice-​off, signals a broader visual and auditory depth of field, uttering, “Okay, I will, thanks,” just before, in supremely efficient editing, a shot cuts from Joe opening the door outside to his rapid and hasty entry into the commonly shared space. He moves so quickly and adroitly, responding to the voice of a man he fails to see, that the camera seems obliged to retreat as Joe moves along the row of bar stools to his right. Joe is so taken with himself that he makes no visual acknowledgment of anyone. Removing gloves from his hands, he is a man as if with but clearly apart from the community. In concert with the first shot of the sequence, the camera dollies (now back) to record a triangular arrangement when Joe, in the foreground, is adjacent to two seated drivers. They converse on their own while he turns to ask of the comely waitress (Sheridan) who comes into view as he pivots and barks, “Hey, gimme a Frisco phone book, will ya?” (4:56–​58). In a masculine gesture responding to his aggressiveness she bends down to gather the item from under the counter, handing it to him, snapping, “Yeah, be sure you bring back all the pages, too.” He takes the book and peruses it while, nonstop, in the same shot, attention is drawn to the two men at the counter who exchange anecdotes. “So as I  was tellin’ ya, here I  was with these two beautiful dames. Boy, what equipment!” The cut (5:07) to a close-​up keeps the phone book in view while establishing a sightline along the diagonal edge of the counter, on which stands, like a sculpture, a large glass jar half-​filled with doughnuts. The men now pose their elbows on the counter and sip coffee. The monologue unfolds: “Anyway, they’re hangin’ around my neck, beggin’ me not to go, see, I tell’em, look, sisters, I got a job to do, so I push’em away [he pushes air away with his arms] and leave and after all, a guy like me, with hundreds of dames, huh, ha,” which prompts his partner to the left to rise and retort, “I’m getting outta here,” before turning to the waiter and adding in a parting shot: “Shortie, it’s too deep for me.” He exits past the doughnut jar before a medium shot (5:21) relocates Joe reading the phone book on a line parallel with the jar and behind

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Figure 8.1  They Drive by Night, dir. Raoul Walsh, Warner Brothers, 1940.

the edge of a pinball machine at which the two men in uniform direct their attention. Like the montage, quick and cutting, the waitress’s quid pro quo in response to Joe’s demand does not go unnoticed. He neither acknowledges nor seems to get the joke in the midst of the boring banter. Her wit is on cue: newsprint, Sears and Roebuck catalogues, and telephone books were cheap substitutes for toilet paper. The waitress rightly surmises that Joe is so miserly, so cheap, that he will disappear into a privy where he will shit, wipe his ass with public property, and return the torn book to the waitress. Exposition of the thematic matter—​whether Joe would do better to join a collective or go alone—​that ensues is quickly ruptured by a new volley of quid pro quos. Having been told that he ought to quit working as a wildcat driver, Joe continues to peruse the phone book while his interlocutor raises his left hand to grasp the nipple-​like knob on the lid of the doughnut jar. A matrix of pleasure and nourishment, an object correlative to the woman’s body behind, the glass jar displays a doughnut not far from a sightline that aims toward the heroine’s pubis.

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A minute later, there’s a cut to Joe, seen over Irish’s shoulder, who now has telephone contact: Joe, into the phone:  “Hello? I want to talk to Mike Williams Standard 72961 [He looks up, addressing Irish]. Don’t worry about me. Some day you road skinners will all be sayin’, ‘Joe Fabrini’s a good guy to work for’ [nodding in self-​approval], ‘and I will be.’ ” Cut to Irish, in a countershot over the shoulder: Irish:  “No doubt about that kid [pointing to himself], but me, I’ll take the salary and let someone else have the worry.”

Medium close-​up that had established the sequence, Red now in view behind the doughnut jar. Joe (his nose as sharp as an arrowhead) aims his words at Irish (7:01): Joe:  “No, that’s the easy way. [He turns to Red, who looks at him askance]. Gimme a cup of coffee.” [The handle of the doughnut lid is now aligned with Red’s right breast.] Red, almost snarling: “Anything else?” Joe:  “What else ya got that’s not poisonous?” Red:  “I don’t know, I don’t eat here.”

The camera cuts to Joe, now not over Irish’s shoulder as the two uniformed truckers raise their cups to ask for more (7:09): Second Driver:  “How ‘bout takin’ my order, Red?”

Cut back to Red behind the jar as she lifts a bill she will add up and deliver to him, in perfect quid pro quo: Red:  “How about takin’ your time?” [The boss moves forward.] First Driver, to Boss:  “Nice new fixture, Barney!” Boss:  “Yeah, she’ll do.”

Back to Joe and the men behind him. He now shows interest in what is before him: First Driver, to Joe’s left:  “Not a bad thing to know.” [He turns toward Joe, smiling about what he sees.] “Classy chassis.”

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Cut back to medium close-​up, Irish out of view, while the Boss and Joe admire Red’s attributes: turning to Joe, almost speaking to the spectator, affirmatively (7:23): Red:  “Yes, and it’s all mine, too. And I don’t owe any payments on it.”

Back to Joe and the two drivers (7:27): Second Driver:  “I’d be glad to finance it, baby.” [First driver smiles at his line.]

Cut to the medium shot (as seen in 5:59), Red now addressing the driver, even more affirmatively, in quid pro quo: Red:  “Who do you think you are, you couldn’t even pay for the headlights.”8

Once again the joke goes unnoticed when Joe, making contact with the foreman in San Francisco, asks the shyster for the money he is owed. Broke, Joe begs Irish to lend him a dollar to pay for the phone call and whatever food he’ll order. After bringing him a cup of coffee, responding to his untoward question begging for what “ain’t on the menu,” Red stares Joe down, retorting: “And it ain’t gonna be. You’d better settle for a hamburger.” He concedes: “Okay, with onions.” In shots of short duration, taken from a variety of angles, the sequence moves in concert with the wit. “Red” or (“Cassie”) is a match for every one of the males in her midst. The quid pro quo (a monetary expression in that “this for that” is at the root of “quid,” meaning a British pound or a chaw of tobacco) is the currency in a milieu where money is fast talk. The structuring diagram of the film—​collective management of an operation versus a self-​directed enterprise in a world where vehicles are metaphors of exchange and a battle of sexes seems to match that of capital and labor—​is posited in the “originary” world of an archaic context in which males live in the illusion that it is they who have their chattel, the female species, under their control. What would appear to be a conventional or decorative sequence (of the ilk of scenes in Sullivan’s Travels, Manpower, and other features) is rooted in a number of cultural facts: economy and waste, division of labor along lines of gender, clatter, and misdirected communication. The editing draws attention to how timing of the dialogue—​not an instant is lost because wit saves time—​is the mark of worth. The rhythm of shots causes the wasted words to “work” at optimum efficiency. 8 They Drive by Night, dir. Raoul Walsh, Warner Brothers, 1940.

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Ed’s office The second joking sequence takes place when Ed Carlson (Alan Hale) enters the film. The role is secondary to the main narrative, but in conjunction with the episode in the diner it is he, like Sheridan, who drives the film forward. Perhaps a trickster or a hermetic character—​of the lineage of Hermes, a thief, a horse trader, a messenger, and entrepreneur—​owns a lucrative trucking firm for causes that defy explanation. Following the medieval tradition of the mal marié, the ill-​wed or putrid spouse, in this film a man whose sex is old but not quite spent, unfitting for a younger partner, procreation being out of the question, Ed finds virility in his art of telling and laughing at his own bad jokes.9 His remarks are self-​exploding. Patently lousy, they are saved by how his performance—​his timing, his way of being “quick on the trigger” as if in conjunction with the editing—​affords surplus value no sooner gained than lost. The noise of his laughter becomes the guarantee of worth and, with the viewing public in the equation of the greater economy of the film, also its symbolic effectiveness. In these moments Lana’s words—​laconic, conniving, and self-​ centered—​are lean and mean where Ed’s wit is generous and, to be sure, wasteful. Below Ed’s office, at a depot where trucks and truckers congregate near an ostensive center of Los Angeles (its municipal tower evident in the background), Joe crosses the path of a surly driver who begs for seconds and quickly lands a punch. Walking by the windows on the second floor that overlook the area, Ed catches sight of the fight and smiles (30:31). Oscillating between the conflict and the window the camera records Ed, ebullient, in vicarious pleasure, adjacent to Lana at first sight who could care less. Elegantly dressed in a floral print blouse, wearing a modish hat, she approaches (“what’s going on?”) and gazes onto the scene idly and almost superciliously. Ed turns, imploring her to “look.” Cut to Lana in full view, then to Ed, in close-​up, when she snipes, “Ed, stop yelling out the window. You’re not a truck driver anymore! (.  . .) When we got married, you promised to act like a gentleman. It’s disgusting to see the head of a company making more noise than any of his drivers” (31:15). 9 Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Mythologiques, 1: Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1962), a propos the “moldy sex” (sexe moisi) connoted when there exists a gap in age between one partner and the other (336 and 344). In traditional societies the shivaree is organized to castigate spouses whose difference of age puts the future of the community at risk. The members of the shivaree make noise to mediate the difference. In They Drive by Night the raucous partying that leads to Ed’s inebriation and murder would be related.

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Figure 8.2  They Drive by Night, dir. Raoul Walsh, Warner Brothers, 1940.

Her reading of his character is spot-​on: with all his noise (the matter of the film itself) he (or the studio) makes more money than any of the drivers (or paying spectators). Down below Joe lands a decisive blow on his opponent’s eye. Snarling, he adds, “You’ll need another eye for the road, and this ain’t makin’ money for either of us” (31:36). Upstairs, Ed, brandishing his fists and joking (“see what you can do with a good man!”), calls the victor up to his office. A cut to the interior—​Venetian blinds decorate the windows first seen from the inside—​ displays Lana, gazing at a mirror in preparing for Joe’s entry, ostentatiously painting her lips. Ed comes forward in the diagonal plan, exclaiming, “I used to hit like that . . . and get hit, too! Hahahahaha!” (32:13). Lana, sitting on Ed’s desk, caressing a leg she extends, awaits Joe’s entry. Ed hustles to his desk and opens a drawer while welcoming Joe into the room: “Where’ve you been hidin’? It’s a wonder [?]‌you wouldn’t come up and see a guy [for] some time!” (32:18). Replies Joe soberly, “Oh, I’ve been pretty busy.” Lana, in the center of the frame, looks away with malicious delight. Shadows of the Venetian blinds cast on his

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head, Ed fishes a bottle of whiskey out of the drawer. He holds it up and examines its contents: Ed:  “Oh, the mice musta’ got into this!” Lana:  “That was no mice, that was a rat!” [Ed laughs and fumbles glass.] Ed:  “Ho! Ho! Ho! Huh! Very funny! Very funny! Ha! Hee! Hee! Hee!”

Cut to Ed, in close-​up, smiling and looking at Joe over whose left shoulder the camera is angled (33:27), now looks at his friend: Ed:  “Ha! Ha! Ha! [swinging his arm, looking at Lana] That’s just like Lana! Right on the trigger every time! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

He bends down to fill the glass. A reverse shot over Ed’s shoulder (33:33): Ed:  “Well, you and I’ll strike a blow for liberty!”

Joe caresses the hat he holds in his hand while clasping his jacket under his left arm. Joe:  “You know, I never touch it.”

Cut to Lana looking at Ed while he stoppers the bottle after taking a shot: Ed:  “Well, that’s all right! I’ll strike the blow for both of us! Ha! Ha! Ha! Oh!”

Ed picks up a second glass. As Ed gulps another shot: Lana:  “Your liver must look like a bomb hit it!” Ed, coughing:  “Ha! Ha! Ha! You know what I say: Live and let liver!”

Ed turns toward Lana, his head still striated by the light and shadow cast through the blinds to the left. Ed:  “Or . . . or: Liver, liver, stay away from my door!”

Lana sneers in disgust while Ed, laughing boisterously, looks toward Joe: Ed:  “It’s a cinch to think of a fast one like that! [Now looking at Lana] ‘Been married to a smart girl [he pats her on the buttocks] for seven years!”10

10 They Drive by Night.

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Comedy settles when Ed invites Joe to join the firm. Looking for a surface on which to strike a match, he finds Joe, who is sitting, now extends his leg to offer him the sole of his shoe.11 Discussion ensues of the virtues of collective enterprise versus the one-​man operation. Ed exits, and quickly the dialogue they share accounts for the history of Joe and Lana’s earlier encounters. Ed returns to encourage Joe to buy a load of lemons that he can truck and sell at a sizable profit in San Francisco where a scourge of flu is raging.

The last laugh Ed’s final volleys of wit precede his murder. He has given his guests a tour of his new home (“how do you like the dump?” he says to the drivers) whose ultimate luxury is an electric eye at the entry of the two-​car (as it were, binocular) garage. Disgusted by the truckers’ revelry and stunned after Joe, an archenemy of pleasure, has exited the home in a glacial mood, Lana witnesses Ed at his best and worst. In view of his truckers and their ladies, all of whom are out of sorts in evening attire, he proposes a toast (1:06:00), which could be taken as an insult aimed at Joe and at the ethic of individual virtue. Brandishing a bottle of champagne, he pronounces, “Early to rise and early to bed . . . makes a man healthy and wise . . . but socially dead! Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Now I’m gonna take you all to the Tango Club!” Lana enters left while Ed chug-​a-​lugs the champagne, greeting her, “Oh! Sugar! Will you rush out and leap into that ermine gunnysack of yours and we’re gonna [he gyrates] sneak up on a rumba!” Lana ripostes, “What’s the matter! Not enough liquor here? Maybe you’d like to put a still in the basement!” Splitting his sides, Ed turns toward Irish for approbation: “Oh! Ho! Ho! Ho! Never at a loss for a comeback! Ha! Ha! Ha! That’s because [he slurs into baby-​talk] because she tickles me pink.” He tries to dance, singing “La, da,

11 Ed and Lana make for a bad match. In striking a match on a man’s shoe in this manner Ed refers to episodes recurring elsewhere in Walsh’s cinema. In White Heat Fallon (Edmund O’Brien) reports to his boss on whose shoe he lights a match, and also, chillingly, in Colorado Territory an evil marshal strikes a match off the boot of a man he has just hanged. The scene in They Drive by Night indicates that in Hollywood a “match” is more than a stick tipped with phosphorous and potassium chlorate that ignites when struck on a hard surface. In classical cinema it is more than what it is, as Howard Bretherton’s The Match King (1932) makes clear where a former street cleaner (Warren Williams), having become a tycoon after being told to pick spent matches from the clefts of sidewalks, destroys his life in failing to see that his love object (Lily Damita) is not a good match. In They Drive by Night the match is a verbal icon affiliated with jokes and fulmination of wit.

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da-​da-​da.” Lana walks away. “Oh, you don’t wanna dance, huh, I’ll always get a partner.” Ed grabs one of the women (Joyce Compton), who falls backward, and Ed embraces Irish (Roscoe Carnes) her date. “Oh, you’ll do!” Ed swirls with his male partner. The film dissolves into the nightclub where Ed soon passes out before Lana drives him to the garage. Ed has stolen the show. Bearing on the workings of the plot, his bad jokes equate wit with banquet wisdom, if only because when successfully timed and performed the noise they generate makes the community cohere, assembling those who play and excluding those who don’t. The sight of a short-​circuit, of Hale telling and exploding at his own jokes, where he is both performer and spectator of his antics, opens a critical perspective on the symbolic process of the “comedy.” His spectacle draws a frame around a dilemma concerning how to manage labor, and how to distribute and share social and affective energies. Laughter opens an angle from which, in situations of obvious social contradiction or class conflict the matter of handling, management, and dispensation—​or, as Rancière would have it, the partage or distribution—​of biological and social energies. From this standpoint the outcome of the story is of little matter. The structure of the film sets Ed Carlsen’s friendly antics that figure at the core of a communal operation against Paul Fabrini’s sobering ethic of the self-​possessed individual, tireless, having no time to waste, who goes without sleep.12 George Raft may have been chosen for the role for reason of his egomania that director Walsh had exploited in The Bowery (1933), a genial (and politically incorrect) feature of Brechtian cast that had displeased the actor. In 1940, Walsh recalls, “Raft was speaking to me again. He seemed to have forgotten The Bowery. His acting had improved since the day I had told him to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.” The implication being that Raft was something of a dummy, he adds, “He was better at memorizing dialogue.”13 The role awarded to Raft in They Drive by Night calls for a selfish person who has no time to waste in dispensing phatic signs, or words such as, “Excuse me,” “May I please,” or “I beg your pardon.” Early on Raft begins with gimme. In the context of joking relations Joe becomes a dubious hero for

12 Raft would personify “a state of emergency, when a bank of floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night, seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never get turned off and become domesticated into a permanent condition” that Jonathan Crary describes in 24/​7; Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 17. 13 Raoul Walsh, Each Man in His Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 302.

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whom wanton words or laughter is hardly a laughing matter.14 Although, as Ed predicted in the first scene in which they meet, one day the world would be money for Joe, it goes without saying in the narrative that Joe’s entrepreneurial success owes to Ed’s generosity. The trucking firm itself is seen as a result of labor and pragmatic vision for which Ed, the spendthrift joker, is both a foil and an ego ideal. The implication is that Ed has crafted the company as an egalitarian community, not an enterprise of capital in which profit would depend on strongly delineated social hierarchies and uneven economic development. The promise of utopia at the film’s end implies that on the horizon there ought to be a balanced distribution of work, wit, and wealth. But insofar as the joke has been la chose du monde la mieux partagée, as it stands under new leadership, the future of the community is unclear.

Credits where credit is due The film uses ocular forms to suggest it can be “read” from a distanced and productively critical angle. It invites us to see its composition from a monocular point of view, as a flat surface on which its “characters” are moving and talking ciphers in an economic diagram; at the same time, the binocular counterpart, in social and psychosomatic depth of field, relates to the nature of distribution of labor, of management of energy, and of gendered space at an unnamed but decisive moment of history. Further, because the joking relation it puts forward requires a third or observing parties, the spectator’s investment in the film is implicitly factored into its political aesthetic. The design and sequencing of the front-​credits suggest as much. At the outset the Warner Shield dissolves to a medium close-​up of two rolling wheels (00:08) that are signs of the mode of production of what will follow. They dissolve into the projected names of the leading players (Raft, then Sheridan, then Lupino, and finally Bogart) in the cones of light projected by the bulbs of what could either be a truck’s headlights, key lights illuminating a set, or even a movie projector.

14 In his classic Structure and Function of Primitive Society (Glencoe, IL:  The Free Press, 1952), ethnologist A.  R. Radcliffe-​ Brown notes how social organization is built around “joking relationships” that can be formalized (so-​and-​so can joke with so-​and-​so but not others) to maintain order and communication. Less obvious are those where it is ill advised to proffer wit and humor, or where laughter does not figure in the design of a “social network.”

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In the upper background stands a traffic light where, in black and white, three illuminated dots would be imagined to be “red,” “yellow,” and “green.” The card dissolves into the wheels that dissolve into the title, set along the same line as the names of the dramatis personae, which dissolves, in turn, to one rolling wheel (00:23) that then dissolves into the names of the supporting actors and actresses . . . which dissolves to one rolling wheel adjacent to the dot of the great B of “Executive Producer Hal B. Wallis.” As it dissolves, the headlight changes from “stop” to “caution” (from red to yellow). A smaller dot of light blinks when the name of the associate producer, Mark Hellinger, dissolves into the names of the writers of the screenplay, Jerry Wald and Richard Macauley, that are set over the mention of the novel. The traffic light flashes while the rest of the credits, now shown frontally, cast shadows onto the limelight behind them. The flashing lamp extinguishes and the name of the director dissolves into view, in diagonal again, over a single rolling wheel that disappears in order to have it take command. The effect of dissolution suggests that the film is indeed dealing with “drives” that belong to a nocturnal condition.

Figure 8.3  They Drive by Night, dir. Raoul Walsh, Warner Brothers, 1940.

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The name of the director fades into black when a long shot of a truck following the curve of a road cutting across an arid land begins the film. The pan left registers the truck’s turning wheels identical to those just seen in the credits. As a diagram or intermediate form, an emblem in which visual and lexical matter are mixed, the credits denote that in the given convention the director’s name is the last word. His name is associated with a shape that allegorizes the technology of the film (lights, projection, turning reels, action stopping and starting) and, both visually and psychically, its ocular character. The credits set in play what it means to see and to read what is screened in at least two ways at once. Given that the truckers must spend their lives on the road, what we discern in the abstract configuration of letters, words, and moving forms could be of the order, as Freud in his work on wit had shown, of the unconscious, of a force that drives by night. Time and again Rancière notes that aesthetic components buoy the political dimension of a film and that where either wins over the other, there comes the risk of relapse into hobnailed dogma or feckless hypersensitivity. A politics belongs to “an art where form links itself to the construction of a social relation and mobilizes a capacity that belongs to everyone. It is no longer a question of the old vanguard dream of dissolving the forms of art into the relation of the new world but, rather, one of marking the proximity of art with all forms in which there is affirmed a capacity to share or a shareable capacity” (EC 148). Addressing the films of Pedro Costa, the same words could apply, Rancière quickly avows, to a film of the savor of They Drive by Night.15 Rancière’s early attraction to the director’s potboilers and oaters tells of his origins as a cinephile, but also of a political aesthetic, what he calls une politique de l’amateur, that turns “old” and odd films of the industry of bygone years, films taken to be historical objects, into things current, compelling, and timely.

15 In view of the names of “great formalists” he sets between inverted commas, Rancière notes that Costa claims “to belong to an entirely different lineage: Ford, Walsh, Tourneur or others, even more modest, anonymous auteurs of B-​films which, within the very system of production aimed toward the profits of the owners, turned out as an art of equality [comme un art de l’égalité]” (EC 148–​49).

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Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police Order Tina Chanter

In what follows I  consider some works of art as a way of thinking about the operation of dissensus in relation to the police order of common sense or consensus. My aim is to think about the relationship between dissensus and community in Rancière’s work and at the same time to address the question of how Rancière’s philosophical consideration of aesthetics fares in relation to feminist art and feminist theory. The purpose of this discussion then is twofold. On the one hand I explore the sense in which Rancière’s understanding of dissensus as a disruption of the police order can accommodate the fact that what passes for common sense will vary considerably from one community to another. On the other hand I play out the effect of bringing to bear some considerations, drawn from what might be loosely construed as feminist aesthetics, on Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime. I stage a conversation, then, between Rancière’s understanding of art and politics, and insights drawn from feminist and race theory in an effort to consider what each can bring to the other. Rancière understands art and politics in the aesthetic regime as capable of effecting different forms of dissensus.1 To understand the relationship between art as dissensus and politics as dissensus, we must understand that Rancière takes up the essentially Hegelian contradiction that art is always also something other than art as the paradox of the aesthetic regime, a paradox that is not, however, to be resolved in Hegelian fashion by ultimately prioritizing one pole over another such that a hierarchy results, whereby life is posited above art, or indeed 1 This does not mean that all art in the aesthetic regime operates dissensually. The three regimes Rancière articulates are not understood as mutually exclusive of one another, so that, for example, representative art can persist under the aesthetic regime, and the aesthetics of such art can have elements of the ethical regime. In Rancière’s view, Jean-​François Lyotard attributes to Barnett Newman’s art a representative function that has ethical overtones, despite Lyotard’s own effort to construe Newman’s art as the art of the unrepresentable.

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art above life as an unrealizable goal to be striven for. Rather this tension is to be inhabited, kept alive, revived, with a vigilance that prevents art collapsing into a social ideal and thereby avoids the dangers potentially accompanying such a collapse, not the least of which are the dangers of art succumbing to totalitarianism on the one hand, and to what Rancière sees as the false pretension of art to purism on the other (Adorno and Lyotard). At issue in the present discussion is the need to think through the implications of the fact that various communities constitute themselves around particular sets of assumptions, with the result that what might pass as self-​evident or obvious to the constituents of a given community will not be granted self-​evidence by another community. Consequently, that which constitutes the police order will vary according to what assumptions pass as self-​evident, and how particular communities cohere around that which is taken to be self-​evident. To compound the difficulty, what is at stake is precisely what constitutes the givenness of community; who is allowed to belong, and who is not, who is recognized as belonging, or granted the legitimacy to belong, and therefore what constitutes a community is in question. While there are many different types of communities, here I will primarily be concerned with those that constitute themselves as loosely affiliated political communities, made up of those who identify as feminist, and/​or as antiracist, or as demonstrating solidarity with trans communities. Within each such group there will be multiple differential perspectives; there are many, sometimes conflicting, ways of understanding feminism, antiracism, and transgender. I reflect here upon how such differences play themselves out with reference to Rancière’s understanding of the operation of dissensus in relation to feminist art. In construing politics as a matter of staging, of making visible, the miscount as a leaving out of account those who have no part, Rancière understands politics in the sense of dissensus, as a conflict of worlds, a conflict about the meaning of the perceptible, indeed about the very availability of that which can be seen and heard. At the same time it is a conflict about who is legitimated to speak and interpret what there is to be seen and heard, and to have their interpretations count. Dissensus puts into question what passes for common sense, what Rancière calls the “police” order of consensus, and thus provides the possibility of shaping meaning and intelligibility, the seeing of what there is to see, and the hearing of what there is to hear in a new way.2 The very possibilities of seeing 2 See the interview with Rancière, “The Janus-​Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière with Gabriel Rockhill,” in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:  Continuum, 2009), 65; hereafter cited as PA.

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or hearing, of perceiving the world, are renewed, such that the transcendental is subjected to a radically contingent, historical process, by which subjects who previously did not count not only insist on being counted, but in doing so change the terms in which subjectivity is thought, and therefore revise the conditions of possibility both of what it means to be a subject and also what it means to think and perceive (PA 50). For Rancière then it is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of politics as consensual, which claims to speak for all but in fact speaks only for those who govern the terms on which claims are deemed to have or lack intelligibility. It is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of art that takes itself to be representative, but in fact consists of a set of highly specific and exclusive norms that dictate what can and cannot be represented, how it should be represented, and who is entitled to judge it. Expressed positively, it is a question of seeing what happens when politics is reconceived not as consensus but as dissensus, when representation is no longer restricted by rules of appropriateness, where the operative model of art is porous, rather than a model that secures the boundaries of art by preserving its purity from contamination by everything it stipulates as something other than art. Let me turn to a series of examples, works of art not discussed by Rancière himself, in order to both think through Rancière’s appeal to dissensus more thoroughly, and to introduce a qualified challenge to it. We might approach one of the more well-​known untitled works by the Guerrilla Girls (which portrays Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque with a gorilla head and the words “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”) in two different ways.3 At first glance, we could regard it as simply occupying the role of a political slogan or manifesto, which didactically attempts to tell a public what to think. Understood thus, the work would purport to reveal a truth for an audience that stands in need of revelation. This work of art would thus fit seamlessly with the “pedagogical” model, whereby a previously ignorant public is ostensibly enlightened through exposure to a “ ‘meaningful spectacle’ which elicits ‘awareness’ of the state of the world” (PA 62–​63). In serving a political purpose the work would mobilize the public, galvanizing its viewers into action, and in the process it would evacuate its status as art by resolving itself into a political

3 http://​www.guerrillagirls.com/​naked-​through-​the-​ages. Accessed October 3, 2016.

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agenda. The work of art would position itself so as to provide “forms of awareness or rebellious impulses for politics.”4 Art would thus “take leave” of itself in order to become a form of “collective political action” (D 149). The Guerrilla Girls would decry the art establishment as a sexist institution.5 Inasmuch as we take these points to be self-​evident and the “political formula[e]‌” of the works of art in question to be readily “identifiable” (PA 63), their political commentary might be dismissed as largely redundant. If the “message” of the work of art is so readable as to be completely obvious, not only is the artistic status of the work of art in question, so too is its political merit. The question is thus not only whether in making a political point a work of art becomes too didactic to retain its status as a work of art in any meaningful sense, but also whether it crosses a definitive line and becomes a political statement. We can also ask whether a work of art advocates a form of politics that adheres to a model of consensus, which posits a community to come that would be unified according to a shared ideal in a manner consistent with Romanticism (and which, as such, would paper over the miscount), or whether, in view of the “aesthetic cut” (D 151) the work of art “questions its own limits and powers,” accepts its “insufficiency,” and “refuses to anticipate its own effects” in “framing a new landscape of the sensible” (D 149). Rather than assimilating this work of art to the pedagogical logic from which Rancière seeks to distance art as dissensus, or critiquing it for its aspiration to leave its status as art in order to become a political slogan that inspires collective action according to the logic of consenus, let’s consider from an alternative point of view what I  am referring to, for the sake of argument, as a work of art (some might see it as a political poster—​it was, after all, commissioned as a billboard). In fact part of both the complexity and the appeal of Rancière is his insistence upon maintaining the ambiguity of borders between works of art and other objects, political or otherwise. It is of some interest that this is a work that concerns itself not only with the art of politics, but also with the politics of art. That is, it offers a commentary on the relationship between the artist and the subject of the work of art. It does so not by asserting a political position, but by 4 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus:  On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 149; hereafter cited in the text as D. 5 In fact the Guerrilla Girls also attack aspects of capitalism, including a work that lampoons art collectors, the text of which reads: “Art is sooo expensive . . . we completely understand why you can’t pay your employees a living wage!” See https://​www.facebook.com/​guerrillagirls (accessed June 26, 2015).

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posing a question. It asks a rhetorical question and juxtaposes the question with two empirical claims. The question “Do women have to be naked in order to get into the Met museum?” is juxtaposed with a claim about the gender of artists whose work is on display in the museum, and a claim about the gendering of the subjects represented in the works displayed. If the number of female artists represented in the modern art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum is less than 5 percent, and 85 percent of the nudes represented are female, the implicit conclusion is that the vast majority of works representing “naked women” (PA 53) are by male artists. If we read the question that is being posed not only in the context of the observations specifying the gender of the majority of artists on display and the subjects they represent, but also against the background of the image of a female body that is foregrounded, we understand that what is being asked is not merely whether there is a relation between the gender of the artists represented in art museums and the subject matter they represent. In question, rather, is how women’s bodies are being represented, and what purposes their representation serve. In question is whether the only way that women can be granted access to museums is in the form of representations that show women as passive objects of a male gaze. Women, then, would only enter into museums in the guise of material content for male artists, who impose artistic form on the passive matter to which women’s bodies have been reduced, in representations by men and for a heteronormative, masculine symbolic. The active imposition of form on passive matter that is a hallmark of the representative regime for Rancière is here explicitly aligned with male subject-​artists representing female object-​bodies. By asking about the gendering of subjects typically displayed in museums, and how they are typically represented, we can understand this work as commenting on some of the defining features of the representative order, the norms that dictate, in Rancière’s words, “which subjects and forms of expression were deemed worthy of inclusion,” or what artistic conventions are considered appropriate for which subjects.6 We can see this work as commenting on the fact that the representative order “set those concerned by art apart from those that it did not concern” (AD 12; ME 23), and as challenging typical assumptions about whose concern art is. Here, the subject is represented as a supine figure reposing

6 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009), 10; hereafter cited as AD. Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 20; hereafter cited as ME.

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in a fashion that specifically cites a painterly image, and in doing so also evokes a litany of paintings spawned in the same tradition. Yet the work does not merely cite this painting or mimic this tradition—​though it does this, thereby reminding us that at issue here is not whether female nudes should be on display in museums, but how they are displayed, by whom, for whom, and for what purposes. At the same time it subverts this tradition, replacing a woman’s head with a gorilla’s head, fusing a female figure with the head of an animal (repeating, with a critical edge, a trope that has been effected so often before—​one thinks of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew). Gorillas are often caged in zoos for a public to view, a reference perhaps to the passivity of the women on display by male artists in museums curated for the pleasure of spectators. The gorilla head points to the habitual association of women with animals, at the same time as it refigures women’s alleged wildness as a refusal to be contained in a frame. What chance does a woman entertain of having her words taken seriously, of being heard, when she is reclining, naked, in a museum within a frame, we might ask, tongue in cheek, by way of recasting one of Mackinnon’s questions in a slightly different context.7 For on this occasion, the riposte must be that she has every chance. In this particular framing, far from quelling the speech of the unidentified, collective group that goes by the name of Guerrilla Girls, their speech is graphically represented within the same frame as a supine female body. Their speech spills out beyond the frame, putting into question a history of well-​rehearsed tropes and conventions that define the appropriate depiction of women’s bodies. Yet if there is an insistence upon being heard, there is also a playful citation to and incorporation of a history of art that reiterates old themes in a new way, transgressing and revising the norms that infuse them in a humorous manner. The citation the work performs is to Jean-​Auguste-​Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, which dates to 1814. The pose of the female body that appears in Ingres, recumbent on a chaise longue, is readily recognizable in the version presented by the Guerrilla Girls, but the head is replaced by a gorilla head, and a question is posed in the script written above the figure. The question this work by the Guerrilla Girls is asking us then is: how much has really changed in the years separating us from Ingres? How long will it take for 50 percent of the artists represented in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or any other major 7 Catherine Mackinnon, “Francis Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 193.

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art institution, to be female, and how would this transform not so much which subjects are depicted but how they are depicted, for what ends, and with what effects?8 There is a robust line of male artists following in the steps of Ingres, whose inspiration is not hard to map, whose work “we” are well accustomed to viewing in art museums, for example, Pablo Picasso’s La Grande Odalisque d’après Ingres (1907). In a well-​documented history of art, Ingres’s influences in his 1862 Le Bain Turc for instance—​which depicts the inner sanctum of a harem, where women relax, enjoying the company of one another—​have been traced back to Raphael. In turn, this theme has shaped a profusion of female nudes, inspiring a series of further painters, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Edgar Degas. We might begin to construct an alternative history by referring to Baby Back (2001) by Jamaican-​born American artist Renée Cox, a work included in “American Family.” Like the Guerrilla Girls, Cox also cites Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, imitating the pose of the female nude depicted there, but changing the color of the skin, and thereby challenging white, European and orientalist ideals of beauty. The work is a self-​portrait, in which the artist wears red high, spiky heels, dangles a phallic whip from her hand, and reclines on a chaise longue, her back to the viewer, her buttocks prominent, calling up other works by Cox, in which she implicitly imitates the cartoon caricature images to which Saarjit Baartman was subjected, when she was paraded in Europe as a freak, her remains having been returned by the Museé de l’homme to their rightful country of origin only in 2002, although her death was in 1815.9 If Cox plays with the question of race, other works refigure gender and class.10 In The Great Maiden by Moroccan artist 2Fik, a bearded male figure reposes in a fashion that again echoes Ingres’s Odalisque, in which the female nude turns her head coyly over her shoulder, acknowledging the gaze of the viewer, and dangles a feather fan from her right hand. The fan, which is also suggestive of autoeroticism, a phallic appendage, becomes a whip in Cox’s rendering, a reference to 8 The Guerrilla Girls have updated their figures, originally provided for 1989, and updated in 2005 and 2012, when the percentage of female artists to female nudes on display were 3 percent to 83 percent and 4 percent to 76 percent respectively. Similarly, in another work, they provide figures for how many women had one-​person shows in NYC galleries. In 1985 only one woman had such a show at the Modern. In 2015, one woman had such a show at the Guggenheim, Metropolitan, and Whitney, and there were two one-​person shows at the Modern. See http://​www.guerrillagirls.com/​posters/​ nakedthroughtheages.shtml (accessed June 26, 2015). 9 See Sanya Osha, “Venus and White Desire,” Transition 99 (2008): 80–​93. 10 A long series of works have responded to Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque. See http://​search.it.online. fr/​covers/​?p=45.

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slavery, perhaps, but one that reverses the power relationship of white domination, since here it is a black woman who wields authority over the whip. In 2Fik’s rendering, the fan becomes a feather duster, held by a hand clad in a bright pink rubber glove, accompanied by a plastic spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the left foreground of the picture, and a vacuum cleaner in the right background. In this context, the headscarf worn by the figure, citing Ingres’s turban, is reminiscent of a bandana that might be worn by a cleaning woman—​worn here, however, by a figure that would be conventionally coded as a man. 2fik’s reclining body is on display, while the paraphernalia of housework codes him in a way that both indicates and departs from the subservient, feminized service roles to which cleaners and housewives, usually employed for poor wages or unpaid, are typically consigned. Often consigned to invisibility, the task of cleaning takes on a highly visible role here in the shape of a trans figure that challenges conventional gender configurations in two different ways, on the one hand installing a male body in a feminized pose more often reserved for the female muses of male artists. On the other hand it mimics, even as it departs from, the class privilege of the reclining females depicted by Ingres in works such as La Grande Odalisque and Le Bain Turc, women attended by, in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s words, their “generally pritty” slaves “braiding their hair in several pritty manners.”11 The emergence of the museum plays a significant strategic role for Rancière, in that it marks a period of transition from the representative regime—​in which works of art ostensibly celebrated the dignity of those who commissioned them, or served the role of religious illustration—​to the aesthetic regime, when the addressee or spectator becomes “undifferentiated” (AD 9; ME 18). Henceforth, says Rancière, “artworks relate to the genius of peoples and present themselves, at least in principle, to the gaze of anyone at all” (AD 13; ME 24). Let me pause here for a moment, to mark the words, “at least in principle [en droit au moins],” for herein lies the difficulty on which my concerns focus, which Rancière thereby signals, albeit obliquely and in passing. The works of art by the Guerrilla Girls, Cox, and 2Fik indicate that the museum spectator is not as undifferentiated as Rancière might assume. Rather, museums, the exhibits they display, and the audiences they target are themselves implicated in nationalist, colonialist, racist,

11 See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters 1708–​1720, vol. I, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 314. See also Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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and cisgender bias, which the works by the Guerrilla Girls, Cox, and 2Fik render visible and put into question. Central to Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime is Kant’s free play, which, for Rancière, promises a humanity to come, heralding an “unprecedented equality” (AD 13; ME 24). The humanity to come signals an overcoming of Voltaire’s division between men of taste and those of coarse sensibility, a division that consists of conceiving of two humanities as “separate classes” that “have distinct senses” (AD 13; ME 23). There is, says Rancière, “no longer a hierarchy of active intelligence and sensible passivity” (AD 13; ME 24). So too the hierarchy of subjects and publics is blurred. Yet the question raised by the Guerrilla Girls, and by works such as that by Cox and 2Fik, is whether this hierarchy is not still very much intact, when it comes to race, gender, and heteronormativity. They point to the ways in which the gendering and racing of artworks tends to be directed toward specific audiences, audiences that are white, male, and heteronormative. Precisely in raising these questions, the Guerrilla Girls, Cox, and 2Fik also challenge the implicit framing of audiences to which they point. If this is indeed the case, then I am suggesting the Guerrilla Girls can be understood to intervene in “reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible” (AD 25; ME 38) as Rancière puts it, since their artwork distributes “spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular” (AD 25; ME 39) in new ways. In raising the question of whether women are still considered largely objects in the context of museums still dominated by male artists, and by inscribing women’s positionality as subjects who interrogate this state of affairs, the Guerrilla Girls are precisely opening up the arena for addressing the political question of who constitutes the community in Kant’s sensus communis. In foregrounding the question of race, Cox is issuing a challenge, one that might suggest that the intervention of at least this particular work of the Guerrilla Girls itself needs to be complicated. Some historical and theoretical excavation suggests that Cox’s implicit challenge to the Guerrilla Girls taps into the Orientalism that can be stipulated in relation to Ingres, which the Guerrilla Girls—​although they address the racism of the institution of art elsewhere—​leave unaddressed in their transfiguration of Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque.12

12 The text of one of their works, for example, reads, “Only 4 Commercial galleries in N.Y. show black women. Only 1 shows more than one.” http://​www.tate.org.uk/​art/​artworks/​guerrilla-​girls-​no-​title-​ p78806 (accessed June 26, 2015).

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As an art collective, the Guerrilla Girls offer an opportunity to interrogate the individualist assumptions that inform Rancière’s appeal to Kant’s understanding of the genius. We might ask whether Rancière tends to preserve the individualism of Kant’s theory of genius, even as he decries the view that equates Kant’s theory with that of the unique (see AD 10; ME 19). The Guerrilla Girls refuse the canons of the individual artist, identifying the origin of their work only with a group that remain unnamed and anonymous, its membership shifting, in a deliberate ploy to undermine the importance of identity and the cult of the individual artist, thus implicitly challenging the idea of the solitary genius. The work emanates from a political movement, a collective movement, a wider feminist movement, to which its collective authorship might be understood to allude, precisely to the extent that the Guerrilla Girls, with their underground tactics, refuse to go by their own names, preferring to adopt the names of past female artists, thereby blurring the boundary between past and present, calling up a history of women artists. The work also blurs the boundary between high art and low art, calling up a tradition of high art in a graphically comic manner, and crossing genres, inhabiting a space that is indeterminate: is this a poster, a political billboard, or is it a work of art that belongs in the Met? And what would be the difference? Not only is the question of authorship and linear temporality muddied by the collective anonymity of a group consisting of a constantly changing membership, and of individuals who represent themselves by taking on the names of historical female artists, so too in this particular case, the work destabilizes itself, rewriting its own history. Another piece appears in 2014, which the Guerrilla Girls refer to as a “remix,” updating the original work, in which a second female nude, a still from Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, is superimposed on the figure that cites Ingres’s female nude, and the words referring to the number of female nudes in the Met are replaced so that the text now reads “Do women have to be naked to get into music videos? While 99% of the guys are dressed!”13 In another citational work referring us back to the figures quoted by the Guerrilla Girls within the context of the United States, no image at all appears, simply the words: “It’s even worse in Europe.”14 This series of works present us with the question of whether or how Rancière’s reflections can accommodate feminist critique. At the same time, it 13 See http://​www.guerrillagirls.com (accessed June 26, 2015). 14 http://​www.guerrillagirls.com/​posters/​index.shtml.

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brings to Rancière’s work a history of feminist critique, a body of scholarship, thinking, and activism that makes it possible to formulate Rancière’s understanding of political and artistic dissensus in terms of feminist concerns. The Guerrilla Girls insist on framing women’s bodies with the words of women, with the concerns of black women, and with transgender concerns. They shift the stakes of nudity, which is presented for women, by women, against a background (that of Ingres’s painting) in which women were passive figures, rather than active speakers. Taking account of Cox helps us to think through how the Guerrilla Girls might give a voice to some women more effectively than to others. Cox intervenes in such a way as to render visible how the Guerrilla Girls (again, in the particular works on which I focus here) continue to silence some women even as they speak for other women. 2Fik disrupts gender norms that typically align certain body parts with feminized scripts, and certain service roles with women. Such artists are capable of shifting the terms of discourse, sight, and the perceptual field in such a way as to alter the landscape of the visible. The history of feminist critique is itself contested ground, in which conceptual and political battles have been fought and continue to play themselves out over the claims of intersectionality. Queer theory has contested the heteronormativity of feminist theory, the transgender movement has contested the normativity of both, questions have been raised about the relevance of class to an invisibly middle-​class feminist theory, and race theorists have contested the implicit ownership of feminist theory by white feminists. A history then that might itself be understood in terms of a series of clashes between the police order of feminism as usual, and moments of political dissensus that stage the imperative to redraw the map of feminism so as to render it not merely more inclusive of those who have played no part in traditional feminism, but capable of structural challenge and transformation so that those whose invisibility has been allowed to remain invisible is rendered visible, and those who have claimed the right to dictate the terms on which feminism is meaningful can no longer assume the right to define the logos of feminist theory or activism. Rancière acknowledges that the way in which the police order is defined, and therefore what will qualify as political dissensus, is dependent upon context when he suggests that “[t]‌he politics of works of art plays itself out to a larger extent—​in a global and diffuse manner—​in the reconfiguration of worlds of experience based on which police consensus or political dissensus are defined” (PA 65). This suggests that whether a work of art amounts to a political slogan or

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not will depend on how the community that receives it constitutes itself, on what counts as common sense for a given community. A writer cannot control how her words might be received any more than an artist can control the meaning of her work of art (see PA 62). Yet it is worth speculating that were a reader to identify themselves under the sign of feminism, the chances are that the second strand of analysis of the Guerrilla Girls I have suggested earlier is likely to have acquired a level of self-​evidence. The same might be said in reference to the way I have framed Renée Cox’s Baby Back were a reader to understand themselves as configured in ways that are racialized, or with regard to 2Fik in relation to trans concerns. In this sense whether a redistribution of the sensible takes place or not is dependent on what constitutes common sense for a given community. Depending on how a given community constitutes itself, what counts as common and what does not, certain questions will not merely be salient, but all too familiar; or else they will not appear at all: they will remain invisible, unintelligible, incoherent, irrelevant, meaningless, beside the point, or perhaps outlandish, threatening, and abrasive. It is precisely around such divisions that dissensus takes shape. By taking a work produced by the Guerrilla Girls feminist collective, by Cox, by 2Fik, and suggesting ways in which these works challenge one another as well as some of Rancière’s assumptions, my intention has been to explore the relationship between particular political movements and Rancière’s understanding of how political art functions as dissensus in the aesthetic regime. By emphasizing the contextual character of the relationship between the police order of consensus that orchestrates prevailing perceptions and the dissensual fracturing of the common sense, my effort is directed toward refining the sense in which Rancière’s conception of politics can be understood to operate. Rather than falling prey to feminist critiques that focus on showing how Kant’s formulation of the transcendental is wanting because it presents itself as being impartial while in fact betraying partiality, I suggest that in thinking through the logic of dissensus, Rancière provides a vocabulary that can shed light on feminist interventions, precisely in the manner that intersectional approaches to feminist theory require. That is, as certain exclusions that were previously invisible and unintelligible, even to progressive politics, are rendered salient and meaningful, what constituted common sense proves itself open to revision, through an ongoing process of challenges. Feminist philosophy and politics can illuminate Rancière’s understanding of the operation of dissensus, which appeals to a state of affairs that a given

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community takes as self-​evident, a self-​evidence that the operation of dissensus brings into question. In this sense the earlier analysis takes seriously and thinks through the fact that communities are differentially constituted with regard to what passes for self-​evident partly in order to acknowledge that Rancière’s own understanding of what is self-​evident is liable to be constituted in such a way as to emphasize certain factors as salient, while ignoring, disregarding, or failing to see others as salient. Feminist art and philosophy provide examples of such partiality. Let me emphasize that I make this point in the interests of maintaining a conversation between feminist theory and Rancière rather than closing it down, precisely because I think an exchange between the two is so productive. In terms of the political examples he provides, Rancière proves to be unusually inclusive and appreciative of feminist political and race struggles, including Olympe de Gouges, Jeanne Deroin, and Rosa Parks in his examples of politically dissensual actors. My discussion here is offered as a way of explicitly opening up his aesthetic considerations to a feminist sensibility—​a gesture I assume he would not oppose, but would rather welcome, given his sensitivity to feminist concerns elsewhere in his work—​thereby illustrating that his aesthetics are amenable to being opened up in this way. There is a sense in which the narrative arc of this chapter might be said to replicate the problem it tries to address, by moving from the Guerrilla Girls to Cox to 2Fik. Perhaps it will be said, with some justification, I  should have begun with 2Fik, or Cox, since by foregrounding the Guerrilla Girls, I continue to tell the story of feminism by centering the experience and reflections of white women, and only acknowledging as an afterthought African-​American feminist and trans challenges to what is thereby assumed to be white, heterosexual, and cisgender ownership of feminist thought. After consideration, I have chosen to take this risk both to respect the sequential appearance and citational references of these works of art, which can be read as playing off one another, and to illustrate how feminism both participates in establishing new versions of the police order and is capable of conflict and fracture. How well feminism can accommodate dissensus varies from one context to another; its success in doing so might be taken as an index of its vitality and continued importance as a movement. The necessary tensions of the feminist movement continue to play themselves out. Throughout this piece the referentiality of the “we” I  have invoked has vacillated. A community of readers that has become attuned to the implicit heteronormativity of an orientalist discourse such as Montagu’s is invoked at one moment, a community of readers attuned to the sexism or racism of

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art institutions at another. Such overlapping communities will be more or less sensitive to the concerns of one another. The degree of sensitivity to the dynamic of race, gender, or heteronormative presumption is not reducible to how one identifies in relation to these categories; neither is it insensitive to it. It is a question of how much thinking and reading and reflecting and challenging one has done in order to appreciate the degree to which our ways of seeing, perceiving, and thinking are inevitably caught up in normative orders of which it is difficult to become aware; even when we are aware of them, the normativity is difficult to combat. It is a matter of acquiescing to the fact that an optics of unconscious dictates what we see and what we do not see, how we orchestrate and react to the world, how we schematize and react to people as raced, classed, gendered, and so on, and to interrogating these optics. Art can distill such schematizations and as such can render them available for interrogation. It can also participate in and help to produce new schematizations. In short, it is a question of how we perceive the world and how the world can be brought under contestation, how it can become another world, how we can perceive it differently in fundamental ways, how the structuring of race, gender, or heteronormativity, for example, can arrange what there is to see or hear or understand. Art can bring into conflict two different worlds, producing dissensus. The very conditions of possibility for understanding can undergo revision.

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Rancière and Proust: Two Temptations Suzanne Guerlac

“I realize that my practice of philosophy makes the reading of my work difficult” Before we address what Rancière has to say about Proust—​to evoke the complicity that could be said to exist between them—​let’s consider for a moment who is speaking, and why.1 Rancière is a strategic, and rigorously polemical, thinker who never loses sight of his “fundamental intuition” of equality, “the dispersal and multiplication of capacities and possibilities.”2 His thinking is always on the move, altering concepts, and rereading histories that are compromised. And they are all compromised to the extent that knowledge is an instrument of class domination. Although the critique of Althusser was conducted many decades ago, the force of that critique has informed the specific character of Rancière’s work, which is not just interdisciplinary but deliberately transdisciplinary in a way that cuts through, and disrupts, boundaries of intellectual competence or authority.3 What is principally at stake in his own work, Rancière writes, “is the contestation of the divisions that reserve one question for philosophy, another for politics, sociology, or aesthetics. Historical singularities are never disciplines.”4 It is not a question of thinking about politics. Thinking itself is

1 Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus. Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière, eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 15. 2 Jacques Rancière, “Politique de l’indétermination esthétique,” in Jacques Rancère et la politique de l’esthétique, eds. Jérôme Game and Aliocha Wald Lasowski (Paris:  Editions des archives contemporaines, 2009), 165. All translations from this essay are mine. 3 See Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). The original French edition, La Leçon d’Althusser, appeared in 1974. The French version was republished by La Fabrique in 2011. For a discussion of the importance of the critique of Althusser for Rancière’s subsequent thought, see Bruno Bosteels, “Reviewing Rancière, Or the Persistence of Discrepancies,” Radical Philosophy 171 (November–​December 2011): 25–​31. 4 Rancière, “Politique de l’indétermination esthétique,” 167.

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a political practice: “It is necessary to break the divisions between disciplines. This epistemological requirement is also a political requirement.”5 Nor is it a matter of writing about aesthetics; writing is itself an aesthetic practice in that it participates in the constitution of a common experience, altering relations of sensibility and thought, and possibilities for action or art making. Rancière, we might say, is a storyteller, to the extent that “the mode of discourse that refutes all hierarchy is the story [récit].”6 His stories—​consisting of staged scenes or examples—​are tonic.7 Reading Rancière one cannot run for cover to familiar ideas or territories. One can only try to summon the energy to fight back a little—​to reclaim some ground or introduce a new turn—​or simply dance with him and let the ground—​and it will be new ground—​gather under one’s feet. Rancière and Proust: they are a match for each other, if only with respect to the complexity and ambition of their work.

“Addressing an author or a concept first means to me setting the stage for a disagreement, testing an operator of difference. This also means that my theoretical operations are always aimed at reframing the configuration of a problem” What might the problem be when it comes to Proust?8 It depends at what level you choose to enter the conversation. We could say the problem is how to read Proust’s novel. We could say it is: what is literature? (Rancière opens Mute Speech by invoking Sartre’s question and puzzling over the tendency to quickly dismiss it.) We could say the problem is established discourses of modernism and postmodernism, presupposed in discussions of authors such as Proust. “I don’t think,” Rancière writes, “that the notions of modernity and avant-​garde have been particularly enlightening [éclairantes] for thinking . . . 5 Ibid., 167–​68. 6 Ibid., 168. 7 “The pertinence of a concept is inseparable from the construction of a scene, it is this thought [cette pensée] that governs my use of ‘examples’ that aren’t examples [qui n’en sont pas]. My examples stage the division [partage], that is to say the immanence of the division in the community that the universal of the definition declares, and, inversely, the common power of the language and of the thought in the staging of the difference of capacities” (ibid.). 8 Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière, eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 2.

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relations between aesthetics and politics.”9 In his two essays on Proust (“Artifice, Madness, Work” in Mute Speech and “Proust:  War, Truth, the Book” in The Flesh of Words) Rancière reframes these relations traditionally frozen in place between a (Sartrean) conception of engagement and a (Greenbergian) conception of aesthetic modernism.10 The Sartrean attitude long ago revealed itself susceptible to crude ideological appropriation. Moreover, Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernism (which found its way into French theory in the Tel Quel milieu, infiltrating into notions of text and significance and implicit in Lyotard’s meditations on the sublime) not only divorced modern art from politics but, as Rancière reads it, enacted a reactionary politics.11 In Aisthesis Rancière undertakes a full-​fledged “counter-​history of ‘artistic modernism’ [modernité artistique]” in the French context (AS 13). Mute Speech and The Flesh of Words began to lay the groundwork for this counter-​history. More pointedly (and at the same time more generally) we could say that the problem Rancière addresses through Proust is a contemporary temptation to a mild form of nihilism, a feeling of cultural impotence that Rancière diagnoses in perspectives and practices that, identifying themselves as postmodern, can be considered offshoots, or effects, of Greenberg’s modernism.12 The question then becomes how to invent modes of resistance to the bleak contemporary landscape of belatedness—​post-​Marxism, post-​democracy, post-​history, post-​politics and postmodernism—​that leave us with the sense that our hands are tied when it comes to politics and even art. Or, put another way, how to revitalize both thinking (philosophy) and doing (politics and art making) in a world where philosophy has collapsed into (negative) theology on the one hand and science on the other, where politics has been evacuated (globally) under pressures

9 Rancière, Le Partage du sensible (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), 26. All translations from this work are mine and subsequent references to this work will be marked PS. 10 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-​Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no.  5 (1939):  34–​49. Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech, trans. James Swenson (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2011), originally published in France in 1998. Subsequent references to this work will be to this edition and will be given in the text, in parenthesis, marked MS; Rancière, The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2004), also originally published in French in 1998. Subsequent references to this work will be to this edition and will be given in the text, in parenthesis, marked FW. 11 For Rancière’s critique of Clement Greenberg, see Aisthesis, Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 304–​306. All translations from this work are mine and subsequent references to this work will be marked AS. Rancière, “Rethinking Modernity,” Diacritics 42, no. 3 (2014): 6–​20. 12 See “Farewell to Artistic and Political Impotence, Jacques Rancière Interviewed by Gabriel Rockhill and Alexi Kukuljevic,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 77–​81.

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of consensus and social management, and where art practices are absorbed into market protocols. It is only when we take seriously the broader (more or less Kantian) sense of the aesthetic for Rancière—​when we remember that an “esthétique première” is embedded, from the start, in his notion of the political as a “debate concerning what is given to the senses [ce qui est donné sensiblement] what lets itself be seen, the manner in which this is sayable and who can say it” that we grasp how it is that the partition of the sensible, which concerns the distribution of the very forms of collective experience, opens and reopens relations between the political and the aesthetic.13 Icon of high modernism (along with Valéry, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf) Proust nevertheless slips through the cracks of literary historical narratives and critical theories. Although the Vocation Story of Remembrance of Things Past fits neatly with the modernist imperative of self-​reflexivity—​if Marcel becomes a writer at the end of Time Regained, he is, for modernist critics, the writer of the novel we have just read—​other modernist requirements, the critique of the subject, for example, and the stipulation that writing should be about “language itself ” are not compatible with traditional interpretations of Proust that read the vocation story in terms of the redemptive powers of art, and art as a manifestation of the truth of essences. Nor was the massive scale of Proust’s novel compatible with the modernist insistence on condensed forms (we think of Poe and Baudelaire). Impossible to pin down, Proust was always a site of cultural contradiction. In this respect he was an excellent candidate for Rancière’s rereading, for his staging of literature as contradiction and for his redistribution of the categories of modernism, philosophy, and aesthetics. Perhaps as a symptom of the kind of cultural atmosphere of disenchantment that Rancière is, thankfully, willing to push back against, it has become fashionable to approach Proust’s work in a spirit of déglonflage.14 A  war against core tenants of traditional Proust criticism—​the truth of essences and the myth of redemption through art—​is being waged by simply reversing the terms of that myth. A  reading of enchantment is replaced by a reading of disenchantment. This does not reframe the problem; it leaves the framework intact and repositions 13 Rancière, “Politique de l’indétermination esthétique,” 157; Le Partage du sensible, esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000). 14 I borrow the term from Kracauer. See Miriam Hansen’s introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1997), xvii. Rancière’s notion of “skeptical art,” it should be noted, is something quite different from the literary criticism intent on debunking Proustian myths.

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Proust with respect to it. Rancière makes a huge contribution to Proust criticism by his willingness to take Proust seriously—​indeed very seriously—​without turning to him for either enchantment or disenchantment, but for disagreement. The partition of the sensible is always un état de force. It involves debate because it is an act of resistance, not to a particular structure of power, but to false truths and inevitable exclusions, and to the pall of consensus, which spells the end of politics as well as art. Politics is, in a sense, disagreement (mésentente) and literature, misunderstanding (le malentendu).15

“Literature is . . . caught between two nullifications” (MS 146) Rancière writes about Proust, then, in the context of an ambitious attempt to reconfigure relations between aesthetics and politics. In Mute Speech he kidnaps Flaubert and Mallarmé—​crucial figures in the modernist trajectory—​and casts them in new roles in a story framed by Victor Hugo and Balzac on the one hand and Proust on the other. Proust becomes the hero of this story that displaces literary modernism from the autotelic, anti-​representational field conventionally identified as modern, and sets it on another path. This story takes realism as its point of departure and opens up the territory of literature that Rancière identifies with the “aesthetic regime of the arts.”16 A first step in reframing the problem of aesthetic modernity in Mute Speech is to rephrase the notion of representation. Instead of construing it in relation to description and verisimilitude, Rancière sets it up in terms of Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, which concerns narrating, or dramatizing, actions. This shift enables him to re-​characterize the rules of classical literature as a structure of constraints that depends upon social hierarchy, not a set of independent formal principles waiting to be challenged by other formal gestures. Rancière theorizes what he calls the “representative regime of the arts” as a fundamentally social order of belles lettres that ties the subject matter of writing to social standing, 15 “Political disagreement [mésentente] and literary misunderstanding each take on/​are to blame for [s’en prennent à] one aspect of this consensual paradigm of proportion between words and things” [la politique de mésentente et le malentendu littéraire s’en prennent donc chacun à un aspect de ce paradigme consensuel de proportion entre les mots et les choses].” Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée 2007), 52. 16 Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 23.

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links genre to subject matter, and manner of speaking (elocutio) to the socially structured sensibilities and expectations of readers or spectators.17 The representative regime, in other words, is an order that ties words and things together on the basis of constraints determined by social hierarchy. At the turn of the nineteenth century an aesthetic regime of the arts undoes these constraints. This is where art as we know it—​and what we call “literature”—​emerges historically. The subject of the literary work is cut free—​one can talk about anything or anyone at all. The correlation between subject matter and mode of representation is undone, which breaks down the system of genres. When the anti-​genre of the novel takes the place of the elevated genre of the epic we are left with style as principal matter of concern. The aesthetic regime of art, in other words, ushers in what we call literature by ruining the representative regime of letters. Hence the emancipatory potential of literature, but also its fragility. Art now risks collapsing back into life: “If the identification of art in the singular is simultaneously the destruction of the very distinction between art and the commonplace, art in the aesthetic regime is in the grips of a fundamental contradiction.”18 The force of this contradiction puts literature in crisis from the start. This is the precarious trajectory of modern art (or literature) that unfolds in the shadow of Hegel’s proclaimed dénouement: the end of art, which would be absorbed into thought and by social institutions or forms of life. The turning point in this story is Madame Bovary, which realized Flaubert’s determination to write a novel about nothing—​or anyone at all—​but in a perfect style. With this gesture literature becomes democratic. It is placed in the service of what Rancière calls “the glory of the ordinary [quelconque],” where the ordinary becomes “the beautiful as trace of the true” (PS 50, 52). But the opposition between a necessity of language (Flaubert’s search for an absolute language or perfect style) and an indifference to content leads to an impasse in Bouvard et Pécuchet where art and idiocy become nearly indistinguishable. This is the kind of collapse of art into life that spells the end of art. On Rancière’s account, Mallarmé responds to this crisis with a commitment to the opposite tendency, one that carried a comparable, though opposite, risk. With Mallarmé, poetry “vanished into the life of the spirit” (MS 148). It is in this sense that literature finds itself caught between “two nullifications” (MS 146), and it remains in this

17 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:  Continuum, 2004), 18; hereafter PA. 18 Gabriel Rockhill, editor’s introduction to ibid., 15.

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precarious position well into the twentieth century, where the “nullifications” are associated with Artaud, on the one hand, whose commitment to an intimate proximity of art and life leads to madness and idiosyncrasy and, on the other, with various modes of formalist poetics (or a poetics of play or textuality), which trivializes art, removing it from life altogether. Rancière needs literature. He needs it to keep philosophy and the social sciences in check, to recast knowledge as a “poetics of knowledge,” and to contest the political order of police—​the “regime of identity.”19 This is where Proust comes in. He becomes the hero who saves literature by taking up, and working productively with, its contradictions. On Rancière’s account, Proust both diagnoses what is at stake in the crisis of literature prompted, at its inception, by the aesthetic regime of the arts, and finds a solution to it: “For some forty years now” (Rancière cites Proust from his notebook of 1908) to the effect that “literature has been dominated by the contrast between the gravity of the expression and the frivolity of the subject (a result of Madame Bovary)” (MS 145). We can recognize here how important Proust’s diagnosis is to the terms of Rancière’s analysis. Proust’s solution to the crisis, according to Rancière, was precisely not to choose one side or the other of the literary dilemma but to identify literature with the playing out of this contradiction, which he does in exemplary fashion in Remembrance of Things Past.

“Literature emancipates when it doesn’t tell us how to use art or literature—​how we have to understand, how we have to see, how we have to read, and what we have to understand.” Rancière’s reading of Proust in “Artifice, Madness, the Work” (Mute Speech) is deliberately open ended.20 The first move is to situate Proust within his own story about the aesthetic regime of art and its contradictions. Because the “epiphanic moments” in Remembrance are “simultaneously essential and aleatory” (MS 156), he writes, the Proustian “poetics of impression” (MS 161)—​a notion 19 “Politique de l’indétermination esthétique,” 169. For “poetics of knowledge,” see Rancière’s Les Mots de l’histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992); hereafter MH. For the order of the police, see La Mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995). 20 Jacques Rancière with Anne Marie Oliver, “Aesthetics against Incarnation: An Interview by Anne Marie Oliver,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 181. http://​www.jstor.org/​stable/​10.1086/​595633.

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others identify with involuntary memory—​provides literature with “a material that allows it to escape the impasse constituted by the Flaubertian frivolity of the subject that drags form down into its insignificance and the Mallarméan essentiality that leads to the paralysis of writing” (MS 156). Because this literary material also operates as a kind of hieroglyph that ostensibly hides a secret spiritual meaning, Rancière reads the Proustian impression as a double mark, one that operates as both form and content, according to the structure of the linguistic sign. Rancière doesn’t make this linguistic association, but he does read the Proustian impression as a mode of writing, an operation of metaphor: “It is metaphor alone that unfolds and makes manifold the one of pure sensation that punctures the concatenation of habits and beliefs. Metaphor, as a power of both order and disorder, is charged with a two-​fold labor” (MS 159).21 The Proustian poetics of impressions implies a nomadic dynamic of tropes that Rancière defines as a contradiction of language with itself: “The trope is the difference between language and itself, the shuttle between the space of words and the space of what they say” (MS 145–​46). It shuttles, we could say, between the signifier and the signified. Rancière takes up the tension between content and form in Remembrance on another level as well, namely, as a tension between this poetics of impressions and the architecture—​the narrative structure—​of the novel. Examining the relation between the poetic moments of impressions (which he compares to prose poems) and the architecture of a novel, he poses a version of the question Barthes asks, namely, how might Proust pass from the haiku to the novel?22 It is this tension that Rancière evokes most frequently when he refers to the productive contradictions of Proust’s work. He speaks of Proust “doubling the truth of the book [dédoublant la vérité du livre]”: On the one hand the truth reveals itself as the result of an apprenticeship carefully constructed by the writer as a passage through anti-​artistic errors [erreurs anti-​artistique]; on the other hand it arrives as the form of pure event that overtakes the subject from within [surpend le sujet en lui] without his knowing it.23

21 “The double mark of the ‘impression’ is the myth of writing, but this myth of writing is caught up in the labor of writing” (MS 160). 22 “My problem,” Barthes writes (speaking also of Proust’s problem) “is how to pass from the Notation (of the Present)” that he identifies with the haiku, “to the Novel” that he identifies with Proust’s novel. See Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–​79 and 1979–​80) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 23. 23 “d’un côté la vérité se révèle comme la conclusion d’un apprentissage savamment construit par l’écrivain comme une traversée d’erreurs anti-​artistique; de l’autre, elle advient comme la

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Remembrance activates a contradiction between these two kinds of truth, an “ecstatic” truth Rancière will elsewhere characterize in terms of “fragments of life” (alluding perhaps to Proust’s “small fragments of realness [petits fragments de réel]” and a truth constructed through narrative form).24 As if to insist upon the importance of this tension Rancière reminds us that the disconnect between architecture (or plot) and impression (including the discursive reflections upon the poetics of impression, which includes the so-​called theory of involuntary memory) is reflected in Proust criticism in the difference between two basic types of readings of Remembrance. One (exemplified by Vincent Descombes) favors the narrative unfolding of the novel (Descombes borrows Northrop Frye’s term “extraversion”) that we enjoy, for example, when Proust stages the Guermantes’ world.25 The other (exemplified here by Anne Henri’s studies) privileges the Narrator’s discursive commentaries, digressive moments in Remembrance that articulate the logic of the poetic, or epiphantic, moments of the novel.26 Not surprisingly, the whole point is not to choose between these two kinds of readings: “The shuttle between ‘impression’ and ‘architecture’ is not merely a confrontation between ecstatic truth and constructed truth. The truth of the book, the truth in action of literature is the conflict between these truths, the movement that makes them work together and against one another” (MS 163).27 In Remembrance, Rancière writes, “[A]‌rchitecture delegates its task to impression as the impression does to architecture” (MS 162). The poetry of the novel is in the prose and the prose is in the poetry; the content is in the form and the form in the content; the art is in the life and the life in the art. This does not imply a dialectical resolution of tensions into a third term but rather a dynamic tension that plays out in modes of interaction and reciprocity. In sum, “Proust forme du pur événement qui surprend le sujet en lui sans qu’il le sache” (Rancière, “Politique de l’indétermination esthétique,” 162; my translation). 24 Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 1621. All translations of this work are mine. 25 Vincent Descombes, Proust. Philosophie du roman (Paris:  Minuit, 1987), 75. It should be noted that Rancière implicitly identifies the truth of impressions, with the Narrator’s own attempts to give the truth of these moments discursively, in digressive remarks. That is, it suggests an identification between the poetics of impressions and the textual level Benveniste refers to as discourse, as distinct from story. 26 Rancière refers us to Vincent Descombes, Proust:  Philosophy of the Novel (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1992); Anne Henri’s Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981); and Proust romancier: Le tombeau égyptien (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). 27 Rancière even proposes at one point that “[i]‌t was the transfer of the power of narrative into the power of metaphor that overturned belles-​lettres and gave rise to literature” (MS 171), a formulation which gives Proust pride of place in the emergence of literature, nudging Flaubert aside.

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only proves literature by exhibiting its contradictions, making that contradiction the principle of the work, the shuttle between the work and discourse about the work, between the experience of life and the artifice of art” (MS 163). What is at stake here is “literature’s capacity for resistance,” resistance both to the forces that would undo literature and to orders of consensus and false truths. A second essay, “Proust: War, Truth, Book,” published the same year in The Flesh of Words, also concerns disagreement between two types of writing and two types of truth, but different truths are at stake. Rancière emphasizes the importance to Proust of the architectural conception of his novel. He cites a well-​known letter Proust wrote to Gaston Gallimard in 1916, in which he defends himself against criticisms that his writing was merely impressionistic, made up of autobiographical fragments, and insists that the architecture of his novel regulates its meaning. Shoring up the status of the novel’s projected form in this way, Rancière then stages a kind of invasion of historical reality into this ordered fictive world. The war, he insists, breaks into Proust’s fictional universe in a way that Proust never could have anticipated when he initially planned his novel. As there are numerous allusions to historical events in the Remembrance (the Dreyfus Affair, the Panama Scandal, Napoleon III) what apparently matters to Rancière is that the war comes after the architecture of the novel had been established and so could be said to threaten or to challenge it. As Rancière acknowledges, the war does not enter into Proust’s narrative per se. There are no episodes of war. Instead, at the beginning of Time Regained Proust devotes a number of pages to the Narrator’s nighttime wanderings in wartime Paris, which he discerns with fresh eyes, having returned after a prolonged stay at a sanatorium outside the city, where he has been recuperating for an indefinite period of time. Through the Narrator’s musings as he walks through Paris under siege, Proust gives us an analysis of the French response to the war. Among a number of other opinions (the Narrator recounts the way notions of nationhood and nationalism pass, in Tardean fashion, from the newspapers to the salons) we hear about Saint-​ Loup’s enthusiastic appreciation of the “poetry” of the war as expressed by soldiers on the battlefield. He has admired the sublime force of the ordinary language of the (ordinary) soldiers under his command, spoken in the face of imminent danger. He has evoked its epic character. The only episode Proust gives us that is explicitly associated with wartime Paris, the only one that

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includes French soldiers and suffering bodies, contrasts starkly with Saint-​ Loup’s exalted emotion: it is the Narrator’s chance encounter with Charlus at Jupien’s brothel which specializes in satisfying the sadomasochistic fantasies of male homosexuals. Although we hear about the patriotic soldiers on the front, the soldiers we see stage fictive scenes of violence to male bodies in this fictive episode of Proust’s novel, one that takes its meaning, Rancière implies, not from the architecture of the novel but from its stark contrast with the real historical events of the war. For Rancière, the clash between these two events—​the historical one and the fictive one—​amounts to a metaphorical “war” between two types of writing, the epic and the novel, and between two types of truth: the truth of the book, where untethered words claim no foundation in life, and the truth of incarnated speech (la parole incarnée), “truth made of flesh and blood” (FW 126). This is the truth of the patriotic epic—​“poem shaped in the certainty of a sentient identity that constitutes a people as people, in the appropriation of bodies, words and deeds that weave a community, in the agreement between a way of being, a way of acting and a way of speaking” (FW 119–​20). It is a truth inherently “antagonistic to that of fictional demonstration” (FW 114). Rancière cites a long and chilling passage from the war chronicles of Maurice Barrès that resonates disturbingly with certain passages of Remembrance. His intention here is not to identify Proust with Barrès (this would be a vulgar move) but to bring home the seductive power—​the very real danger—​of “the identity-​truth of the world made flesh” (FW 120). Because it threatens not only the fictional world of Proust’s novel but literary truth more generally, Rancière argues, it provokes an urgent need, on Proust’s part, to refute it precisely by including the war in the novel and fighting against it by literary means, “closing, once and for all . . . the door of truth made of flesh and blood” (FW 126). This he does by writing the fictive scene that stages other soldiers and other suffering bodies, men who find their sadomasochistic pleasure at Jupien’s house, including not only the germanophile Charlus but also the French patriot and war hero, Saint-​Loup. It is ultimately Saint-​Loup’s implication in this scene that renders it not just ironic but, as Rancière put it, a sacrilege, not only a sacrilege against the fatherland but a desecration of incarnate truth itself, “Christian truth, that of the incarnate spirit” (FW 120). Proust, Rancière argues, stages a battle to the death between the word made flesh and the quixotic, unmoored language that deploys only fictional logics. The scene Rancière stages in this reading of the wartime stroll could be said to allegorize

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the dissensus specific to literature, but in a battle that pits dissensus itself against agreement as identity-​truth. The battle of literature against anti-​literature is unremitting. Proust writes his book, Rancière affirms, between two temptations. The first is the idea of a book made of “fragments of life,” of “sensations that are imprinted in ourselves.”28 The second is the temptation of la parole incarnée, a writing “that would be the flesh of a ‘living spirit.’ ”29 Rancière’s two essays could be said to address these two “temptations,” and yet, upon reflection, they hardly seem parallel. For in “Artifice, Madness, the Work,” Rancière did not set up the poetics of impressions as a temptation that needed to be violently resisted. He presented it as an opportunity to resolve a certain crisis of literature, caught between two “nullifications,” an opportunity to rework the terms of this crisis of literature into a skeptical art, an art that “investigates itself, that makes fictions from this investigation, that plays with its myths, challenges its philosophy and challenges itself in the name of this philosophy” (MS 174), and an empowering practice of contradiction. He depicted Proust, we remember, as a writer who shuttles back and forth between textual levels and literary truths. In Mute Speech, the ecstatic truth of impressions—​those open sesame moments of involuntary memory—​were portrayed as an operation of metaphor, that is, as a mode of writing in productive tension with the constructed truth of narrative fiction. In that essay, contradiction included reciprocity:  the contesting elements relegate their tasks to one another. Moreover, the contradictory forces at play have deep roots in the very constitution of the aesthetic regime of art—​in the very emergence of literature as contradiction, which it is from the start. In “Proust: War, Truth, Book,” on the other hand, contradiction becomes war—​“an open war of truths” (FW 123). It is war to the death. It is definitive: there are winners and losers. Because here we are not dealing with the contradiction that is internal to literature, we are dealing with a confrontation between literature and “anti-​literature.” Under Proust’s pen the democratic regime of fiction, where “no body subjected to suffering and derision verifies the truth of any book” (FW 123), defeats “truth made of flesh and blood” (FW 126).

28 Rancière with Oliver, “Aesthetics against Incarnation,” 177. 29 Ibid.

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Disagreement (or, perhaps, misunderstanding) When Rancière dramatizes an irruption of the real event into the fiction of Remembrance, invoking Proust’s letter to insist upon the importance of the novel’s architecture, he is being strategic, just as strategic perhaps as Proust presumably was when he sent that letter to reassure Gallimard concerning the value of his work. As readers of Proust are well aware, and as Rancière himself explicitly points out in “Artifice, Madness, the Work,” the architecture of Proust’s novel is unusual to say the least: “the enigma of the Remembrance is . . . known from the outset. The door that the story should unlock has been held open by the labor of metaphor from the beginning” (MS 160). There is no real progression from beginning, middle to end. The ultimate revelation of involuntary memory as it assists writing is already given in the Madeleine episode in Combray. “The knowledge gained by the hero of Remembrance can never be enough to make him a writer” (MS 162); indeed it seems to have little to do with the novel’s ending and this is precisely its brilliance. When the war intrudes into the novel, I would suggest, it intrudes not into the fiction, or the architecture of Proust’s novel, but into the very process of its writing; it alters the very being of the work. There are several architectures of this ever-​expanding novel that Proust kept writing until his dying day. There was the novel conceived in three parts—​Swann’s Way, Guermantes Way, and Time Regained—​that tells the story of the desire to write and ends with the embrace of the Vocation. It evokes the timeless play of metaphor (an aesthetic logic, Proust writes, comparable to the causal logic of scientific reason) as a means of escaping time and reaching the true essences of things.30 But then, with the war—​“the death of millions of unknowns” (2190)—​Proust’s novel goes off in new directions. Rerouted through Sodom and Gomorra, it places Albertine at its center and more than doubles in size. In other words, there are not only two truths at play in Proust’s novel, and two poetics, but also (at least) two “architectures” of this work that critics increasingly treat as an unfinished work, further problematizing the issue of architecture.31 Proust writes of metaphor that it is “a relation in the world of art analogous to the unique relation of causality in the world of science” (2280) and that “when, relating a common quality to two sensations” through metaphor, the writer “releases their common essence by uniting one with the other in order to subtract it from the contingencies of time” (2280). 31 See on this point Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, “Proust inachevé:  le dossier ‘Albertine disparue,’ ” Recherches Proustiennes 6 (Paris:  Champion, 2005); and Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 30

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If there are (at least) two architectures of Proust’s novel there are also (at least) two registers of what Rancière calls “impressions.” In the three-​volume structure, Proust tied impression to involuntary memory in the Madeleine episode and to writing, both in the Martinville steeples episode and with the embrace of the literary vocation in Time Regained. Once Albertine arrives on the scene, however, impressions take on new labors. They begin to not only recuperate past moments—​lost time—​but to produce memory images (e.g., the image of Albertine silhouetted against the sea), images that impact the plot of the novel as it unfolds since both desire and jealousy in this novel are said to pass through images. Marcel returns to Balbec for a second visit, for example, because of the memory images he has of Albertine on the beach there, memory images that were generated within, and by, the narrative of the novel. Something like improvisation sets in. Memory is no longer just the retrospective affair of the Narrator. Our hero engenders memories through experience. And in this context Proust introduces the following metaphor: memory (i.e., the faculty of memory) is a photographer. Proust figures the accumulation of impressions through experience as an inner book, but he also figures these past impressions as “innumerable photographic plates [clichés]” that require development (2285).32 His narrator speaks of the need to “take an impression through all the successive states that lead to the fixing of it [faire passer une impression par tous les états successifs qui aboutiront à sa fixation]” (2274). What is at stake when these figures operate is neither a truth of essences, nor an incarnate truth, nor a claim to immediacy; what is at stake is an “infallible proportion of light and shadow” (2272, my translation) and dynamics of remembering and forgetting.33 Rancière is aware of all this and chooses to ignore it. “Pure sensation . . . leaves behind no negative that merely waits to be developed” (MS 159), he writes, adding dismissively, “the development of ‘negatives’ [is] merely the fabrication of colored glass for magic lanterns” (MS 159). 32 Photography is a conventional figure for memory in the nineteenth century. We find an account of the “cliché souvenir” in Léon Hervé de Saint Denys’s Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger (1867); authors as divergent as Bergson and Théodule Ribot cite psychologists (Jules Bernard Luys, Mortimer Granville) concerning mental photography, which was deemed involuntary. One could argue that the very trope of involuntary memory emerges within this photographic metaphorical field. See my Proust: Photographies (forthcoming). 33 Proust explicitly distinguishes the photographic, as it pertains to dialectics of remembering and forgetting and to temporalities of anachronism from the cinematographic (2275, 2280)  in an argument which parallels the important argument Bergson made (using this term) in Creative Evolution.

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Rancière’s aversion to certain discourses of photography is well known.34 He finds those of Benjamin and Barthes, in particular, guilty of the modernist fallacy of medium specificity. But I wonder if he is not too quickly dismissive of photography (just as he suggests others are too quickly dismissive of Sartre’s question: what is literature?). Everything art photography brought on the scene, he suggests, was already invented by literature. Perhaps, but what about primitive photography? His view that the indexical feature of photography was an invention of postmodern thinkers does not acknowledge a long tradition of discourses on photography (in the inclusive sense) from François Arago, to Jules Janin, and Fox Talbot, all of which informed the work of André Bazin.35 It is not the place here to debate the implications of these various discourses, the question of the trace, or claims to immediacy. What I want to call attention to is the way Proust deploys fictive events and metaphors of photography in Remembrance to perform relations of time to experience that support narrative rhythms of intermittence and anachronism that are perhaps more pertinent to what we might refer to as the “architecture” of Proust’s novel than the comments about involuntary memory that appear in Combray and then again in Time Regained. Indeed this is precisely where, as Rancière puts it, impressions delegate their tasks to narrative and vice versa. Because these “delegations” are temporal in nature. I mention Rancière’s decision to exclude the photographic modality of impressions because it is symptomatic of a larger issue: his decision to evacuate the question of time in his discussions of Proust’s novel. Proust goes to great lengths to elaborate what Rancière calls “metaphor” in temporal terms. The special value of “involuntary memory” is not just that two impressions are linked (as in metaphor), it is the temporal difference that comes into play. And it is not only a matter of experiencing something that is at once present and past but, more precisely, of experiencing things that are “real without being present [actuels],” and, at the same time, “ideal” (in the sense of physically absent) “without being abstract” (2267). In other words the specific virtue of what Rancière calls impressions is not the operation of similarity in difference of metaphor but the experience of temporal difference, the difference of time from itself that operates as time moves forward. See Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007); and “Rethinking the Modern” and “Ce que ‘medium’ peut vouloir dire: l’exemple de la photographie,” Appareil on line: http://​appareil.revues.org/​135; DOI: 10.4000/​appareil.135. 35 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–​9. 34

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Rancière speaks of Proust writing between two temptations. Might we not also speak of two temptations when it comes to Rancière? The first would be the temptation of disagreement—​perpetual and perpetually shifting performances of disagreement that challenge the partition of the sensible, the divides between those who are counted and those who are not. This includes the temptation of words in excess, of “la parole née du vide.”36 The second we might call the Emersonian temptation (shared by Marx). This is the temptation of “constructing a new form of community, a new sensory fabric where the prosaic activities achieve the poetic dimension through which they compose a common world.”37 Of which Rancière comments: “I think that the Emersonian formulation of the task of the poet to come provides us with the best view of what an artistic ‘avant-​ garde’ may mean.”38 It is the trajectory of just such an “historical avant-​garde” that Rancière proposes in the scenes he has carefully selected for Aisthesis.39 The politics of this affirmative aesthetics would be one not of disagreement alone; it would include a “power of anticipation”; it would be a politics oriented toward the shoring up—​perhaps even the engendering of—​a common sensorium.40 This would be a political temptation Rancière arrives at only after having won a certain battle against Greenberg’s apolitical (reactionary) and a-​historical notion of the avant-​garde. This is the politics and the aesthetics Rancière elaborates in terms of a notion of “democratic temporality” and “free movement.”41 We could say that, since Aisthesis, his work threads its way between these two temptations. But the temptation of “esthetic communism” as an anticipation of a new common world that would accommodate disagreement about who is counted and who is not, risks collapsing into the nightmare of collective identity.42 It is this threat, the one so vigorously staged in “Proust: War, Truth, Book,” that reinforces Rancière’s tendency to take shelter (and fight back) in and through words. In so doing, however, he risks a certain medium specificity of his own—​a privilege of language—​and he risks falling back into another mode of self-​reflexivity—​the comfortable difference of language from itself and an idea of literature defined

Rancière, Les Mots de l’histoire. Essais de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 140. 37 Rancière, “Rethinking Modernity,” 11. 38 Ibid. 39 He refers in this essay to the “true historical modernism to which Greenberg’s modernism would put an end” (ibid., 8). 40 Ibid., 12. 41 Ibid., 10, 14. 42 Ibid., 19. 36

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principally by the dynamics of its own contradiction. He also risks staging the contradiction between literature and anti-​literature as an epic struggle. All of this represents, I think, a missed opportunity when it comes to Proust. Recently, Rancière has begun to speak more about time. He identifies time as a distribution of the sensible—​“prior to being a line stretching from the past to the future,” he writes, “time is a form of distribution of human beings.”43 I  might add:  and other living beings (this is one the more important limitations of the tendency to reduce, in the final analysis, partitions of the sensible to performances of language). I would want to hear Rancière dialogue with Proust concerning what Rancière has recently called the “complex intertwinement of temporalities, a complex set of relations between the present, the past, and the future: between anticipation and lateness, fragmentation and continuity, movement and immobility” that is the time of modernity.44 This, it seems to me, is a good characterization of the fictive world of Proust’s novel, one that performs what Rancière calls time that is “not contemporaneous with itself ”45 It is precisely the strange architecture of Proust’s novel, one that has little to do with the narrative doings it frames, that enables Proust to perform his novel as precisely a kind of free movement. His universe of remembering and forgetting, of intermittence and anachronism, presents the kind of nonhierarchical regime of time—​the time of simultaneity that is “different from itself ”—​that Rancière now identifies with what he calls “democratic temporality.”46 In Les Mots de l’histoire Rancière writes that “nothing endangers history if not . . . fear in the face of the sensible matter of its object: time, words, and death” (MH 169). This, I think, is what Proust’s novel is all about and strangely, in his readings of Proust, Rancière pulls back from time and death to speak only of words.

Ibid., 8. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid. 43

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The Conception of the Will in Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of the Arts: Pathos and Reverie in Stendhal, Ibsen, and Freud Alison Ross

The standard modernist doctrine combines the historical claim that modern art can be adequately defined as the formal pursuit of technical innovations in the different media of the arts with the thesis that such explorations of technique have avant-​garde and “revolutionary” significance. According to Rancière, Marxists such as Adorno and Greenberg enthusiastically embraced the doctrine. These writers were keen to show that if the social revolution had “failed,” revolutionary “success” could be sought and celebrated instead in the field of the technical exploration of the capabilities, or the “medium specificity,” of different artistic media.1 Hence the new understanding of the innovations of twentieth-​century art as advances internal to the techniques of specific art forms—​Schoenberg’s twelve tone music, Mallarmé’s “intransitive” writing, or the abstract painting of Jackson Pollock—​is fused with the idea that in these technical explorations of specific media genuine social criticism occurs. In Greenberg’s writing, the intellectual difficulty of the “avant-​garde,” premised on its separation from ordinary experience, is opposed to the facile rewards of “kitsch.” The repression of the avant-​garde in totalitarian regimes is taken as evidence of its political status, and of its unsuitability for crude ideological usage.2 Adorno maintains that it is the non-​fungibility of art in a society entirely won over to exchange that qualifies art as a vehicle of social criticism. Art earns its autonomy from premodern patronage when it enters the market. The noninstrumental, formal character of art that 1 See Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes:  Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review 14 (2002): 133–​51; and Rancière, “Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview,” Angelaki 8, no. 2 (2003): 191–​211. 2 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-​Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 34–​49.

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accompanies its autonomy equips it for social criticism. This formal quality, further, is what detaches modernist art from the characteristics of social realism.3 There are many strands to Rancière’s dissatisfaction with the modernist doctrine. He rejects the purist edge of modernism, that is, the celebration of the separation between art and society and between the different techniques and media of art forms. The rejection is premised on two assertions: first, the idea of medium specificity is not adequate to describe the upheavals that occurred in art practices of the past century; second, the political promise of art is itself intelligible only as a feature of the network of ideas and practices within which the modern idea of art is conceived. Art as “idea” and “practice” becomes incoherent once the modernist premise of the separation of (avant-​garde) “art” from other social spheres is strictly followed. According to Rancière it is the “realist” strains of modern literature, which the modernist perspective disparages, that parent social revolutions.4 They do so in the sense that modern literature depicts and makes available to perception the loosening of the ties between social standing and narrative interest, between privilege and elevated literary style. The point is broader than noting the consequences of the literary revolution that occurs when focus is given to forms of experience that fall outside the sphere of “noble action.” The loosening of the bonds of social prestige follows as well from the way that nineteenth-​century literature brings voice to the opaque materiality of the nonlinguistic world: Flaubert’s description of dust rippling over flagstones near Emma Bovary, for example, or Hugo’s detailed presentation of Notre Dame Cathedral and the sewers of Paris.5 Any art, Rancière points out, is also an “idea” of art,6 but no art form adheres seamlessly to the experimentation with technique that constitutes the modernist “idea” of art. In particular, the idea that art exists as a separate world in reality means, contra modernism, that “anything whatsoever can belong to it” (A x). Particular “regimes of perception, sensation and interpretation of art” are altered by the “images, objects and performances” that they embrace (A x). Rancière’s

3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-​ Kentor (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1997). The tone of Adorno’s work is full of pathos since the critical dimension of art is, in his view, only fleeting. 4 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, 2013), xvi; hereafter A. 5 Rancière treats this topic in Mute Speech, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 6 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 72.

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vocabulary of the “regimes” of the arts is his alternative to the dogma of what he dubs “the monument of retrospective modernism” (A xiii). He uses it to show that the “sensible fabric and intelligible form” of what for the past two centuries is called “art” (A ix) enables the perception of “very diverse things, whether in their techniques of production or their destination, as all belonging to art” (A x). This porous boundary between art and “everything else” requires attention to the protocols that differentiate what comes to count as “art.” The approach to art as a “regime” deliberately undermines the pertinence of the idea of medium specificity as an adequate perspective on the arts. There are textual elements in paintings, cinematic style “pans” in the pre-​cinematic works of nineteenth-​ century literature, and narrative features in erstwhile “modernist” poetry.7 He finds similar problems with the received ways of describing the institution of the museum of fine arts. The museum of fine arts is conventionally described in the terms of Hegel’s influential account of art’s declining significance in his Aesthetics as a mode of presentation of Spirit or the Idea of Freedom in modern life. The museum is the modern institution that embodies the separation of art from social life into an “ideal” object displayed for a deracinated spectator. The museum, Rancière notes, catalogues the works it displays with scrupulous attention to history and context. Art as it is presented in the museum is “historical art” (PA 20–​21). Identifying the diverse ecology of forms and experiences that may be identified as “art” and the contexts that support them opens up a more realistic view of the stakes of aesthetic revolutions than the celebration of the “politics” of the avant-​garde in modernism. Modernism, in Rancière’s summation, failed to “found any important art,” but it did “succeed in imposing the golden legend of the avant-​gardes” and thereby rewrote “the history of a century of artistic upheavals to its advantage” (A xiii). The conception of the aesthetic regime of the arts, in contrast, identifies the features of sensible experience that count as “art” irrespective of whether they adhere to the modernist theory of medium specificity or the “legend” of the political vocation of avant-​garde art. An example from his recent work can be used to capture the diverse references that constitute his alternative to the modernist doctrine. Rancière’s Aisthesis identifies reverie as one of the modes used in the aesthetic regime of the arts to depict emancipatory forms of experience. The modern philosophical tradition of aesthetics is one of the major reference points for airing 7 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: A&C Black, 2013), 29; hereafter PA.

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how instances of reverie offer an experience of emancipation. He points to the loose affiliation of the state of reverie with versions of the Kantian thesis of the aesthetic suspension of interest in aesthetic judgment. In a Schillerian vein Rancière outlines the way reverie dislocates prevailing schemas of division of labor in so far as it supposes the cessation of labor. And he analyzes the influence of Rousseau’s reveries not just on Kant, in his formulation of the aesthetic attitude of disinterest, but also on Stendhal (A 45–​46). These are so many ways that Rancière attaches the experience of a new life to the seemingly inconsequential experience in reverie of detachment from one’s immediate situation. Crucially, it is the disengaged status of the will from action that motivates his analysis. The idea, however, needs to be framed in relation to the concern articulated in his earlier work that the very idea that life could be redesigned through aesthetic experience is a “promise” that requires careful scrutiny. In his important essay “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes” Rancière writes:  “Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. This is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfil its political promise are also condemned to a certain melancholy.”8 I would like to consider these qualifications regarding the significance of the aesthetic regime of the arts in relation to Rancière’s treatment of the suspension of the will to act and to know in Stendhal and Ibsen.

Suspension of the will to act: The passivity of the will in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black If the critical aim of Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime of the arts is to show the one-​sidedness of modernist doctrine, his position requires a vocabulary able to convey the contradictions that elude modernist detection and constitute the features of the art that belongs to this regime. To this end, he often refers to the unresolvable tension between logos and pathos. This tension features prominently in his analysis of the drive to will-​less obliteration that, he contends, emerges as the odd feature of the state of detachment of the character Julien at the end of Stendhal’s 1830 novel The Red and the Black. It also frames the suicides of Johannes Rosmer and Rebecca West in Ibsen’s 1886 play 8 Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution,” 151.

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Rosmersholm. In each case, it is the possibilities for the assignation of meaning in the absence of calculation that organize his analysis. Julien’s end at the hand of an executioner differs, of course, from Rosmer and West jumping hand in hand into the mill-​race. I will compare them here, however, in relation to the stakes of Rancière’s claim that the sensitivity to the futility of calculative meaning is crucially lacking in the commentaries on these works. The point has some bearing on his persistent claim that the technical features and political potential of modern art and literature are best captured through his conception of an “aesthetic regime of the arts.” Rancière’s treatment of characters that lose the drive to act warrants comparison with recent discussions of the character Bartleby from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby:  The Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street.” Agamben and Deleuze are fascinated by this literary character’s withdrawal from the sphere of instrumental action.9 The path he takes is seemingly disengaged from the agency of the will. The scrivener is employed in a bank. Initially Bartleby discharges his duties effectively, but after a period of time he loses interest in his work and begins to reply to the requests to copy documents that he “prefers not to.” Eventually Bartleby incurs legal sanction for refusing to leave the office (he “prefers not to” leave) even after the change of management. He ultimately dies in jail having “preferred not to” eat. In Rancière’s view, Deleuze’s treatment of the character of Bartleby as exceptional in this regard is erroneous (A 51). The passive will that is disengaged from the circuitry of action is set out in relation to the cause-​effect logic that he defines as a feature of the representative regime of the arts. In the way he outlines this position, Rancière does not—​as Deleuze and Agamben seem to—​lose sight of the fact that Bartleby is a literary figure. Indeed it is for this reason that he uses aesthetics to explicate the different kinds of meaning that figures with a passive will in nineteenth-​century literature may communicate in their passivity. The logic of the mechanism of cause and effect traces the path of noble action. In the representative regime of the arts style is indexed to topic; noble action is represented in an elevated style. The integrity of this conception is challenged 9 Herman Melville, Bartleby: The Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). See also Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or on Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-​Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–​ 71; and Gilles Deleuze, “Bartelby, or the Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W.  Smith and Michael A.  Greco (New  York and London:  Verso, 1998), 68–​91. Rancière’s most extensive treatment of the story is in “Deleuze, Bartleby and the Literary Formula,” in The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 146–​65.

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in the selection of non-​noble topics and non-​comic styles for literary treatment in the aesthetic regime of the arts. “Dust” (Flaubert) or a “building” (Hugo) may be the subject of elevated literary description. “Style,” as Flaubert wrote, is “an absolute way of seeing things.”10 Further, in the new documentary style of nineteenth-​century literature, it is less the arc of noble action that occupies the novelist’s attention than the prosaic features of life.11 In the conception of this general framework the logic of cause and effect, as it applies to the description of a character’s action within a story, needs to be distinguished from its application to the structure of the story itself. However, in the latter instance too narrative cogency may break down. In the case of Stendhal’s novel, Rancière complains that Stendhal’s contemporary critics saw the problem in the premise of the novel: it was implausible that this “uncouth little peasant” could become a sudden “expert in high-​society intrigues” (A 40). His social rise is so rapid that he becomes treasured secretary to the Marquis de la Mole. Rancière argues that none of the critics’ complaints about the implausible characters and situations in the novel identify the central paradox: After a relentless series of calculations, which even includes copying the letters of a Russian aristocrat to seduce a woman in whom he has no interest in order to elicit the interest of another, Julien throws it all away. He shoots the lover he had made the object of his systematic stratagems in the first part of the novel, Madame de Rênal. Moreover, he does not flee but waits at the scene to be apprehended and then refuses to be party to any strategizing on his behalf by his friends who try to save him first from the condemnation of the court and then from execution. Madame de Rênal, who survives the shooting, refuses to testify against Julien, whom she still loves. She begs the court to acquit him. Her signature on the letter to the Marquis arguably “causes” the shooting. The letter had drawn on the evidence of her love affair with her children’s tutor that came to shame her. This letter’s denunciation of Julien as an unscrupulous young man bent on the seduction of vulnerable women had been composed under the urgings of her Jesuit confessor. When it is sent to the Marquis de la Mole he angrily rescinds his agreement to fix Julien with a noble title, and an income to support the marriage of Julien to his pregnant daughter, Mathilde. Julien in a fit of anger 10 Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 16, 1852, Correspondence 2 (Boston:  Harvard University Press, 1982), 31. 11 This point in made in diverse contexts. The most notable treatment occurs in Mute Speech. See Alison Ross, “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-​ Philippe Deranty (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2010), 156–​76.

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then shoots at Madame de Rênal. Julien’s love for Madame de Rênal is, however, rekindled when he hears she has survived the shooting. She attends the trial, refuses to testify against Julien, and visits him in the prison. Julien eschews the efforts to save him and declares his last days with Madame de Rênal to be his happiest (40). Rancière argues that the action that precipitates the hero’s downfall is not explicable within the structure of the novel. The letter of denunciation that constitutes the “reason” for the shooting figures oddly against the background of this character’s calculative bent. He draws attention to the fact that the internal voice of the narrator is absent in the crucial scene of the shooting: he surmises that this absence is required for the shooting to occur since the narrative presence of a rational voice, elsewhere abundantly in evidence in describing Julien’s motivations, would render the rashness of the act inconceivable: Thus the act, which is the culmination of an entire network of intrigues, also annuls it by ruining every strategy of means and ends, any fictive logic of cause and effect. This act definitely separates the ambitious plebeian from the causal rationality and the very temporality in which his conquering goals were inscribed. Action and the “real world,” Stendhal now tells us, are a matter for “aristocratic hearts,” representatives of the old world. (A 43)12

There are two aspects of Rancière’s account of The Red and the Black that interest me here. First of all, he draws a parallel between Julien’s disengaged state at the end of the novel with earlier scenes, which he claims also show the venerated state of happiness, defined as the state of being absorbed in the moment. The point is important:  these earlier scenes corroborate Rancière’s thesis that nineteenth-​century literature presents the form of a life that realizes aspects of the “aesthetic revolution” in the depiction of “reverie.” Julien “represents” the awareness of the illusions of the representative regime. His absorption in the present marks the absence of feelings of regret for the past or anxiety about future projects that is incomprehensible from the perspective of the chain of cause and effect that defines noble action. Second, Rancière suggests that the passivity of the character in the face of his execution, like the earlier scenes of 12 Rancière’s analysis of Stendhal’s novel differs from Lukác’s view that Stendhal condemns in Julien’s fate “the vileness, the squalidness of the whole epoch.” Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 72. Rancière shares with other critics an emphasis on Stendhal’s inconsistencies in the way he portrays the epoch. See Geoffrey Strickland’s classic discussion of this point in Stendhal: The Education of a Novelist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 209–​11.

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happiness, bears comparison with the quality of aesthetic satisfaction as this is described in some of the important texts of modern philosophical aesthetics.13 As mentioned earlier, the improbable feature of the novel in Rancière’s eyes is Julien’s absurd act in shooting at Madame de Rênal and then waiting to be arrested. The consequence of the atypical absence of self-​interested calculation is that Julien finds happiness, albeit as a prisoner awaiting death. This sequence raises the problem of continuity of themes and character. To be sure, the transition that Julien’s rash act marks in the novel is read by Rancière as a shift from the logic of cause and effect in the representative regime (here represented by Julien’s calculated rise up the ladder of social prestige) to the waning of the hold of the cause-​effect structure in the aesthetic regime. The transition, Rancière shows, may reach its culmination in the “end” of the plot of the novel, but the aesthetic-​state suspension of the logic of cause and effect also punctuates Julien’s earlier experiences. The end of the novel reprises these experiences in a more emphatic form. The claim, however, is at odds with Stendhal’s description of the earlier moments. For instance, Rancière describes the sensuous pleasure of holding a hand as a patterning of aesthetic experience as Kant defines it. It is clear, however, that Julien’s attitude to Madame de Rênal’s hand is driven by the very strategic considerations that Rancière claims are absent in these scenes.14 Moreover, even if such considerations were not present, there are problems in describing such moments as aesthetic, in the Kantian sense of the term.15 The 13 Rancière emphasizes that this includes Rousseau’s influence on Kant, since it is Rousseau who influences Stendhal. See A, 46–​47. 14 Stendhal, The Red and the Black, trans. Roger Gard (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 74: “Julien still had the coarse words of the morning in his ears. Wouldn’t it be a way, he asked himself, of scorning this person—​so heaped with the advantages of fortune—​to get possession of his wife’s hand in his very presence? Yes, I will do it—​I, for whom he has shown such contempt.” “From that moment, calm—​so unnatural to Julien’s character—​swiftly vanished; now incapable of thinking of anything else, he anxiously desired that Mme de Rênal should genuinely want to give him her hand.” 15 Rancière refers to the state of suspension freed from interests in both Kant (where is it defined as “subjectively universal”) and Schiller (who terms it the “play drive”). These thinkers use different technical vocabularies to describe the equality of sensation involved in the aesthetic attitude. Kant gives the most significant commentary on the “aesthetic” dimension of ordinary experience. His account of the aesthetic attitude is also the most systematic, although some of the components of this attitude were first outlined in Rousseau’s theory of “reverie” (A 46–​47). In all these thinkers the “pure sharing of a sensation or an emotion” is an equality that abolishes the hierarchy of occupations. The happiness that such “present sensation” yields is squandered when it is exchanged for “the bitterness and deceptions of the other equality”: namely, “to exert or strive to exert some influence” (48). The schemes of talented plebeians to rise in society are easily thwarted by dim-​witted gentlemen or Jesuits “for they have already sacrificed sensible happiness to social performance” (48). Rancière here parses Rousseau’s condemnation of the corrupting effects of society. Elements of this theme are also revived in Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetic theories. Kant praises those who turn away from museums to seek aesthetic pleasure in nature’s free beauties and Schiller despairs at the despotic agendas unleashed by revolutionary schemes, for which the education of the play drive is a supposed

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sensuous touch of the hand is not a formal, reflective pleasure. It “depends on the existence of the object” and is “coerced” and “gratified” by sensuous charm in a way that pure Kantian aesthetic pleasure cannot be.16 Such pleasures as Julien experiences in these pages empty out the heightened awareness and impact of the moment that should characterize aesthetic experience, since they awaken the goal of end-​pleasure, the seduction of his mistress. Indeed the idea of Julien as “strategist” is arguably under attack at a more fundamental level in the novel: so consumed is he by his strategizing that he overlooks the fact that against his proudly held republican views he is turned into a cog for a legitimist plot. The novel describes how he is distracted by his will to rise in society from paying attention to the content of the messages he is charged with memorizing and communicating. The discrepancy between intention and action thus has an earlier genesis than the scene of the shooting. More seriously, the absence of calculative thinking that for Rancière characterizes the early moments in the novel cannot be understood as the forerunner of the pleasure Julien feels in the prison where he is released from the now useless strategic calculations. Instead, the rationale Julien has for holding Madame de Rênal’s hand is the strategic one of breaking down her distance to him. When she permits him to touch her, he has an elevated feeling of personal satisfaction and achievement and a desire for repetition of the experience as an element of his strategizing within the household.17 If the prison should be taken as some

antidote. What is important in these aesthetic theories is the way they make the state of reverie comprehensible as the emancipation from empty social strategizing. By extension, this aesthetic-​ state becomes an illuminating perspective on the futility of such strategizing. 16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), see especially §6 regarding the universality of the judgment of taste: “He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying this liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he may regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone as well. He cannot discover such private conditions because his liking is not based on any inclination he has (nor on any other considered interest whatever)” (54). See also Stendhal’s description of the brief moment of reverie that Rancière refers to: “Julien thought no more of his dark ambitions, nor of his plans, so difficult to execute. For the first time in his life, he was enchanted by the power of beauty. Lost in a formless and soothing reverie quite alien to his nature, softly pressing a hand whose perfect prettiness gratified him, he half heard the rustling of the foliage of the elm stirred by the light night breeze and the distant barking of the dogs at the mill on the Doubs” (The Red and the Black 75). Aside from the “gratification” Julien feels, the “formless” quality of this reverie is also antithetical to Kantian formalism. 17 The scene in which Julien is absorbed by beauty capable of extinguishing instrumental goals lasts a few sentences (cited in full in the previous note) and it is followed by Julien’s reflections that “[d]‌reaming of Napoleon’s victories made him see something new about his own. Yes, I’ve won a battle, he said to himself, but one must profit by it—​it is essential to crush the pride of this haughty gentleman while he’s in retreat. That’s pure Napoleon” (The Red and the Black 75–​76). Stendhal thus expresses Julien’s strategies in the military language of the subjugation of an enemy.

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kind of realization of passivity, defined in temporal terms by the absorption in the moment that comes from the obliteration of past regrets and the release from future calculations, perhaps it makes sense to describe this passive state as a temporary suspension of the endless chain of means and ends or cause and effect. What value does Rancière see in this suspension, especially since it is the prelude to Julien’s condemnation and execution? Unlike the gloss of radicalism that Agamben attempts to attach to the figure of the isolated, starving Bartleby, Rancière studies Julien from the perspective of the status of modes of experience that are made possible in the aesthetic regime of the arts. The study makes aspects of the aesthetic regime legible. His first analysis, in The Aesthetic Unconscious, of figures like Julien who act without wanting anything is placed under the general thematic of “pathos.”

Obliteration of the will to know: The sickness of the “will” in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm In his slender 2001 book The Aesthetic Unconscious Rancière treats Freud’s writing on art. His goal is to understand the strategic significance of the interpretation of plastic works of art and pieces of literature in Freudian theory. Specifically, he asks what these works “serve to prove and what structures allow them to produce this proof.”18 The point is phrased in terms of meaning: at a general level, plastic art and literature are cited to prove that there is meaning in the insignificant, that there are sparks of thought in apparently anodyne details (AU 3). The virtue that allows these ordinary details to be thought provoking is not that of opaque and intractable material form requiring psychoanalytic decipherment. These figures are “tokens of a certain unconscious”: “They are testimony to the existence of a particular relation between thought and non-​thought, a particular way that thought is present within sensible materiality, meaning within the insignificant, and an involuntary element within conscious thought” (AU 3; emphasis in the original). This relation between thought and non-​thought is often described in the book as the tension between logos and pathos—​the tension between reason and the absence of sense or meaning. This tension is, among other things, a miniature presentation of the tensions in the metapsychology underpinning 18 Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 3; hereafter AU.

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Freudian psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s metapsychology evolves from his early idea that psychic life is governed by the compulsion to repeat pleasure once he discovers the insuperable basis of psychic life in the death drive. According to Rancière, the type of testimony to thought that Freud finds in art relies on specific features in the revolution that the aesthetic regime installs: foremost among them, the importance of seemingly insignificant details. Freud’s work prior to the discovery of the death drive in 1920 looks for the reasons that can unlock the meaning of such details. Later, too, he is insistent on a rational dissection of human behavior. This is the perspective Rancière uses to tackle Freud’s interpretation of the Ibsen play Rosmersholm. The play is set against the backdrop of the loosening hold of Christian belief and traditional class divisions. It opens one year after the suicide of Rosmer’s wife, Beata. Johannes Rosmer, a retired clergyman, lives with Beata’s friend Rebecca at his ancestral manor of Rosmersholm. Rebecca had moved in at Beata’s invitation and had remained there after Beata’s suicide. Rosmer’s brother-​in-​law Kroll, the local school principal, who had introduced Rebecca to Beata, is enraged when he learns of Rosmer’s newly acquired liberal views. Kroll later comes to see Rosmer’s “apostasy” as the effect of Rebecca’s influence. He confronts Rosmer about his relationship with Rebecca and rails against Rosmer’s betrayal of his class roots. He reveals to Rosmer that Beata had been concerned that Rosmer was losing his faith. Rosmer, who thought he had kept this a secret from his wife, is consumed with guilt that he may have been the cause of his wife’s suicide. To deal with his anxiety he states that he wishes to fill the “empty place” that his first wife has left and proposes marriage to Rebecca, who unequivocally rejects the proposal.19 For Freud the puzzle of the play is analogous to Rancière’s approach to Stendhal’s novel: why does Rebecca baulk at the satisfaction of her goal and through a series of confessions put it out of reach? How does the later indifferent attitude to her cherished goals relate to the earlier methodical plans she executes to attain them? Rebecca admits, after Kroll confronts her about her parentage, that she instigated Beata’s decline in order to achieve greater influence over Rosmer. Later on, she encouraged Beata’s suicidal thoughts because she had fallen in love with Rosmer. She had arrived at Rosmersholm as a free willing agent, emancipated from the moral “superstitions” of Christian tradition. 19 Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm (Salt Lake City, UT:  Project Gutenberg, 2015), 121–​22:  “Rosmer:  ‘I cannot—​I will not—​go through life with a dead body on my back. Help me to throw it off, Rebecca; and then let us stifle all memories in our sense of freedom, in joy, in passion. You shall be to me the only wife I have ever had.’ ”

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Just as she has influenced Rosmer, even leading him to repudiate his Christian faith, so conversely he has “infected” her will with his moral scruples. Her newly acquired capacity for guilt means she cannot now accept Rosmer’s proposal. She is unable to live with what she has done, and he is unable to live with the knowledge of the true circumstances of his wife’s end. The play ends with Rebecca and Rosmer throwing themselves, as Beata had, off the bridge into the mill-​race to their deaths. Rebecca’s early scorn for the superstitious fear that death comes to Rosmersholm in the form of a “white horse” seems to have disappeared at the end of the play when she herself fears that she has seen the “white horse of Rosmersholm.”20 Rancière emphasizes the central role given to the rational explication (logos) of insignificant or random incidents in Freudian interpretation. In this instance, his objection is that Freud’s position entirely disregards the end of the play and with it the pathos that drives its narrative. The point is significant for the evolution of Freud’s thinking since his interpretation of Ibsen’s play in “Some Character Types Met with in Psychoanalysis” (1916) predates his decisive formulation of the death drive in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in which he concedes the nihilist aspects of pathos: the organism, he writes in the later work, wishes to “conclude its own tendency to senescence.”21 The logic of the aesthetic revolution in which the undertow of pathos fatally impedes the hitherto unquestioned sway of logos, Rancière stresses, leaves its mark on Freud’s intellectual evolution. Even if Freud sidelines the actual events of the end of the play in favor of focusing on the determining role of the components of the Oedipal drama in Rebecca’s life, the surge of pathos that defines the aesthetic regime of the arts is the prism through which some of the main themes of psychoanalysis are seen. In particular, Freud’s rationalism in dissecting the unconscious mind places the interaction between the representative regime (in which the will to know is positively valued) and the aesthetic regime (in which the discovery of the death drive [logos] reveals the inevitability of the dissolution of the will [pathos]) into focus. The aesthetic regime of the arts is the perspective that makes this union of logos and pathos identifiable. “Rebecca: ‘I fancy I have had a glimpse of the White Horse’ ” (ibid., 174). 21 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”:  “It would contradict the conservative nature of drives if it were the goal of life to achieve a state never previously attained to. Rather, it must aspire to an old state, a primordial state from which it once departed, and to which by all the circuitous byways of development it strives to return. . . . the goal of all life is death’ (his emphasis). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1920/​1955), 79. 20

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The central theme in Rancière’s treatment of the play is the desire for the abolition of the will. Pathos reigns over logos. The characters have lost the capacity for happiness, for the innocent absorption in the moment that he claims defines Julien’s last days. Their experience of time is now riven with guilt about the past and anxiety about the future. The innocence of their feelings cannot be recaptured. They desire the obliteration of the will; knowledge of the past (Rebecca) or of the true causes of Beata’s death (Rosmer) is not liberating, but crushing. It leads to illness. Rebecca’s earlier strategizing to liberate Rosmer from his old values and free him from an unsatisfying marriage comes to nothing. When she is in reach of her goal, she no longer wants it. Rancière rejects Freud’s commentary on the play, which is devoted to the significance of the scene where Kroll informs Rebecca that her stepfather, Dr. West, is in fact her natural father. The scene is stressed in Freud’s account because Rebecca’s disconcerted response indicates that she had had sexual relations with the stepfather, and is now told that this man was her natural father. As a liberal free spirit, the ignominy of her birth as an illegitimate child, which Kroll thinks he imparts to her, would presumably not bother her. The knowledge Kroll reveals, however, is devastating. Her reaction raises Kroll’s suspicions. To the objection that she had rejected Rosmer’s proposal of marriage even before Kroll’s revelation, Freud responds that the “universal” structure of the Oedipus complex was determinant here as well: she had, after all, replaced her mother in the intimate relation with Dr. West and felt the guilt of this past situation as a mark of unworthiness in her relations with Rosmer.22 Freud interprets her explanation that Rosmer had ennobled her feelings and made profiting from her actions intolerable as a mere “screen” that hides the inescapable machinery of the Oedipus complex, which is the true key to her rejection of Rosmer’s proposal. The perspective that Rancière takes on Stendhal’s novel and Ibsen’s play highlights some of the subtleties involved in his conception of the “aesthetic regime of the arts.” These subtleties, as we saw in the case of his analysis of Stendhal, raise the question of the adequacy of his perspective on the material he treats. In the case of Freud’s projection of Oedipal meaning (logos) from the scene between Kroll and Rebecca onto the double suicide of Rebecca and Rosmer (pathos) that is the conclusion of Ibsen’s play, the crucial issue for Rancière’s position

Sigmund Freud, “Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-​Analytic Work,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14 (1914–​16), ed. James Strachey, 309–​33, 325. 22

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is the respective status of logos and pathos in the aesthetic regime. When he expounds on this issue, the traditional Aristotelian understanding of the representation of dramatic action is the central point of reference. For Aristotle, drama is “an arrangement of actions. At the base of drama are characters who pursue particular ends while acting in conditions of partial ignorance, which will be resolved in the course of the action” (AU 18). The Aristotelian conception of action as the resolution of ignorance is redundant in the aesthetic regime of the arts. The Aristotelian perspective on dramatic action is also blinkered in the face of Sophocles’s Oedipus. The “pathos of knowledge” that is the ground of the ancient Oedipal performance is repressed in Aristotle “behind the theory of dramatic action that makes knowing a result of the ingenious machinery of reversal and recognition” (AU 19). Aristotle rationalizes action; its dramatic structure is the resolution offered by knowledge. When Corneille and Voltaire revive Oedipus in the “classical age” they need to make radical changes to the play; not because Oedipus sleeps with his mother and kills his father, “but because of the way that he learns about it, because of the identity of opposites that he incarnates in this learning, the tragic identity of knowing and not knowing, of action undertaken and pathos undergone” (AU 19). The solutions of these French classical tragedians depend on the idea of “thought as action imposing itself on passive matter” (AU 21). Significant alterations to this end are made to Sophocles’s tragedy, each of which involves adjusting the denouement of revelation. Corneille creates an irresolvable ambiguity about the guilty party. He introduces for Oedipus a sister, Dircé, with a claim to the throne and a motive for sending her father on his journey; and a lover of the sister, Theseus, with an interest in the court’s succession and doubts about his own birth: three different interpretations of the oracle are possible, three characters might be guilty—​“the story preserves suspense and uncertainty about the denouément through careful handling of the distribution of knowledge” (AU 14). Voltaire is more radical than Corneille in his amendments. He finds certain points in the original Sophoclean plot defective, such as Oedipus’s ignorance of his predecessor’s fate, and so he “corrects” the drama by introducing the character of Philoctetes. Philoctetes is in love with Jocasta, was exposed after birth, was absent from Thebes at the time of the murder, and returns just when “a guilty party is needed” (15).23 23 In Walter Burkert’s Oedipus, Oracles and Meaning (Coach House Printing:  Toronto, 1991), he acknowledges that the Oedipus story is dramatically absurd in some of the ways the French

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The restoration of Sophocles’s Oedipus away from these rational French reconstructions is not just important for the birth of psychoanalysis; it attests more generally to the union of opposites that occurs in the aesthetic regime of the arts. Again, this union can help illuminate the role of Oedipus in psychoanalysis; it is the condition for the intelligibility of the psychoanalytic use of the myth as a universal schema for the revelation of a secret. “Oedipus,” Rancière writes, “is proof of a certain existential savagery of thought, a definition of knowing not as the subjective act of grasping an objective ideality but as the affection, passion, or even sickness of a living being” (AU 22). In short, matter acts on and transforms thought; in doing so, the futility of action is grasped. Pathos here reaches a union of sorts with logos. This is the “logic” of intelligibility as the revelation of a secret (i.e., the Oedipal secret)—​or, in Rancière’s terms, the union of pathos and logos—​that the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious depends on. Crucially, it means that, like dramatic literature, psychoanalysis requires the revelatory role of the storyteller, the one who discloses the secret, the one who regulates the relation to knowledge and the pace of the dramatic denouement. In The Aesthetic Unconscious, Rancière cites from Ibsen’s preparatory notes for his 1888 play, The Lady from the Sea. The play focuses on Ellida Wangel, the daughter of a remote lighthouse keeper. She had chosen a life with the widower Dr.  Wangel and his two daughters, even though it takes her away from the sea. Ellida feels imprisoned by this new life and lured by her interest in a sailor. The drive for the obliteration of the will that the character Ellida feels in her situation, Rancière stresses, reduces the “freedom” that Dr. Wangel “grants” to her to choose her future as illusory and insignificant. Dr. Wangel in this play does not, as Freud asserts in his interpretation, “cure” Ellida by allowing her to choose between him and the sailor. This is a mere screen for a Schopenhauerian pathos. Such pathos can undoubtedly be distinguished on many points from the classicists complained about. He argues, however, that it is the knowledge of the gods that is asserted in the play. It is their statement of what will happen that is the key to the “knowledge” Oedipus discovers. For this reason, Burkert writes that “the achievement of Sophocles . . . is a problem not of the unconscious but very much of human consciousness” (27). “[T]‌he question enacted in [Sophocles’s] drama” is “how truth can exist in the world of man and how man can stand the truth” (27). “The horrible breakdown of Oedipus proves the veracity of divine prescience, proves the existence of an all-​comprehending intelligence that envelops this world of ours, proves the function of the ‘universal signifier’ and thus the meaning of the universe. This proof is worth the sacrifice, the breakdown of this man with whom we unwillingly identify, Oedipus. Oedipus, in all his sufferings, finally has the secret pride of those who know” (26–​27). The confirmation of the prescience of the gods is a version of logos in pathos that does not require the mediating machinery of the Freudian unconscious. Such pathos displays instead “the savagery of thought” (AU 22), which Rancière claims Freud is equivocal about.

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suspension of the will to act in Julien’s incarceration. However, whether the state of suspension in Ibsen is “freely” chosen or “coerced,” the point remains that the cessation of willing is equated with a way (back) to happiness, which is in some way a state of non-​knowledge. The illusions of the will dissipate “into the nothingness of the will that wills nothing” (AU 81). Or, in the case of Rosmer and Rebecca, the union of knowledge and non-​knowledge, activity and passivity is the “full expression” of the “aesthetic unconscious” (AU 77). Here too the suspension of the will is the defining element of the situation. Ibsen writes in his notes for The Lady from the Sea: Life is apparently a happy, easy, and lively thing up there in the shadow of the mountains and in the monotony of this seclusion. Then the suggestion is thrown up that this kind of life is a life of shadows. [. . .] Everywhere limitation. From this comes melancholy like a subdued song of mourning over the whole of human existence and all the activities of men. One bright summer day with a great darkness thereafter—​that is all. [.  . .] The sea’s power of attraction. The longing for the sea. People akin to the sea. Bound by the sea. Dependent on the sea. Must return to it. [. . .] The great secret is the dependence of the human will upon “the will-​less.”24

In Rancière’s discussion of the Stendhal novel, the philosophical references that elucidate Julien’s experience are taken from Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, reinforced with references to Schiller and the musings of Rousseau. The philosophical aesthetics of the description of the will-​less state in The Aesthetic Unconscious, in contrast, comes from Hegel, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche’s revivals of ancient tragedy. Schopenhauer is obviously a central figure for the conception of the disease of the will that death alone can cure. And Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche each provide an approach to tragic action, which uses the schematic outline of the brute indifference of fate, the insight into which is sharpened in Hegel by reason. Nietzsche, famously, diagnosed the modern sickness of knowledge that suffocates the power of action in Hamlet, who like Oedipus requires a final “cure.”25 It was also Nietzsche who revived the Sophoclean insights of tragedy that the philosophical drive to intelligibility had, in his view, smothered in later generations of Greek playwrights like Euripides. Euripides, Nietzsche wrote, put the spectator on the stage: more specifically, he wanted the action to Henrik Ibsen, Draft for The Lady from the Sea, in The Oxford Ibsen 7, ed. James Walter McFarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 449–​50. Cited in AU 80. 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Courier Corporation, 1995), 23 and 60. 24

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be intelligible for one ideal spectator: Socrates.26 It is a consequence of Rancière’s position that none of these perspectives is dutifully followed, none of them are entirely satisfactory: they are collected together so each can be mined for the partial insights they provide into the treatment of the will in the aesthetic regime of the arts.27 The “regime” tracks the logic able to capture simultaneously the seeming incompatibility between the perspective on timeless reverie (Stendhal-​ Kant-​Rousseau) and the knowledge that dissolves action in its return to the state of non-​knowledge (Ibsen-​Freud-​Nietzsche). In this way, the aesthetic regime of the arts recuperates “passive” matter into an active drive and potential site of meaning; the will that imposes its projects and meaning is drawn to a state of passivity (Julien) or obliteration (Rebecca). The fusion of the active and the passive, of the axes of sense making and the dissolution of meaning, intimate that meaning now emerges from the absence of sense. They signal that sense and non-​sense have changed their positions and significations.

The position of the will in the aesthetic regime of the arts There are ambivalent notes in Rancière’s writing on the aesthetic regime of the arts, which his commentators occasionally overlook and sometimes downplay.28 When he characterizes the features of the aesthetic regime of the arts he does not always do so approvingly. After all, the vocabulary of the “regimes of the arts” are intended to explain how and why things come to count as art, what protocols are in place so that figures in a perceptual field attract expectations of specifically aesthetic significance. For this reason the interpretative apparatus of psychoanalysis or the theories of modernist art are elements of the apparatus of

26 Ibid., 45. 27 Cf. Rancière’s position on the respective positions of logos and pathos with Michel Foucault’s comparative analysis of Euripides’s Ion and Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, in The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–​1983, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 84–​145. Foucault insists on the difference between Oedipus whose will drives the disclosure of truth, and the characters in Ion whose various deceptions are unmasked to reveal the truth of Ion’s origins as a result of their passions (pathos) (Creusa’s humiliation and despair and Ion’s fury). In Ion it is the goddess Athena who tells the truth [logos] that the god Apollo was “unable to formulate” (145). 28 See, for an example, Walter Benn Michaels, “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph,” Non-​site.org 1, January 25, 2011 (accessed June 15, 2015): http://​nonsite.org/​ issues/​issue-​1/​neoliberal-​aesthetics-​fried-​Rancière-​and-​the-​form-​of-​the-​photograph. Michaels’s essay fails to set out the dialectical nuances in Rancière’s treatment of the topic of intention in modernism and takes him instead to be a party to the postmodern critique of modernist purism.

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the “regime.” Since the accent of the concept is explanatory, the treatment of topics aims to adequately cover the varieties of art that belong to the regime. Hence he treats the disengagement of the will from action (Stendhal) or knowledge (Ibsen) as a phenomenon common to works in the aesthetic regime. Freud’s interpretation of the characters in Ibsen’s plays, like the way Rancière frames the account of Julien’s ambitions early in Stendhal’s novel, brings the features of the aesthetic treatment of the will into relief precisely because the old, representative regime of the arts still frames them. In particular, it is in the context of its appearance as an aesthetic motif that the passivity of the will could and should be understood. Whereas Agamben and others cast Bartleby’s choice not to work merely as a rebellion, overlooking the relevance of the literary context in which it occurs, Rancière gives due consideration to this and other specifically aesthetic elements in his analysis of the will. In his attention to the position of the will in the aesthetic regime of the arts, Rancière indirectly comments on the thematic of the avant-​gardes in modernism. The historical narrative of technical innovation is ordinarily used to defend the coherence of the modernist perspective. The preoccupation of modernist theories with technique is displaced in Rancière with the analysis of topics and themes, such as the will-​less reverie, that range across different media. There are the slapstick bodies of Chaplin’s pantomimes, which express “the secret nihilism that accompanies the great mechanical faith” (A 206). These bodies liken “the demiurgical potential of machines to the shadow play on the walls of the cave, at the cost perhaps that these shadows turn out to be more exact and clearer than the plans of the engineers of the future” (A 206). The truncated figure of the Belvedere Torso becomes a “surface of conversion” with no regard either for the category of the understanding that motivates the projects of representative bodies, or the exercise of perceptual faculties that aim to discern clarity in form (A xiii). The expectation of a connection between the experience of will-​less suspension and emancipatory experience is a feature of the art of the aesthetic age. But the promise of this aesthetic revolution is ambiguous. The art of this age neither necessarily entails nor realizes this promise. The significance of the art of this age is that it shows manifold figures of the dissolution of the logic of cause and effect. In Aisthesis the figures of apathy, of expressions that do not intend or mean anything and of acts that do not want anything, are not coerced into the evidence for a theory of modern art history. They present instead the zero degree of modern experience in which sense and non-​sense, logos and pathos, become

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fused in a tension-​ridden state. The context for staging this fusion is “art” in that its suspension of the will stands apart from the “ordinary” experience of time. It does so, as in the case of Julien’s disengaged state of reverie, partly in its coexistence with and contrast to the logic of cause and effect that reigns in the “representative” time. If every art is also an “idea” of art, the regimes of the arts entail a network that connects practices and the conceptions of these. In the case of the aesthetic regime of the arts, the network of practices and ideas builds up the expectation that artworks are sites of emphatic significance. Rancière shows that this network is composed of contradictory elements. Timeless reverie, like the disintegrating drive of pathos, pulls against the expectation that art carries social significance solely in its technically based dissociation from the social realm. Such an expectation distorts the importance of techniques in order to write the modernist’s “golden legend” of the modern history of (avant-​garde) art. The feeling of pathos that counteracts this legend is not without emphatic significance of its own. On the contrary, beyond the stories and characters that carry it, the abyss of sense is significant precisely because of the manifold ways in which it displays how projects, institutions, and characters are drawn into states of apathy, reverie, and inaction. These states are legible in their interaction with the will. I have argued that for Rancière the interaction of the will with the will-​less state that favors inaction is a defining feature of the aesthetic regime of the arts. This interaction is the topic of “ideas” about art as much as it is a practice of meaning in the arts. As well as its status as an element of the regime of the arts, able to decode art and the interpretative machinery brought to bear on it, the apathy and nausea of the will has an ontological significance: the abyssal state of a disengaged will testifies to the possibilities that precede the organization of sense into established patterns of meaning. For Rancière, the perception of such possibilities is only episodic; and the emancipatory capacity of the aesthetic regime is limited, but no less crucial for that.

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Dreaming Bourdieu Away: Rancière and the Reinvented Habitus Marina van Zuylen

For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual [. . .] Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter. —​Bourdieu I never say what to do or how to do it. I try to draw from scratch the map of what is thinkable. This way, whatever smacks of the subversive in a world of impossibilities and prohibitions might suddenly appear feasible. —​Rancière Whoever we believed we were is no longer the same; that vision we had of ourselves and others in society splits apart, our place, our tastes, nothing is natural anymore, nothing goes without saying in the workings of the most ordinary things of life.1 —​Ernaux The unparalleled impact that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has had on sociology and its contiguous fields, and particularly on its ability to trace the life of the body to the habits of the mind, has resulted in a number of vigorous counter-​trends.2 Rancière’s head-​on attack on the sociologist as king, the subject 1 This is excerpted from Annie Ernaux’s obituary of Bourdieu published in Le Monde: “[L]‌’être qu’on croyait être n’est plus le même, la vision qu’on avait de soi et des autres dans la société se déchire, notre place, nos goûts, rien n’est plus naturel, allant de soi dans le fonctionnement des choses apparemment les plus ordinaires de la vie.” “Bourdieu: le chagrin,” Le Monde, February 5, 2002. 2 This chapter owes a great debt to Charlotte Nordman’s indispensable Bourdieu/​Rancière. La politique entre sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2006).

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of “The Philosopher and the Sociologist,” the third part of The Philosopher and His Poor, is a case in point. “To ensure his kingship, the sociologist . . . absolutized the arbitrary.”3 Rancière’s main target is Bourdieu, whom he accuses of edging suspiciously close to Plato by describing social classes as stagnant and unmovable, prone to remaining self-​duplicating, and thus moribund. Even if he tries to write the “people” out of their ignorance, by dwelling on their fate so tirelessly, Bourdieu ends up locking his subjects into an ever more constricting predicament. “Everything happens as if the science of the sociologist-​king had the same requirement as the city of the philosopher-​king. There must be no mixing, no imitation. The subjects of this science, like the warriors of the Republic, must be unable to ‘imitate’ anything else than their own dye” (PP 189). The shoemaker must be made to believe that he will inevitably be shut out of the aesthetic gaze. And the likes of an Emma Bovary, trying to pass off as an educated grande dame, is promptly put in her place by Flaubert’s theories of pure art. Passing from one station to another is as impossible an endeavor as merging Kant and John Stuart Mill. Habitus, to Rancière, is a blatant form of defeatism. Rather than viewing the self as the sum of its genealogical parts, he embraces it as a series of potential histories, an entity capable of shedding traces of its past inequalities by presenting and performing them in a new light. Or ignoring them altogether. In his view, if we can assign ourselves a course of action, it is not to explore the maze we are stuck in, but to work our way out of it. Nobody is fated to be the passive reflection of his or her social condition. And why keep writing oneself deeper into doomsday when there are plenty of words to signify and enact liberation? Habitus is descriptive, not performative. Rancière’s impatience with its Sisyphean burden—​it carries dead certainties ad infinitum—​comes from his desire to view the human experience as a trajectory with few straight lines, but where twisted paths lead to unexpected possibilities. This chapter considers Rancière’s work as a way out of Bourdieu’s habitus. Rancière views Bourdieu’s understanding of social codes and transmission of cultural capital as smacking of paternalism and intellectual sluggishness. If habitus is the sum of the internalized habits that shape our taste, reminding us of who we were before we could wear the flattering mask of culture and manners, then the “I” will inexorably be 3 The Philosopher and his Poor, ed. Andrew Parker, trans. J. Drury, C. Oster, A. Parker (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004), 179. Subsequently referred to as PP.

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reduced to a platonic essence, an essentially unchanging point. It is Bourdieu’s allusions to the unchanging quality of being that produces the greatest rift between him and Rancière. For the former, we inhabit our origins no matter how much we try to reinvent ourselves. Our first experiences stick to us, providing the basis for judgments of taste and distaste. Our gestures and tics are always on the verge of betraying that extra layer of past self. A compendium of shame, ambition, and metabolized taboos, it seems as though we keep reliving our childhood through hexis, those gestures that break the boundaries between sensation and thought, that make us forget which came first, the blushing or the shame. Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking.4

The question of the permanent over the fluid haunts Bourdieu. If the possibility of defiance might be seductive, how many people actually dare to rebel and shake off their childhood habits? Why are we so bad at transgressing imperatives that have ceased to be categorical, obligations that no longer oblige or “désoblige” anyone? How is it possible, Bourdieu writes, that “the order of the world, with its one ways, its No enter signs [. . .] its obligations and sanctions is not subjected to more transgressions or subversions, more [. . .] acts of madness?”5 It is one thing to point to the unspoken rules of tradition, but fusing such a tradition with a paralyzing sense that it would be useless to break through its doors is perhaps the greatest point of contention between Bourdieu and Rancière. For the former, the sense of historical inevitability (I will never be part of the elite because I am not an ancienne de l’école normale supérieure), the relationship between success and pedigree, unconsciously leads to talking oneself out of a competition that is lost in advance. Rancière’s work, one might say, is an ode to an ever-​renewed belief that conformity exists only to be trumped. Experts should not be telling us what we can or cannot do; they shouldn’t be recounting our private histories. We are coconspirators in our negotiations with the past. Rancière’s sees the world as the ceaseless implementation of ostensibly impossible wagers, the overcoming of daunting roadblocks. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1977; Paris, Droz, 1972), 93–​94. 5 “De la domination masculine,” Le Monde diplomatique, August 1998, quoted by Charlotte Nordmann, Bourdieu/​Rancière, 17.

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It is no wonder, then, that belonging and excluding are concepts shunned by Rancière. To him, exclusion and inequality are labels that educators, politicians, and academics distribute all too generously. Why have sociologists and philosophers so confidently assessed privilege and poverty alike?6 If it were up to Rancière to educate the so-​called dominés, the first step would be to assume not their lack of awareness about the social straightjackets they are said to inhabit, but their capacity to take stock and therefore to slip out of their condition—​to shed that so-​called second skin. Whereas Bourdieu is the archeologist of our bodily palimpsests, Rancière is the shaker-​up, the troublemaker, who shuffles categories, muddies the waters, and uncovers singularity. With Rancière, no single body is ever stable and no condition is ever definite. Change can hit us when nothing seems amiss, even, and especially, when inertia reigns. It doesn’t take Burke’s or Kant’s sublime to transform us, to make us see. Metamorphoses can be ignited by a single moment of expectant silence, by the glimpse of a discrete gesture—​the unexpected alliance of two moments in time that will clear the ground for a newly found urgency of being and acting. An increasing number of Rancière’s narratives, Aisthesis being the most vital example, document key moments where a mechanical gesture is interrupted, leading to a conscious-​filled activity. Such moments, because they disrupt a mechanical course of events (working by rote, repeating a gesture without feeling it) can reframe and radicalize one’s place in time. Rancière captures temporal intervals, while Bourdieu gives an overview of the already-​formed human, clad in his or her indelible ways. The former lets time unfold, the latter focuses on the mannerisms and behaviors shaped by customs and class. While the reality of Bourdieu’s work is a lot more complicated than these pat phrases, Rancière likes to pit the evolving nature of his subjects against Bourdieu’s proto-​platonism.7 From this rather skewed position, it is easy to see how he would read habitus as the mirroring of a transcendent immovability, an inevitability of selfhood as hard to shake as a platonic essence. It sticks no matter what, locking the individual in the 6 Rey Chow sums this up lucidly in his blog:  “According to its very orientation, argues Rancière, only the sociologist can know what is best for ‘the poor’—​or, that is, everyone and anyone who needs to be ‘managed’ or ‘policed,’ not just the masses, but everyone from schoolchildren to delinquents to the unemployed to convicts [.  . .] relying on hierarchy and authority for their own operation, [French social and educational institutions] were doomed to fail and to reproduce hierarchy, authority and structural inequality.” http://​reychow.blogspot.com/​2014/​05/​ the-​philosopher-​and-​his-​pugilists-​part-​1.html. 7 In her pathbreaking Les transclasses, ou la non-​reproduction (Paris: PUF, 2014), Chantal Jacquet uses Spinoza’s Ethics and Ernaux autobiographical writings to argue for Bourdieu’s sensitivity to what cannot simply be subsumed under habitus.

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no-​way-​out dungeon of materiality; so assimilated, so perfectly metabolized, it becomes a doomed heredity. Rancière consistently breaks away from bodily or cultural genetics. To explore further his phobic avoidance of pinpointed identities, one has only to turn to Jean Borreil, whose La Raison nomade is one of his great influences. It is with these unforgettable lines that Rancière introduces the late philosopher, providing a short cut into his own thinking. Unlike Bourdieu’s eternal return of a recurrent selfhood, Borreil describes the human as embodying two simultaneous movements and affects. We are past with present, lost and found, traitors and servants to a same past. The fidelity to the place we come from is also the fidelity to the movement that made us leave it [. . .] we are only somebody/​anybody by virtue of that movement, ever since the borrowed strangeness of our maternal language, we never stop becoming someone else [.  . .] opened up to others by those singularly uncanny encounters that change our color and our fabric.8

Sure, we are bound to our past, wed to handed-​down traditions and prejudices; sure, like Oedipus, we can run far from home but cannot outrun the crisscrossing grids that drove us to where we are now. But we are also mavericks, following many other crooked paths, losing and finding the threads that bind us to our place of origin. The fabric of Rancière’s thought is all about this brewing and crossbreeding. Himself an infinitely mercurial character, he has boisterously relished and cultivated his rebel status. He famously rejected Althusser’s brand of Marxism in the 1970s, kept up his utopian dreams in the 1980s, and travels pretty much alone today as he persists in fitting ideas of proletarian emancipation to his own brand of neo-​Hegelianism. Rancière neither lets himself be called philosopher, historian, sociologist, or anthropologist. Just like the figures he gives voice to, he gravitates toward de-​identification and dissensus, processes that welcome the heretical and disruptive. Myth-​breaking is one of his favorite intellectual ploys. It makes sense, then, that he would want to debunk Bourdieu’s eternal cycle of reproduction as yet another myth, one that will itself continue the propagation of an infernal structuring and reductive process. As Peter Hallward writes, “Rancière’s most fundamental assumption is that everyone thinks. Everyone

8 La Raison nomade (Paris: Payot, 1993), 16–​17 (“parce que nous sommes tissés et métissés par ces rencontres”).

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shares equal powers of speech and thought, and this ‘equality’ is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure.”9 We are all privy to the possible and that is the basis of radical equality. Our desires are far more complex than our conscious ambitions. They drive us to want in ways that transcend materiality or even recognition. Bypassing the desire of the other, wanting for the sake of an unmediated sensuous experience, is one of Rancière’s staunchest claims. At times, especially in Aisthesis, where from the floating gaze of Murillo’s street urchins a whole world materializes, we are brought strangely close to German Romanticism and its apophatic revelations. But despite their epiphanic quality, these revelations have little to do with the beyond: they germinate from the intense pleasure bred by the moment, the event before our eyes, only then followed by a consciousness that takes place between reality and the daydream. Why such a slippery presentation of the world? Behind Rancière’s defense of multiplicity and attack of identity politics is the rejection of the obvious binaries that have (often unfairly) been viewed as Bourdieu’s trademark. It is not, he writes, about “the working class ideology versus its bourgeois counterpart, popular culture versus academic culture, but [about] the fact that all important explosive phenomena within ideological conflicts occur in liminal spaces.”10 It is for the reader and spectator to inhabit these spaces, not for the writer to assign them. A difficult poem is not about excluding an “unprepared” reader, but about discouraging this reader from reading according to his or her horizon of expectations. Rancière would certainly “forgive” Emma Bovary’s “predictable” literary taste by refusing the category high versus low, classy versus déclassé. The putting to death of the “po-​et-​ical” aspirations of the “hysteric” Madame Bovary; the condemnation to forced labors of infinite repetition of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s autodidact desire to know [.  . .] An ambiguous fraternity through which the work of art is made capable of rolling off anywhere, even in the hands of [. . .] the Madame Bovarys who populate interworlds from which are turned out the dreamers of the proletariat and the déclassé intelligentsia. This is when social science intervenes in sorting out what is suitable for each. (PP 201) 9 “Staging Equality: Rancière’s Theatrocracy,” New Left Review 37 (2006): 109. 10 Rancière, La Méthode de l’égalité, eds. Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan (Paris:  Bayard, 2012), 51. “À partir de ce moment-​là, ce qui a été important pour moi a été la critique de tout identitarisme, l’idée que ce n’est pas l’idéologie ouvrière contre l’idéologie bourgeoise, la culture populaire contre la culture savante, mais que tous les phénomènes importants comme déflagrateurs de conflit idéologique et social sont des événements qui se passent à la frontière, des phénomènes de barrières qu’on voit et qu’on transgresse, de passages d’un côté à un autre.”

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Suitability is a word that Rancière scratches from his vocabulary. Who decides whether Emma’s ambition is vulgar and her tastes dubious? Whence the consensus that her desire to pass from paysanne to Parisienne is a blatant sign of ridicule? Why is Flaubert’s concept of distance the only viable aesthetic principle and why is it so readily agreed on, turning those who read for the plot into literary losers? Rancière’s defense of Emma against Flaubert is a bold move. He puts it in place with the very idea of cognitive dissonance, a dissensus that allows us to travel somewhere between the transfigured landscapes of Emma’s imagination and the flat sidewalk of primitive identification. Rancière complicates matters further by praising a type of difficulty fundamentally different from Flaubert’s or Adorno’s. A Mallarmé poem, known for its ambiguity, does not have to stand for high art, but is poised instead to become a most powerful deterrent against facile categories: “the function of the poem, generally speaking, is to consecrate the human sojourn for what it is: a fold, a singular parenthesis in the mute eternity of things.”11 A poem speaks in a language that can neither be general, nor poised for appropriation. As for the “mute eternity of things,” with its Novalis-​like overtones, it forbids a rule to live by and yet evokes a powerful alternative world. It is eternal and temporal, from and outside of language. Making sure aesthetics is what preserves its impossible-​to-​ summarize impact is another way of guaranteeing that any preset definition of the world is a counterproductive agenda to harbor. In Tant pis pour les gens fatigués, another nudge at Bourdieu’s fatalism, Rancière crows: “I never say what to do or how to do it. I try to draw from scratch the map of what is thinkable. This way, whatever smacks of the subversive in a world of impossibilities and prohibitions might suddenly appear feasible.”12 The optimistic slant is a call to defamiliarize ourselves from the myriad of passively accepted roles projected onto us. Of course Brecht comes to mind. In the case of a play or a pantomime, the spectator comes to understand that the actor’s impact is not about showing but about living. Unlike laughter, that supremely important component in Rancière’s register of liberating affects, the art of showing

11 “Le poème en général a pour fonction de consacrer le séjour humain pour ce qu’il est: un pli, une parenthèse singulière dans la muette éternité des choses.” “La rime et le conflit. La politique du poème,” in Mallarmé où l’obscurité lumineuse, Colloque de Cerisy 1997, eds. Bertrand Marchal and Jean-​Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Hermann, 2014). 12 “Je ne dis jamais ce qu’il faut faire ni comment le faire. J’essaie de redessiner la carte du pensable afin de lever les impossibles et les interdits qui se logent souvent au cœur même des pensées qui se veulent subversives.” Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2009), 604.

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smacks of didactic paternalism. Humor is liable to provoke the kind of outer body experience that can’t be traced to a singular origin. If Rancière would like to create a counter category, one that blurs the boundaries between classes, then he demands a different pedagogy—​one where humor would play a vital role. “For in the final analysis,” he writes, “the pedagogy that ‘raises consciousness’ by unveiling exploitation and its mystifications is a very impoverished virtue. The great virtue that must be learned by the public with the actor is humor, the art of performing on stage where opposites never cease to interchange themselves” (PP 121; emphasis in the original). Laughing at one’s oppression is part of the “art of becoming a historical agent” (PP 121). You can only laugh at yourself if you are no longer the victim of warped social relations. Real social misfortune, Rancière claims, occurs not when we are “not being unaware of real conditions but of not being equal to what they bear” (PP 121; emphasis in the original). Consider these two examples of potential liberated selfhood:  in one of the most striking parts of Aisthesis, Rancière takes on Hegel’s description of Murillo’s Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melons. These boys, writes Rancière, are “doing nothing and not worrying about anything.” Their carefree idleness saves them from being boxed in, sentimentalized, instrumentalized by our need to pity them. Murillo’s genius, it appears, is to stop the young urchins from fitting an alleged social condition; the dirt on their bodies contradicts and belies their joyous posture. As hard as we try, our tendency to cast them as poor beggar boys (think Diderot and Greuze) is thwarted by their sensuous reverie. Rather than focusing on the rags and tatters, Rancière describes their far niente, their doing nothing: It is important to grasp the power of subversion of this innocent far niente. Far niente is not laziness. It is the enjoyment of otium. Otium is specifically the time when one is expecting nothing, precisely the kind of time that is forbidden to the plebeian [. . .] This is not the lack of occupation but the abolition of the hierarchy of occupations.13

The facial expression of the “petits dieux de la rue” (little street gods) is the kind of joy that blurs the distinction between “high” and “low” occupations. “The patrician occupation is to act [. . .] [p]‌lebeians are bound to do” (A 46; emphasis in the original). These urchins neither act nor do anything. Their bliss partakes of the autonomous quality inscribed in Schiller’s idea of play; it is also a crucial 13 Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 46.

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step in Rancière’s rehabilitation of free time, in his departure from what he contests as a sociology of hierarchical déjà vu. The dream state, the reveries that transport the two boys into a no-​man’s land outside of class and time, is central to Rancière’s unorthodox reading of poverty. Indeed, his version of Murillo’s dreaming children will inevitably run circles around any desire to brand, to pity, or to classify. He opens the essay by quoting Hegel’s Aesthetics: But in this poverty and semi-​nakedness, what precisely shines forth within and without is nothing but complete absence of care and concern, which a dervish could not surpass, in the full feeling of their wellbeing and delight in life. (A 21)

Perhaps the crucial verb here is to “shine forth.” Hegel is eager to demonstrate that painting has more to do with the reflection of light, the magical play of shadows, than with the subject itself. But however little the painting may have to do with a social or allegorical agenda, for the form to communicate its core, it needs to form a sharp connection to what it is representing. The play of appearances may be the culmination of its freeing of the spirit, but this also originates out of a lingering concern for content: The freedom manifested by the insouciance of the characters depicted cannot simply be reduced to the freedom of indifference. The new concept of art demands [. . .] that it be the realization of content, of an inner necessary freedom [. . .] The freedom of a people that gave itself its own way of life and prosperity, that can rejoice with “insouciance” about the setting it gives itself after great pains, and rejoice in a disinterested way at the image of this universe, created by artifice, in the same way the child revels in the skipping of a stone skillfully thrown across the water’s surface. (A 32)

Rancière connects the aesthetic experience to a hard-​gained history of the body; even if the boys don’t know it, they do benefit from a sense of historical agency; and rather than being subjugated by it, it feeds their ability to cast off oppression. The strength of such a reading is that it does not contain a simple message. The painting cannot be read as a straightforwardly triumphant anticapitalist alternative. Instead, Rancière divests the boys of what we might paternalistically applaud as their bold act of bravado. What actually distinguishes their lazing around is the off-​the-​cuff indifference to their station. There is no redemptive agenda, “just” a selfhood without qualities—​that is, a state that exists outside of our own obsession about work versus play, productivity versus leisure. Rancière wants to read the painting against those who might croon at its resistance to productivity; he indeed divests the melon-​eating street dwellers of our own cumbersome

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teleological gaze, our fixer-​up mentality. This is yet another instance of an anti-​ Bourdieuian move: echoing Borreil’s refusal to see the human as motored by one single type of fuel, Rancière invites us to consider every experience in its duality. Murillo’s playful boys are decidedly not reflections of one single social framework. They embody a paradox that Rancière would summarize as the experience of suspension, doubled with that of a people’s will power. If the little Sevilleans “eat[ing] their melon, play[ing] cards, or let[ting] themselves be picked for lice while munching their bread, can express the artistic Ideal, it is because it comprises both the freedom of the modern people that gives itself a world through will power and that of the antique who neither wants nor does anything” (32). Rancière’s genius is to extricate the two boys, and along with them his readers, from certain automatic reactions. No, not everything is about power play and mimetic desire; desiring is not always about the desire of the Other. Without reverting to Kant’s purposefulness without purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck), where the Beautiful simply is, independent from our needs or projections, Rancière turns away from the work itself to concentrate on the human capacity to experience autonomy. Dissensus is the defense of a power-​free amour de l’art. The love of art does not have to be the result of sinister machinations, or even of any awareness that it is art as such that one is experiencing. Behold how the spectator who experiences the free play of the aesthetic in front of “the free appearance” enjoys an autonomy of a very special kind. It is not the autonomy of free Reason, subduing the anarchy of sensation. It is the suspension of that kind of autonomy. It is an autonomy strictly related to a withdrawal of power [. . .] The autonomy is the autonomy of the experience, not of the work of art. In other words, the artwork participates in the sensorium of autonomy inasmuch as it is not a work of art.14

This astonishing passage, with its invocation of a very different type of aesthetic freedom, goes far beyond Schiller’s notion of play and ultimately liberates us from Kant, Lacan, and Bourdieu in one fell swoop. Free Reason, commodification, or the doomed power play of desire can finally cease to be our aesthetic signposts. Like the photographs of David Octavius Hill that Rancière discusses in his 2004 Politics of Aesthetics, Murillo’s painting has “burnt the image-​character, 14 Dissensus:  On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), 117.

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where non-​art ha[s]‌pierced a hole that placed it at the heart of what could henceforth be experienced as art” (A 37). It is only once the viewer’s fixed ideas are brushed aside that the carefree power of the children will emerge. To recapitulate, and this is absolutely central to Rancière’s poetics, the aesthetic experience will have the most likely impact, it will produce the most lasting political upheaval, when “the loss of destination that it presupposes disturbs the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations.”15 Rancière fiercely defends the street urchins’ right to remain chaotically free—​anonymous, unrecognizable, unclassifiable. The paradox of the unclassifiable is that it guards the individual’s autonomy while threatening to make him or her an outcast. Certainly, this is what occurs in Rancière’s “A Child Kills himself,”16 an essay about Roberto Rosselini’s Europa ’51. He presents the figure played by Ingrid Bergman as a character whose multiplicity of roles and social embodiments destroys her relationship to family, dangerously complicating her place in society. Her husband and mother-​in-​law, no longer able to cast her in one role or another, simplify her “condition” by relegating her in the position of the mad woman, ultimately sending her to an insane asylum. Rancière sums up the plot: [T]‌he heroine, a rich bourgeoise absorbed by social life, was unable to see the true extent of the effects of this time of war and horror on her son, an impressionable child. The child’s suicide tears her out of the complacency of her universe and sets her on a voyage into the heart of poverty and charity, creating a scandal that will lead her friends and family to have her committed.17

Rancière revels in this scandal. Turning back again to Borreil’s words quoted earlier, one might surmise that the heroine is continuously “opened up to others by those singularly uncanny encounters that change [her] color and [her] fabric.” It is her ability to confuse her interlocutors’ attempt to turn a person into a category (is she a mother, a socialite, a social worker?) that deepens the rift. It is “unnatural” for the socialite to be a social worker; for a mother to leave the family structure. Whatever is considered “natural” to her upbringing, to the expectations of her class, she has entangled, ruined. The guardians of the social status 15 Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art,” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 13. 16 “Un enfant se tue,” in Courts Voyages aux pays du peuple (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990). 17 Short Voyages to the Land of the People (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), trans. James B. Swenson. Quoted in http://​www.diagonalthoughts.com/​?p=1554.

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quo—​here the husband and his mother—​can no longer protect the armature of society if it is being undermined by her occupying more than one role. Likewise, implies Rancière, the artwork plays a similarly complicating role, allowing social knee-​jerk reactions into maverick moments of enlightenment. Whereas Bourdieu tends to trace even the most successful reinventions of selfhood to a tangible genealogy, Rancière zooms in on historical and fictional characters that frustrate causal narratives. And he does that through a sleuthing that mostly uses literature and art as evidence. A case in point is his radical dispelling of the following prejudice—​workers only want the kind of art that reflects or claims to improve their condition. In fact, one of Rancière’s most original arguments is that the nineteenth-​century workers who will become the de facto narrators of their newfound social histories had little interest in reading texts focused on their own oppression and “servitude.” The irony is that they wanted the most canonical of canonized writers. What did these workers read in the sparest of their spare time? In the 1848 workers’ paper Le Tocsin des travailleurs, Rancière discovers a surprising fact, one that has become the cornerstone of his work. Louis-​Gabriel Gauny, the writer-​joiner who led proletarian discussions, advised his coworkers to immerse themselves in Goethe and Chateaubriand and read The Sufferings of Young Werther and René. Against all expectations (and Rancière delights in countering any expectations) Gauny never recommended texts rife with social questions. These improbably quixotic lives, Gauny argued, spoke to workers in unexpectedly powerful ways, notably, through counter-​identification. Indeed, both Werther and René, reveling self-​indulgently in a vice unknown to most workers—​idleness—​were attractive because they embodied the curiously novel and unknown state of bored inactivity. Indeed, remarks Rancière, these two emblematic characters “suffered from the misfortune that is forbidden by definition to the worker: the misfortune of having no occupation, of not being fit or equipped for any specific place in society?”18 Reading about idleness and identifying with an unknown, coveted state exercises a defamiliarizing fascination. So unlike Bourdieu, who belabors the familiar distribution of roles and tastes, Rancière shows again and again that like does not go with like. As Nick Hewlett points out, for Rancière “human beings are

18 Aesthetics and Politics: With and Around Jacques Rancière, plenary lecture delivered on June 20, 2006, to the symposium co-​organized by Sophie Berrebi and Marie-​Aude Baronian at the University of Amsterdam on June 20–​21, 2006.

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political, then, precisely because they are literary, because the meanings of words are contested and struggled over in disputes between the powerful and the powerless, those who have to date determined the meaning of words and those who have not.”19 Rancière indeed has a knack for digging up archives that contradict predigested notions. Workers, he reveals, are not so different from philosophers; they have aesthetic yearnings in spades, even if this sends scholars into reclassifying nightmares. Why sociologists want to assign certain tastes and behaviors to specific socioeconomic groups is nothing but a further proof of their ethic and aesthetic carelessness. And lack of empathetic imagination. De-​assigning, as we continue to see in his work, is far closer to Rancière’s aim. The novel, it would seem, does a better job than sociology at demonstrating that there are no givens that cannot be altered. It indeed has the paradoxical power to invent impossible scenarios and then get out of them. A power that mimics exactly what humans do. In the novel, no subject matter is off-​limits, including the right to do nothing—​that murky place that usually excludes the workers Rancière centers so much of his thinking on. Many of his figures, indeed, progress along solipsistic territories; their lives rarely match what is expected of them—​the teacher becomes the student, the worker becomes the poet, and the master becomes the empathetic caregiver. One of the appealing things about the novel genre is that it takes all kinds of liberties, the most important being that it can decide to forego plot and do without an emblematic main character that swerves from ignorance to knowledge, from recognition to catharsis. While so much of Bourdieu’s work is about opinion—​strong opinions and opinions reçues—​Rancière’s world embraces the multiple sensations that simultaneously attach us to and detach us from experience and past histories, making them behave in unruly ways. While to Bourdieu, the repositories of culture resemble the stations of the cross, to Rancière they are potential sites of liberation. Compare how both thinkers consider the workings and impact of museums. Bourdieu’s description is full of anxiety: “[M]‌useums,” he writes, “betray their true function, which is to reinforce for some the feeling of belonging and for others the feeling of exclusion [.  . .] the world of art opposes itself to the word of the everyday life just as the sacred does to the profane.”20 Rancière counteracts this pessimism with a passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s What

19 Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-​thinking Emancipation (London: A&C Black, 2010), 99. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1993), 255.

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Is Philosophy: “A monument does not commemorate; it does not celebrate some past event but it confides to the ears of the future the enduring sensations that gives it its body: the ceaselessly revived suffering of men, their renewed protest, their relentlessly resumed struggle.”21 Rancière then turns to the French group of artists called Urban Encampment (Campement Urbain) and observes how it rethinks a constraint—​the lack of art space in the inner cities—​and reverses it by creating its own musée imaginaire. In this particular urban encampment, visitors engage with a cultural wasteland by turning empty spaces into opportunities for reflection. The social discontent around the city of Asnières is reflected and recycled by improvised artists and visitors. Indifferent to the class structure imbedded in the museum, ignoring issues of privilege and aura, these people “set out to create no more artworks. Instead they want to get out of the museum, and provoke modifications of the space of everyday life, giving rise to new forms of relations.” Rather than be subjected by the possible humiliations that come with not knowing high from low, not recognizing camp from kitsch, they turn their backs on the institutionalized place of art and occupy their own space. Within the depressed heart of Asnières, this group proposes to create [. . .] a place that would be “extremely useless, fragile and non productive” [. . .] dedicated to a specific end: solitude, which meant that it would be conceived and implemented as a place that could be occupied only by one person for the sake of lonely contemplation or meditation. This is why the project was called I and us. So the “being together apart” appears to be more than a poetic sophistication. Constructing a place for solitude, an “aesthetic” place appears as a task for engaged art.22

When crossing the partage du sensible, Rancière implies an untainted gaze, a purity of experience not contaminated by the voyeuristic and competitive pleasure that Bourdieu unpacks. For Bourdieu the strangely interchangeable place of past and present dissolve and merge like slipping sand. In matters of taste and status, the newly anointed member of an old class can never appropriate the expression “it goes without saying.” An explanation is always required and there is no such thing as neutral taste since taste is always a shifting reflection of the gaze of another. Aesthetic pleasure never occurs out of the blue. Whatever 21 Deleuze/​Guattari, What Is Philosophy in Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. http://​www.artandresearch.org.uk/​v2n1/​ranciere.html (n.p.). 22 Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community, n.p.

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delight one gleans from a work is always connected to a tight system of cultural references, suffused by a host of memories producing and deriving from a desire for social recognition. Aesthetic pleasure, to Bourdieu, comes from the brutal passage from practice to belief; this amor fati is a doomed kind of love, built on the self-​hating edifice of past aesthetic exclusions and faux pas. Contrast this with Rancière’s emancipated spectator, who manages to break loose from past constraints and from the tyranny of the market; who drives art rather than is driven by its portentous pedigree. Between the piercing gaze of the wannabe, who pretends that the game he or she wants to win is not a game, but a charmed experience, and Rancière’s liberating disconnect between art and cultural commodification, there is a giant step. Consider his suggestion that the “task of modern cinema would be to return to the disjunction of the gaze and movement, to re-​explore the contradictory powers of the stoppages, delays and disconnections of the gaze.”23 One of the secret recipes of Rancière’s optimism is his suggestion that one can only connect if one first disconnects from the gridlock of cultural capital. In the revolutionary worker’s paper mentioned earlier, Le Tocsin des travailleurs (1848), the same Gauny enjoys a full-​bodied aesthetic experience because he wills himself to split his persona into his working and feeling self. It is a “game,” Rancière writes, “in which working-​class pathos transforms itself into an aesthetic and militant passion for re-​appropriation” (PP 199). Gauny, indeed, undergoing a quasi-​out-​of-​body experience, separates himself from his work as a carpenter, and brackets the tangible world around him by paying extreme, undivided attention to the conscious act of interrupting his work.24 The joiner who appears to “be commenting on The Critique of Pure Reason [. . .] offers the gaze of an aesthete on the décor of his servitude” (PP 199). Note how he speaks of himself as an other, in the third person: Thinking himself at home, as long as he has not finished the room in which he nails down the boards, he likes the layout of the place; if the window opens out 23 The Intervals of Cinema, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso Book, 2014), 39. 24 See Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth, eds. Gary Bridge, Tim Butler, and Loretta Lee (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012): this book about neighborhood social mixity in urban planning contrasts Rancière’s interest in Gauny’s with Bourdieu’s bleak outlook regarding social hybridity. “Rancière [. . .] diagnoses a particular absence of transcendent possibility within Bourdieu’s interpretation of social class [. . .] He describes Gauny’s account of himself laying on a parquet floor, gazing at the décor around him, a décor that positions his servitude. Rancière describes how, in Gauny’s account, his writing demonstrates a transcendence of any trapping of habitus [.  . .] [he] operates outside of Bourdieu’s schema [. . .] present[ing] a “cutting up” of any deterministic, un-​thought, sense of habitus” (245).

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onto a garden or over a picturesque horizon, he stops moving his hands for an instant and shifts his thoughts toward that spacious view in order to enjoy it better than the owners of the neighboring homes.25

As with Murillo, it is this hiatus from work that enables Gauny to experience the world as a free man, and not as a carpenter allowed to take a break from his arduous task. He is the actor as well as the emancipated spectator of a world he has reclaimed. In a key anti-​Bourdieuian moment, Rancière sees the acquisition of Gauny’s aesthetic gaze as the “torsion of habitus.” The disembodied appreciation of a landscape made familiar, tamed by a non-​subservient gaze, “is also the claim of a human right to happiness that exceeds the rhetoric of proletarian recruiters, the battle of cottages and castles” (PP 199). What Rancière calls the “new sensorium,” that moment gleaned from the divorce between the worker’s laboring arms and his floating gaze, provides us with new tools through which to examine a leisure-​based, heightened consciousness. The attack on Bourdieu’s habitus, at this specific juncture, has a great deal to do with Rancière’s democratic embrace of idleness via aesthetics. If Aristotle favored schole (contemplative idleness) over ascholia (work), it is because it is the only state that can generate autotelic contemplation, contemplation for its own sake. From Bourdieu’s point of view, even if work were to lead to pure idleness, this state could not exist in its own right unless its practitioner had already cultivated the rarefied ability to contemplate with no practical end in sight. To Bourdieu, contemplation without a goal is almost impossible to experience if you live on the outskirts of elitism. Thinking, let alone daydreaming, is not a given, but a practice. Not so for Rancière for whom thinking is never a privilege, but a given. It belongs to any individual who understands that a “plebeian care of self ” is “at the same time a care for others”; thinking is always thinking with: “an idea of the human individual that was also an idea of solidarity between beings.”26 In Rancière’s persistent attack against a class-​based understanding of work time versus free time, his most strident belief might be that workers are also thinkers who will always find time to think. Bourdieu’s malaise in the museum fits the same strictures as his skepticism vis-​à-​vis contemplation. Without the proper preparation, the viewing of art “Le Travail à la tâche,” in Louis-​ Gabriel Gauny, Le Philosophe plébéien (Paris:  Maspéro-​La Découverte-​Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1983), 45–​46. Quoted in Rancière, PP 199. 26 Jacques Rancière, Staging the People. The Proletarian and His Double, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 37. 25

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causes panic and social anxiety. It can be an “oppressive presence against and within which characters define their desires.”27 Finding oneself next to a smug museum visitor, knowingly nodding at a familiar canvas, can certainly be a harrowing experience. But only if you play the game of comparative culture. If you stop considering culture as an accumulation of acquired capital but rather as a joyfully chaotic series of unexpected encounters, the museum’s threat can be neutralized. Rancière might respond to Bourdieu’s museum blues by invoking the democratic dimension of open-​ended cultural experiences. Why not treat the museum the way you might surf the Internet or browse randomly your library’s shelves? His defense of the web could be transposed to create a different relationship to the museum: some reactionary people [who] are so angry with the Internet, saying it’s horrible that people log on to the web and they can find everything they want, that it is against research and intelligence. I would say no, it is the way intelligence, equal intelligence works. You wander randomly in a library the same way you surf randomly on the Internet. This is, from my point of view, what equality of intelligence means.28

The freedom and anonymity of the Internet is one of Rancière’s solutions to the hyper-​judgmental nature of cultural transmission. By wandering in and out of websites, following threads of information rather than getting directions from haughty gatekeepers, one can enjoy the internet as a great equalizer, not fear it as an instrument of domination. To Bourdieu, though, libraries and museums cannot afford such freedom. Those oppressed by their cultural norms, intimidated when it comes to making inevitably loaded cultural decisions, end up erecting them as symbols to live up or down to. This is something Rancière refuses to do; he never projects onto the working class, or indeed, onto any marginalized group, the straightjacket of such inevitable habitus. Instead, he reconfigures the possibilities of worker and bourgeois alike, demonstrating how they can set themselves free from the grinding workings of such cultural machinations. Documenting how they find their voice and how it can resonate outside of the deterministic grammar of anointed culture Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble:  Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Richmond: Virginia University Press, 2011), 25. 28 Jacques Rancière and Truls Lie, “Our Police Order: What can be said, seen and done.” Interview published in Eurozine online. Originally published in English in Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo). http://​www.egs.edu/​faculty/​jacques-​Rancière/​articles/​our-​police-​order/​. 27

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is, within his usually meandering aesthetic practices, one of his most consistent aims. Not that his counteroffensive is straightforward or a simple recipe. His quest occurs via a series of public experiences made intensely private. It seems that the first step toward making one’s mark is to stray from the ambient doxa. “Aesthetic experience,” Rancière writes, “has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination that it presupposes disturbs the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations.”29 For the worker, as mentioned earlier, why not read Romantic literature rather than political tracts? Or why not meditate alone in an empty space rather than joining a sit-​in? Because there is little trace of striving and humiliation in this redistributed realm. Rancière’s characters (real and fictional) float in and out of their habitus in a cavalier way, happily casting away the shadows of their pasts, while renewing themselves through those singular encounters that allow them to “cross [. . .] the borders of what seemed impossible.”30 Occasionally, one has to raise a suspicious eyebrow at Rancière’s utopian vision.31 Granted, Bourdieu can appear too systematic in his desire to lay bare our social unconscious, to expose our amnesia about who we were and what we have become. But while Rancière so clearly tries to take the sociological mystifications out of Bourdieu’s habitus, his work has its own dream-​like opacity; it often confounds rather than demystifies, rendering more impenetrable the blind spots that Bourdieu tries to uncover. Even though there is a pattern behind these vagaries, Rancière’s scenarios often remain impressionistic. Whether they occur through daydreams or pantomime, from an “ingenious assemblage” of broken lines and fractured time where spectator and actor can “embroider [their] new poem around these patterns” (A 83), it remains unclear how such emerging poeticization can be sustained. But Rancière is not seeking long-​term solutions to social unease; nor is he looking to execute a program of action. Rancière’s aesthetics operate on faith, not facts; his landscapes drift into dreamscapes, with scant details about implementation, banking on the fact that something new will happen through the immediacy of the aesthetic experience. Not from repetition, but from innovation, not from the dwelling on inequality but from the performing of equality. Rancière, “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community,” 13. 30 Jacques Rancière and Lawrence Liang, “Interview with Rancière,” in Lodi Gardens, Delhi (February 2009): http://​kafila.org/​2009/​02/​12/​interview-​with-​jacques-​Rancière/​. 31 As Paolo Magnanoli notes, with Rancière, historical truth “is an entity that is entangled with subjective elements such as imagination, affect, and desires, including utopian impulses.” Documents of Utopia:  The Politics of Experimental Documentary (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2015), 78. 29

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Despite Rancière’s building so much of his thinking against Bourdieu, it is nonetheless striking how much we can learn from his occasional kinship with the “sociologist king.” Charlotte Nordman, who brushes two remarkably distinct portraits of both men in Bourdieu/​Rancière, convincingly reveals how the potential for change is also deeply imbedded in Bourdieu’s sociology. Focusing particularly on his Méditations pascaliennes, she argues that its startling defense of an education that shapes and changes should make us wary of a Bourdieu solely equated with La Reproduction and its endless threads of déjà vus. With Pascal’s wager as his inspiration, Bourdieu draws a far more performative picture of his subjects than meets the eye. Writing about education’s ability to change patterns and reflexes, Bourdieu embraces with Pascal a more dialogical philosophy, one that concedes that an apprenticeship of the new might actually supersede the repetition of the old.32 That Bourdieu’s thinking allows for an elasticity of human behavior comes as no surprise. It is just that Bourdieu has suffered a fate that resembles his own fateful predictions. Having his name so intimately attached to habitus and having developed a concept that can be simplified and summarized ad infinitum has not always served him well. Prominent writers such as Annie Ernaux have felt the need to come to his rescue. Defending him ardently against those flattening his message, her eulogy praises him not only for bringing to light the hidden mechanisms of social reproduction, but also for giving a voice to sublimated and internalized beliefs. Because he “defatalises” (défatalise) human existence, Bourdieu “does not destroy or minimize art, he simply rescues it from the sacred, thereby treating it far better than religion, namely as a complex human activity.”33 Ernaux dispels the myth of a Bourdieu mired in the status quo; she defends him as a humanizing observer who indefatigably fights for change, even if this could take decades. It is in fact the pace of change that separates most blatantly the two philosophers. With Rancière, it is certainly not a gradual shedding of habits, but something joyfully violent and seismic, as unpredictable and 32 Nordman, Bourdieu/​Rancière, 42. See Bourdieu’s Méditations pascaliennes (Paris:  Seuil, 2003), 29:  “Contrairement à ce qu’affirme Rancière, l’analyse sociologique, comme la psychanalyse, n’a donc pas simplement pour effet de faire accepter au sujet l’inéluctabilité de sa nature, contre les aspirations infondées qu’il pourrait nourrir, mais d’ouvrir la possibilité du déplacement” [quoted in Bourdieu/​Rancière, 127]. 33 “Il m’a toujours semblé au contraire que, mettant au jour les mécanismes cachés de la reproduction sociale, en objectivant les croyances et processus de domination intériorisés par les individus à leur insu, la sociologie critique de Bourdieu défatalise l’existence [. . .] Bourdieu ne détruit pas l’art, ne le réduit pas, il le désacralise simplement, il en fait ce qui est beaucoup mieux qu’une religion, une activité humaine complexe.” “Bourdieu: le chagrin.”

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transformative as an epiphany. To Bourdieu, it occurs over generations. Whether stepping up or stepping down, it is the transition from one condition to another that the latter so powerfully documents. In contradistinction, it is the moment of impact that sets Rancière apart. The focus on distance versus immediacy, self-​consciousness versus embodied consciousness certainly distinguishes these two thinkers. Their longing for equality, however, brings them back together. In Bourdieu’s famous passage about Proust’s narrator, bashfully confessing that his love for Ruskin’s prose is impure because mimetic, there is nonetheless the acknowledgment of real and great joy. Indeed, writes Proust, “[t]‌he mixed joyfulness of art crossed with erudition causes a selfish return to the self, one where aesthetic pleasure can become sharper, but not remain pure.”34 As hard as he may have tried, Bourdieu could not delete the delight behind the aesthetic experience. Joyfulness will prevail, even if it is undoubtedly “mixed” and impure, perhaps even masking the unguarded self. Posturing or not, the aesthetic experience indomitably cuts through the lines of heredity, sharpening how we view the world. So as our two thinkers keep battling their beliefs through the opposite side of the same lens, their desire for a redistribution of the aesthetic experience will continue to hyphenate their names in one superb reflection on the ways we make the choice to become who we are.

“Une sorte de retour égoïste sur soi-​même est inévitable dans ces joies mêlées d’érudition et d’art où le plaisir esthétique peut devenir plus aigü mais non rester pur”. Quoted by Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction, Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 584–​585. 34

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Rethinking the Aesthetics/​Politics Nexus in Latin America Silvia L. López

The rebellion against the failures of neoliberalism in Latin America has produced experiments with new political forms, from plurinational states to new forms of populism, that must be thought in conjunction with the construction of new communities of sense that have configured not simply new spaces of interpretation, but a very concrete democratic expansion of the body politic. While Latin America has a long tradition of artistic experimentation in configuring new communities of sense, from Ernesto Cardenal’s primitivist art community on the island of Solentiname in Nicaragua to Augusto Boal’s radical Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil, current forms of artistic intervention in contestation with the neoliberal order go beyond the experiments made during the period of repressive dictatorships in the region. By partitioning the sensible in new ways, whether it is by staging individual and collective acts of emancipation in plazas, monuments, ruins—​all spaces never associated with the people—​performers like those participating in ADAPTE interventions in El Salvador emerge in public spaces, redefining new ways of doing art and of thinking politics. Their interventions are irruptions that expand the regime of perception of the social world and how we make sense of it. It is, therefore, no accident that it is in the work of Jacques Rancière that we find the necessary affinities to think the aesthetics/​ politics nexus in Latin America today.1

1 For a recent collection of essays exploring the work of Jacques Rancière and cultural production in Latin America, see the special issue of the journal parallax 20, no 4 (October–​December 2014), which I guest edited.

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Rancière in Latin America Jacques Rancière has had a long-​standing relationship with Latin America that dates back to the 1960s, when he went to Brazil to teach a seminar on Marx’s Capital at the University of São Paulo. Althusser’s Reading Capital had appeared in France in 1965 and its impact was felt almost immediately in the university circles of the Latin American Southern Cone. The founding of the University of Vincennes in Saint-​Denis (PARIS 8) in 1968 brought the opportunity for an even closer and more formal academic exchange with radical French thought.2 Since then Rancière has broken with Althusserian Marxism, the dictatorial regimes in Latin America have ended, and neoliberalism has established itself as hegemonic in the new global order. But what has remained constant is the interest in Rancière’s work and his close contact with Latin America. His frequent visits to Latin American universities, his lectures to packed auditoria, and the immediate translation and publication of his books into Spanish speak to a particular affinity between Latin American realities and his thought. The pertinence of this affinity for understanding the aesthetics/​politics nexus in Latin America will be explored in the pages that follow. To broach the aesthetics/​politics nexus in Latin America requires us to consider new ways of recognizing the forms of its appearance. On the one hand aesthetics can no longer be considered as a specific field of knowledge, nor as that area of philosophy dedicated to thinking the world of artistic objects in relation to subjective experience. Neither can it be understood as a speculative realm in which the meaning of aesthetic production is constructed. On the other hand politics can no longer be conceived simply as the exercise of power, nor as the struggle to conquer it. Politics is a specific sphere of experience where we dispute our right to name the distribution of time and space, of articulating what is visible or hearable, and of reorganizing the way we relate signs to other signs—​it is that which Rancière calls the partition of the sensible.3 This partition defines the way in which different groups irrupt and disrupt the sensible world creating new relationships between subjects, object, and signs that contrast with the given

2 Rancière’s presence at the University of São Paulo is part of a long and close history between Parisian and São Paulo intellectuals that dates back to the founding of the University of São Paulo in 1934. For a history of the presence of France in Brazil, see Leyla Perrone-​Moises, Cinco Seculos De Presença Francesa No Brasil (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2013). 3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New  York:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004); hereafter PA.

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protected order of a given social consensus. By definition then, politics is more a logical position that confronts the order of our social world, rather than a territory contested by predetermined groups. In this sense, the aesthetic understood in terms of the sensible world would be the realm that opens the possibility of interlocution between the different realms of expression of the political. It is worth considering more closely the meaning of this theoretical operation proposed by Rancière, which leaves behind a traditional Marxist understanding of the politicization of aesthetics and of the aestheticization of politics à la Benjamin. The operation of recovering a broad realm of the sensible allows for a differentiated understanding of the arts as functioning under different regimes, which define the specific ways in which a given epoch conceives of the nature and logic of artistic representation.4 The ethical, the representative and the aesthetic regimes of the arts are not simply part of a new form of historical periodization, but a new way of reading the relationship of the arts to the order of social perception and its political constitution. A modern regime of art would be, in Rancière’s terms, an aesthetic regime constituted in opposition to an ethical or a representative obeying a particular partition of the sensible rather than a traditional understanding of the functioning of the arts in modernity. By breaking with the sociology of the modern differentiation of society, where art occupied a compensatory realm, Rancière brings back to the table the question of the aesthetics/​politics nexus and the materiality of a sensorium that has been segmented to generate a particular form of visibility that can only be questioned with the emergence of a new form of politics that reorders a specific regime of signification. Rancière presents us with a clear advantage for understanding modern aesthetic production beyond the problematic division inherent in modern dichotomous conceptions of culture, such as high versus low culture, modern versus traditional, foreign versus national, indigenous versus European, among others. In Latin America, the aesthetic regime of the arts played a central role in disorienting the expressive consensus of a European understanding of modernity. It was in the reordering of signs with signs in the literature of the marvelous-​real,5 for example, that new forms of visibility were achieved that allowed for the conditions of possibility of new forms of seeing, new forms of 4 Jean-​Philippe Deranty, Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2014), 119. 5 It is Alejo Carpentier in his preface to the Kingdom of this World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1957) who coins the term, which later will come to be known as the stylistic and editorial phenomenon of magical realism.

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doing, and new forms of enunciating. In this regime, discourses of the absolutization of art, as well as those of its trivialization coexisted, different temporalities marked by the contradictions of uneven and combined development appeared in one space, and new relationships between local logics and global ideologies clashed in the realm of signs. It was perhaps in the literature of the Latin American Boom6 that it was most intensely evident that the politics of literature was not the politics of its authors and their political messages, but rather a distribution of the sensible operated by a new relation between signs and sounds, time and space, and orders of the real. This is the first time literature is massively consumed and that opens possibilities for new decolonized subjectivities through new forms of adequation between Latin American reality and its literary expression. One must understand this process as the culmination of a long process of experimentation that finds its moment within the horizon opened by the Cuban revolution, as well as of the larger modernizing transformation of the 1960s. The aesthetics/​politics nexus in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century was reconfigured to think social materiality through making visible what was excluded and made its presence through new articulations of the real, of a different partition of the sensible where those with no part emerged in a disorienting and dissenting order. While the region witnessed the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and the internationalization of a poetics of the properly Latin American novel, there were other forms of making, seeing, and doing that partitioned the sensible—​creating new forms of political sensibilities engaged in “rehearsing revolution.”7 In a recent study, Salvadoran critic Ricardo Roque-​Baldovinos takes an in-​ depth look at the workings of the theater in the context of pre-​revolutionary El Salvador in the early 1970s.8 The paradox of how repressive governments allowed for the dissensual play of theatrical forms illuminates the non-​ correspondence between the repressive state apparatus and the artistic practice of a type of theater that was in effect a poetic practice against oppression, a “rehearsal of revolution” so to speak. Not only in El Salvador but in other Latin American cities as well, the practices of street theater or invisible theater 6 During the 1960s and 1970s the reinvention of the Latin American novel by writers like Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa enjoyed an international editorial projection that came to be named as the Latin American Boom. 7 Ricardo Roque-​Baldovinos, “A Rehearsal of Revolution: Salvadorean New Theatre and Politics in the 1970s,” parallax 20, no. 4 (October 22, 2014): 320–​33. 8 Roque-​Baldovinos, “A Rehearsal of Revolution,” 320–​33.

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were forms of intervention in societies where new partitions of the sensible world had unexpected political repercussions. Roque-​Baldovinos describes one of these invisible actions. Three actors of a theater collective sit in a bus: one reads the paper out loud, another responds to him, and a third one contradicts the opinion of the second one. Fairly soon the entire bus is engaged in a debate in ways not possible in societies living under censorship and repression. The actors get off the bus without the passengers ever knowing that what had just happened was a staged performance. His research and interviews with the artists of the time show how politics and art passed through a new semiotics of bodies. Beyond the space of the theater itself, these theatrical interventions created new zones of experience and new aesthetic communities that fueled the imagining of democratic spaces. The military regime still operating under an understanding of art imbedded in a regime of representation could not read this type of intervention for what it was. In a different context, namely, that of Argentina of the 1960s, M. Laura Novoa has examined the way in which the development of electronic music reconfigured not simply the understanding of music in Argentina, but how it transformed the way of making music, of listening to it, and of understanding its relationship to the public.9 The development of electronic music in Argentina is complicated by its relationship with a state project of modernization that from the 1950s on intended to expand beyond industrialization into the realm of artistic practices.10 Novoa investigates how the internationalization of avant-​garde poetics, including those of electronic and concrete music, effected changes in forms of sensibility by creating new points of reference shared by different social groups. In peripheral contexts this music, rather than affirming established listening habits of the elite, broke with given nationalistic and bourgeois restrictive practices of listening. It challenged an auditory culture associated with the reproduction of a consensus about the sound of the nation. Novoa’s analysis complicates our understanding of the developments of new music in Latin America by situating the debate around music’s political valence within the specific confines of a peripheral avant-​garde that placed different exigencies on musical culture in a modernizing Argentina. The expansion of the auditory field operated a series of dissensual operations that rejected hegemonic forms of subjectivation through listening, allowing for a new understanding of the role of autonomous technical 9 M. Laura Novoa, “Listening to Cultures in Conflict: the Politics of Sound in Buenos Aires in the 1960s,” parallax 20, no. 4 (October 22, 2014): 303–​19. 10 Ibid., 307.

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developments in the formation of new communities of sense. These new forms of intelligibility allowed for the undoing of distinctions of the musical and the extra-​musical partitioning of the sensible in a new regime not of visibility, but of a new audibility that originally was intended to keep pace with the modernization process, but that had unintended consequences for democratic expansion. The originality of the contributions of both Roque-​Baldovinos and Novoa consists in exploring changes in the organization of the sensible through the formation of new communities of sense that expand forms of subjectivation that will be key to later developments in the resistance to the military dictatorships that will dominate the political and social life of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Both of these essays focus on periods preceding the repression of the military regimes in these countries and show how avant-​garde practices in the periphery are less about rebelling against established art institutions and more about experiments in the creation of communities of sense that open up democratic spaces that will soon after be shut down by the order of the police. The authors claim that the radical transformation of the aesthetic/​political nexus and its impact on the formation of new communities of sense is a radical and innovative contribution to understanding Latin American cultural production and to an expansion of Rancière’s understanding of the partition of the sensible beyond the reign of visibility into the bodily and acoustic dimensions of recognition. Graciela Montaldo is another Latin American critic who has examined the work of Rancière in the context of neoliberal hegemony and how it has allowed for a return of “theoretical acts” that once were considered one and the same with acts of emancipation in the 1960s.11 Latin America has become the largest laboratory for political forms that seek to refound societies after neoliberalism. From the Bolivarian circles to the new constitutions in Ecuador and Bolivia that redefine the state as plurinational, local political experiments seek to redefine democracy beyond its liberal meaning. Having left behind the utopian revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, the new century inaugurated a new era of experiments in the articulation of the people, sovereignty, and emancipation. Rancière’s theoretical presence, like that of many other left intellectuals, has opened a two-​way dialogue about aesthetics, politics, and democracy that challenges the neoliberal order on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been at the forefront of the reactivation of a critical language that allows for the resignification 11 Graciela Montaldo, “Dialogues in Theory: Emancipation and Emancipatory Acts,” parallax 20, no. 4 (October 22, 2014): 33–​44.

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of communitarian experiences, daily life, and acts of emancipation. The new political formations in Spain that emerged out of the 15M movement and the anti-​austerity platforms have taken direct inspiration from what happens daily in Latin America.12 Rancière has been embraced as the thinker of the 15M, that is of the political moment of the occupation of plazas, of articulating into visibility those who feel unrepresented. In a recent conference at the University of San Martín in Argentina, he restated: “[D]‌emocracy is not a form of government; it is rather the manifestation of an always disruptive and conflictive egalitarian principle.”13 The universality of the power of anyone and egalitarian actions that bring into disorder the hierarchical distribution of social roles and functions, as well as of places, are the characteristics of true politics. A shared vocabulary about emancipatory acts enacted daily, while embracing again the reactivation of theoretical acts that have at their center the problem of democracy and emancipation, characterized a new aesthetics/​politics nexus. Bearing this in mind Montaldo analyzes the way in which those who are marginal and invisible irrupt into the scene of culture through the transformation of artistic communities once thought to be removed from the sphere of culture. The publishing project of Eloisa Cartonera made visible those who had no part in cultural life but were nonetheless everywhere: street kids who survive by waste picking and salvaging materials from the trash. In this project street children assemble books with cardboard covers and photocopied pages that recreate the works of Argentine literary cult figures making them into a different kind of cultural object and by establishing a different relationship between the making of literature and those who existed outside its visible real.

Dissensual communities, or what is a plaza? Plazas as space of political protests, highly monitored, are part of a long history of the development of modern cities. They have been traditional spaces for the delivery of political speeches or occupied temporarily by political protestors.

12 Podemos and its citizen platforms won significant municipalities in the May 24, 2015, elections, including in Madrid and Barcelona. Many of its young leaders wrote their dissertations or spent significant time studying Evo Morales’s MAS formation in Bolivia or the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chávez. 13 http://​www.eldiario.es/​interferencias/​democracia-​representacion-​Laclau-​Rancière_​6_​385721454. html.

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Most Latin American cities have their original colonial downtowns organized around a plaza with each of its four sides flanked by an administration building, a main church, and important stores or cinemas. The growth, modernization, and transformation of cities have multiplied their centers in metro areas. In some cities many people don’t go into the downtown anymore, even if it remains emblematic of a city’s history. During the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–​83) the mothers of disappeared students and activists decided to go to the main plaza in Buenos Aires, Plaza de Mayo, and walk together in circles, heads covered in white handkerchiefs, to call attention to the fate their children had suffered. The Pink House, the Argentine equivalence of the White House, faces this plaza. While the right to gather and protest was banned at the time, walking in a plaza in silence with other women did not qualify as a protest. As long as they kept walking, the act did not qualify as a gathering. The images of these women circulated worldwide and they became known as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. They had successfully circumvented the restrictions on their right to assembly and protest and reclaimed the signifying logic of the plaza: a public space granted to citizens for their expression of specific political grievances against the government, even in times of repression. The traditional use of plazas was part of the order of a consensus to express dissent or make demands about concrete political actions in limited space and time. Since the economic crisis of 2008 the use of public plazas has transformed the aesthetics/​politics nexus. If we look back at the occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid in May 2011, we identify a new logic of visibility at work. Here were thousands of people not protesting one event, not representing one problem, nor making one demand. They were there to say that the government of Spain did not represent them. The discussion and gathering of bodies did not follow one program or a set of speeches; instead hundreds of small circles would form where a handful of people talked among themselves and where individuals moved from group to group. They had irrupted into a public space to say that they were there: not for a day, not for a specific amount of time, not to deliver one demand. The instability of the “we are here” went on for weeks. The image of a hundred thousand people singing “Ode to Joy” led by their own philharmonic was seen around the world. All of a sudden the hymn of the European Union seemed to mean something entirely different in the voices of European citizens who had erupted as the non-​represented in this union. This was a new assembly that rejected the imposed logic of the plaza as strictly an instrumental space of politics or of art, but not a place for its reinvention.

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In neoliberal Latin America the dominance of shopping malls has relegated many plazas to either places which pedestrians cross in a rush to get to the next bus stop, where they buy a snack on their way home, or where abandoned statues stand silently and speak of bygone eras of national history. In cities like San Salvador, local governments have embarked on the sanitization of plazas to demonstrate that what seem to be chaotic and dangerous downtown areas are actually under the control of the local government. Guards often water plants or patrol the empty plazas announcing a new kind of civilizational urban clean space devoid of people or purpose. One such plaza is the Monument to the Savior of the World in San Salvador. In 2014 a group of Salvadoran artists decided to do a number of interventions in public spaces. They called themselves ADAPTE (the imperative form of adaptar, the Spanish verb for “adapt”). Their intention was to generate a dialogue about the city and its unfolding. Their interventions were meant to interrupt given interactions within historically and traditionally conceived spaces by questioning their role in the daily life of San Salvador.14 Carmen Elena Trigueros decided to stage her performance in the Monument to the Savior of the World, which is one of the most emblematic plazas of San Salvador. Situated at the foot of the San Salvador volcano in an affluent neighborhood, the plaza is a monument to Christ the Savior of the World, and it serves as a divide between the affluent neighborhood in the upper skirt of the volcano and the less well-​to-​do southern neighborhood that stretches to the heart of downtown San Salvador. High on a marble pillar Christ the Savior gives his blessing from the base of the volcano. Sitting at the crossroads of a busy intersection, the plaza once featured on its outskirts vendors, animal topiaries, and sometimes homeless people on benches. Recently, the municipality decided to give the plaza a lift by cutting down the topiaries, getting rid of the vendors, and having it permanently populated by municipal guards and gardeners who water the new lawns. Ready for showcasing patriotic events, the guards’ presence is to signal that less politically desirable events cannot be staged there. On a Sunday morning, and on the day prior to Independence Day (September 15), Trigueros 14 ADAPTE activities took place in San Salvador, Antiguo Cuscatlán, Santa Tecla, and Zaragoza between September 14 and November 29, 2014. The interventions were self-​funded and several guest artists from other countries participated: Paolo Angelosanto (Italy), Marlon de Azambuja (Brazil), Kevin Baltazar, Nayda Collazo-​Llorens (Puerto Rico), Crack, Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Ronald Morán, Beth Moysés (Brazil), Nadie, Iván Navarro (Chile), Póker, Carmen Elena Trigueros and Patricia Villalobos (Nicaragua). A description of the project can be found on their Facebook page (ADAPTE community).

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Figure 13.1  Carmen Elena Trigueros, “Lavandera,” © Violeta Leal.

showed up dressed as a modest washerwoman (lavandera) with a gigantic flag (la bandera) (Figure 13.1)15: For the next 50 minutes she proceeded to wash the flag on her hands and knees (Figure 13.2). At the end, she wrung it out at the steps of the monument in order to set it down to dry (Figure 13.3). The guards at the monument did not understand what to make of the performance since it did not correspond to what they understood to be a political protest. Passersby stopped to inquire about what was happening. Other artists, and some members of the press, were there to document it. The following day the most conservative newspaper in the country featured on its front cover a picture of Trigueros and a description of the action. Hundreds of reactions by disconcerted readers, enthusiastic supporters, and angry citizens followed. What had just happened was not simply a strange sight in a plaza. It was an aesthetic separation that reconfigured a community of sense. Trigueros had put into play two 15 In Spanish the word “lavandera” (washerwoman) and “la bandera” (the flag) are homophonic, and it is only the different articulation of the consonants b and v that indicate which word is meant when spoken.

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Figure 13.2  Carmen Elena Trigueros, “Lavandera,” © Violeta Leal.

Figure 13.3  Carmen Elena Trigueros, “Lavandera,” © Violeta Leal.

homophonic signifiers, lavandera and la bandera, and proceeded to stage herself in an action that brought them together. By dressing up as a washerwoman who washes the national flag in perhaps the most emblematic plaza of the city, she transformed that space for fifty minutes, and neither the flag nor its relationship

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to the working people of El Salvador—​especially its women laborers—​was the same afterward. The activity of washing the flag, symbolically washing the face of a country which has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and leaving it at the steps of the Monument of Christ the Savior, was an emancipatory act that recuperated that plaza for the resignification of citizenship. Rather than passing by a waving flag as an abstract symbol of the nation, people saw a flag being washed on the floor. The nation needed washing of the blood of daily violence, of the past armed conflict, of its injustices. The people are represented in this act by a working woman, whose role is not to be mother of the nation, but that of a laborer for better times. It contrasted with the cleaning of the plaza by the municipality, which had intended its new hygienic status as a sign of control over an otherwise chaotic city. The curiosity and stupefaction of the guards only corroborates the idea that plazas and their meaning have changed and are ahead of what the order of the police expects when citizens set foot on them. Recent uses of the plaza, in acts such as lavandera, have to be understood as an irruption of politics that redistributes the sensible. These are not acts of consensual agreement about the political use of public space, but acts that resignify the meaning of the plaza and politics. While the plazas remain the highly policed hygienic spaces that the municipality of San Salvador exhibits as part of its commitment to order, interventions like lavandera irrupt into that order to populate the plaza, however briefly, with a new ordering of signs that allows a new thinking of the public as people, of the plaza as contested space, and of aesthetics as an irruption of politics. These are acts of emancipation that irrupt and disappear before the order of the police reigns again. It is in the indistinction between the political and the aesthetic, between labor and artistic creation, between the artist and the citizen, that the politics of aesthetics shows its transformative potential. As Rancière has reminded us, the aesthetic effect is in fact a relationship between two “separations.” The works that enter the new realm of aesthetic experience had been first produced according to a certain destination, be this the civic festivals of ancient times, religious ceremonies, or the display of monarchic power. But their aesthetic sensorium is the sensorium marked by that loss of destination.16 In Carmen Elena Trigueros’s intervention the destination of the Monument of the Savior of the World was disturbed and new connections between the bodies of citizens and the place they live in were established. 16 Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008): n.p.

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A  process of disassociation was established, that is “the break in a relation between sense and sense—​between what is seen and what is thought, what is thought and what is felt” (PA 11). What is reconfigured is the determined relation between the intention of an artist, a form of sensibility presented in a place, the experience of the spectator, and a specific form of community. This conflict of presentation in the realm of sensoriality is what Rancière calls dissensus (PA 235). The politics of an intervention like that of Trigueros resides not so much in what it says or can be interpreted to say, but in the act of creating a new landscape of the visible that allows for new connections between places and bodies, signs of one order and of another, and for new forms of enunciation. And while this sensorial reconfiguration does not articulate in itself the means or resources for collective emancipation, it is in the words of Graciela Montaldo an “act of theory and emancipation,” or to borrow from Roque-​Baldovinos, “an ‘act of rehearsal,’ ” perhaps this time not of revolution, but of new forms of citizenship that may arise from a new understanding of people, spaces, power, and of the aesthetics/​politics nexus.

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Part Three

Glossary of Key Terms

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Distribution of the Sensible Daniel Brant

The term “distribution of the sensible,” which Jacques Rancière defines in a brief 2000 essay Le Partage du sensible (The Politics of Aesthetics, 2004), provides an important link between the thinker’s work on political philosophy and his reflections on aesthetics.1 Rancière’s approach to the latter, developed throughout a number of essays and books on topics as diverse as symbolist poetry and European cinema, eschews definitions of aesthetics that focus on the specific characteristics of a given medium or on the nature of art and beauty. Instead, the French philosopher relates aesthetics to what he calls the “sensible,” a noun that evokes perception and the senses (aisthētikos) rather than reason or good judgment as its use in English as an adjective typically suggests. Redefined as the field of perception, or what is visible or invisible to the community, the sensible becomes in Rancière’s appropriation of the term a highly charged terrain for the struggle over representation in both politics and art. The sensible, for Rancière, determines the evolving boundaries of what is perceptible and common to the community as well as the specific groups who stake claims on this space and representations of it. At the heart of the distribution of the sensible, then, is the question of the groups that are included in or excluded from the body politic based on social status and the perceived legitimacy or illegitimacy of their speech. Building on this definition of the sensible, Rancière further relates politics and aesthetics to one another by identifying what he suggests are the shared stakes of artistic and political representation. At their most basic level, as Rancière argues, politics and aesthetics are concerned, on the one hand, with determining the status of legitimate speech and claims made in the political field and, on the other,

1 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible:  esthétique et politique (Paris:  La Fabrique, 2000). Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004); hereafter PA.

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with the ordering of the parameters of the visible and the sayable within the aesthetic field. Such a parallel between art and politics therefore draws on a set of features that includes the arrangement of bodies and movement, the role of speech, and the status of the sensible in governing artistic projects as well as the subjects and objects of political discourse (PA 19). In other words, as Rancière writes, “Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions,’ that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done” (PA 39; emphasis in original). Defined in this way, the “distribution of the sensible” describes a certain epistemic link between politics and aesthetics that encompasses not only what constitutes “legitimate” political claims and “proper” subjects of art but also the way these two fields intertwine to constitute and reconstitute themselves along with the communities they represent. Central to Rancière’s redefinition of aesthetics in The Politics of Aesthetics is the idea that the “sensible” imposes a hierarchy on the community and its members that also regulates their participation in political and artistic representation. The French noun “partage” along with its English (“distribution” and “partition”) and Spanish (“reparto”) translations denotes the importance of order and division as well as that of inclusion in or exclusion from the composition of the sensible. But underlying this logic is the idea that the sensible is also a shared space that is common to the members of the community. Highlighting the competing tensions at play in the concept, Rancière explains that the distribution of the sensible is “the system of self-​evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (PA 12). For Rancière, then, art and politics are both deeply concerned with governing which members of the community have access to the common along with what registers as visible and sayable there. Rancière is explicit about the inextricable connection between aesthetics and politics when he describes politics as the struggle over representation rooted in the transformations of the sensible and the evolving arrangements of what is visible and sayable. “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,” he writes (PA 13). The power dynamics surrounding the distribution of the sensible are thrown into relief in Rancière’s La Nuit des prolétaires (1981) (The Nights of Labor, 1989), which examines the literary creation of nineteenth-​century French workers. There he argues that contemporary intellectuals were incapable of

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recognizing worker literary production as a mode of emancipation since it deviated from their expectations of working-​class resistance at the time. This blind spot on the part of intellectuals—​the consequence of a social and aesthetic prejudice that precluded workers from creating and partaking in “art”—​illuminates the type of conceptual and epistemic misunderstandings that Rancière would further examine and formally theorize into the concept of the distribution of the sensible in subsequent work. For example, in La Mésentente, the philosopher describes certain speech situations in which the interlocutors fail to hear the “same thing in the same words”2 wherein what is at stake is “the sensible presentation of [the] common” and “the very quality of the interlocutors to present it” (MPP 14). In this way, Rancière invests aesthetics as an important terrain for political negotiation where the battle over the sensible becomes a struggle over the composition of the community as well as the regimes of visibility and invisibility bestowed upon its various groups. The Politics of Aesthetics continues Rancière’s analysis “of the distribution of the sensible that is at stake in politics” across three types of regimes including the ethical regime of images, the poetic/​representative regime of the arts, and the aesthetic regime of the arts (MPP 9). The distribution of the sensible that Rancière follows from regime to regime records the increasing autonomy of artistic modes of production and the tendency of the latter to remap political subjectivity by redefining the status of art and the possible subjects that it represents. The distribution of the sensible reflects Rancière’s refusal to subordinate art to politics by making aesthetics an inherently political site of the continual negotiation of the sensible. In his work, art is a mode of production, a type of work, that “unites the act of manufacturing with the act of bringing to light, the act of defining a new relationship between making and seeing” that is best understood not simply as the reflection of political ideology but as the “transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self-​presentation” (PA 44; emphases in the original). With art as the vector for composing “the landscape of the visible” (PA 45), the distribution of the sensible points to the powerful role of aesthetics for framing and reframing the realm of political possibilities in the common and the groups included in this space.

2 Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente: politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 13. All translations my own; hereafter MPP.

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Fable Audrey Évrard

In 2001, with the publication of La fable cinématographique (translated in English in 2006 as Film Fables), Jacques Rancière enunciates a concept that not only underlies his conception of cinema, but runs across his entire body of work: the fable. Film fables are first and foremost fictions of the real woven within the illusionary spectacle of the moving images we see unfold on the screen. Limiting the discussion of this concept to Rancière’s writings on cinema though overlooks its relevance to the philosopher’s much broader engagement with the fable as a mode of enunciation that encapsulates the political nature of aesthetics (visual, literary, poetic, performance) in his thought. A recurring trope in the history of literary forms, the fable is commonly defined as a story precisely structured by logical articulations, twists, and resolutions with clear didactic and entertaining effects. Yet, for Rancière, the fable, which manifests itself in literature, poetry, theater, as well as cinema, is not what gives the story generic coherence; instead, it is what punctures the smooth narrative fabric of the story. It expresses itself through the fundamental dialectical contradiction of any narrative, torn between the presumed necessity of historical/​narrative teleology that organizes action in time as well as across space and the redistribution of activity as multiple coinciding and coexisting acts. In Latin, fabula means “that which is told”:  for Rancière, what needs to be told in a story and our history are the myriad of “broken, polemical voices, each time dividing the identity they present,” all erupting simultaneously at any given time. Only when all of them can be truly heard at once can the logic of univocity governing the story/​history be called into question and allow a true democratic “scene of speech” to take shape.1 This definition of the fable as a détournement of the fictional order, a

1 Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 10–​12.

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redistribution of the poetic that promotes suspension and the aesthetic rehabilitation of the body and everyday materiality where the Aristotelian logic insisted on progression, the incarnation of feelings, moral character, and causal rationality defines Rancière’s thought and informs not only his essays on literature and cinema, such as La parole muette, La fable cinématographique, or Le fil perdu, but also his work on social philosophy and history, as evidenced in Les révoltes logiques and Les mots de l’histoire, to mention a few titles. The Rancierian fable, whether cinematic, literary, theatrical, or historical, is therefore first and foremost an “emplotment of time” that resists “the old Aristotelian model.”2 What makes cinema particularly well equipped and more apt to stage this “complex intertwinement of temporalities, a complex set of relations between the present, the past, and the future: between anticipation and lateness, fragmentation and continuity, movement and immobility,”3 than literature, or even theater for that matter, is the unique interweaving of language and images, moving light particles and their crystallization on the screen. In cinema, the passive materiality of energy preconditions the figural and intellectual activity that shapes it into concrete representations. This is exactly what early avant-​garde filmmakers and film theorists Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac saw in photogénie, which they described as the affirmation of a cinema no longer defined by rationality, chronology, and actions but instead one that was able to render the truth of life, a long, continuous movement composed of an infinity of micro-​movements. Epstein’s reversal of Aristotle’s hierarchy between the rational and the sensible, between narration and the raw materials emanating from life, results in “the para-​ scientific utopia of matter dissolving itself in energy,”4 another incomplete definition of cinema’s essence in Rancière’s view. The film fable can only be understood when one considers simultaneously the aesthetic quality of cinema, its mechanical constraints of production and reproduction of images, and the cinematic image as the product of the human eye’s cognitive logic of mimetic perception. At the end of the prologue of Film Fables, Rancière provocatively returns to the Aristotelian referent, seemingly conceding that “cinema is the Aristotelian art of the 20th century . . . It re-​established the fable as the primary mode of dramatic organization and the characters and genres as classical categories.”5 2 Jacques Rancière, “Rethinking Modernity,” Diacritics 42, no. 3 (2014): 10. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New  York:  Berg, 2006), 3; hereafter FF. 5 Jean-​Marc Lalanne and Stéphane Bouquet, “Jacques Rancière,” Cahiers du Cinéma 567 (2002): 57.

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However, he does not do so in an effort to salvage Aristotelian mimesis as an alternative mode of enunciation but rather to affirm his own fable as necessarily “thwarted” (FF 11). “A constant principle of what is known as mise-​en-​scène in the cinema,” Rancière explains, “is to supplement—​and thwart—​narrative continuity and the rationality of goals by not aligning two visibilities, or two relationships of the visible to movement, either by means of visual reframings, or by means of the aberrant movements imposed by a character who simultaneously aligns himself with the scenario of the pursuit of goals and perverts it” (FF 16). This description of cinema as a dialectical contradiction between a system governed by narrative laws and sudden eruptions of life, light, movement, and emotions that short-​circuit the grand narrative is fundamentally political. Indeed, the Rancierian (film) fable stages modern society’s seminal antagonism between the popular as an aesthetic (a re-​partitioning of society and social roles) and its constant reappropriation by bourgeois norms, in other words the taming of popular insurrection, community life, and energy by generic and narrative conventions affirming the elitist/​bourgeois social order. For Aristotle, mimesis is not the passive imitation of life; it is, quite the contrary, an active structure and effort to rationalize through fiction social divisions between those who act and those who make.6 Rancière sees in the Aristotelian emphasis upon causality the affirmation of the centralized body politic, the source of a collective voice that not only maintains the order of the narrative but also keeps the social and moral verisimilitude of the fiction. This is why the main stakes of modernity, and of the successful enactment of a modern fable, consist in facilitating the collapse of this controlled democracy: the plot needs to collapse from its own core, and action needs to be taken over by details that derail and stall the forward motion of the narrative. In late-​nineteenth-​century and early-​twentieth-​century “modern fiction,” new structures, such as Flaubert’s and Stendhal’s sacrificial dialectics forced upon the flawed protagonist, Joseph Conrad’s “concentric circles” continuously redirect, according to Rancière, the linear progression of fictional temporality into a new regime of coexistence. In cinema, restoring the duality of the film fable means uncovering the “capacity of a body to be objectified (whether it is the body of film characters or that of the actor, or cinema as a corpus) in relation to a narrative and/​or visual order, thus in relation either to a logic of representation or to visual iconicity.”7 6 Jacques Rancière, Le fil perdu: Essais sur la fiction moderne (Paris: La Fabrique, 2014), 120. 7 Lalanne and Bouquet, “Jacques Rancière,” 62.

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Cinema is therefore a fable insofar as it is a narrative, linguistic, and visual system that seeks to tell a story and our relationship to our world, history, others, and ourselves through a variety of stories that provide us pleasure because they are mimetic but also because it simultaneously resists representation as a social, artistic, and political norm by means of its mechanical, technological, and photogenic essence. Across the artistic forms that Rancière analyzes—​literature, theater, poetry, and cinema—​the sudden revolt of the misaligned performing body, or of the “useless” material detail (FP 20) triggers a disjunction and a dislocation of the illusionary spectacle of the moving image or of the narrative system. These bodies and matter caught in movement on the screen, on the page, or in society start telling new stories independently of the fiction they participate in. The sudden vibrations and impulsions of these bodies in movement may at times forestall the dominant logic of narrative organization and normalization of cultural representations. The political signification rendered manifest through these contradictions needs to be recognized as being temporal since Aristotelian narratives design a temporality and control and orient it toward a predetermined ending; when the real (of a body, a location, and an event) protrudes and suspends the teleological narrative of representation, time is also paused and suspended. In Le fil perdu, Rancière explains how Flaubert, Conrad, or Virginia Woolf unfolded a new, “ ‘democratic’ temporality” (FP 27) by embracing the everyday chaos of fictions overcrowded with characters, and sacrificing the “grand actions and exquisite feelings” of “aristocratic heroes” to preserve “the [anonymous] lyricism of impersonal Life” (FP 67). Modern fables thus “dissol[ve] the personality of fictional characters” and weave together a “new fabric of common sensible experiences”8 where “it becomes impossible to distinguish between the great minds of those who think, feel, dream and act and the anonymous trapped into the repetition of life stripped bare” (FP 27). In recent years, Jacques Rancière’s work demonstrates a determined attempt to read modernity anew, to revisit some earlier intellectual reluctance toward the term. In “Rethinking Modernity,” as in Film Fables, the true rupture between what is classic and what is modern is neither essential nor paradigmatic as Deleuze maintains.9 For Rancière, it has to do with the relationship one draws

8 Rancière, “Rethinking Modernity,” 12. 9 Gilles Deleuze, L’image-​mouvement (Paris:  Éditions de Minuit, 1983); and L’image-​temps (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985).

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between an activity (whether mundane or artistic), a movement, or, in contrast, the suspension of this activity, and both the origin and the end game envisioned for such in/​activity. In other words, whereas the aesthetic redistribution of the social fabric and sensible experience told by the fable has largely been conceived in spatial terms, as a sort of “geography of History,”10 Rancière is inviting us, in his most recent works, to reconceive modernity as a “redistribution of the hierarchy of time,” and most importantly to envision a modernist fable that punctures “the temporality of ends and means, which [is] also the temporality of work and rest” obstructing our current ethos.11

10 Jacques Rancière, Les Mots de l’histoire:  Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris:  Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 110. 11 Rancière, “Rethinking Modernity” 18–​19.

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Intellectual Equality Zakir Paul

The axiomatic equality of intelligence constitutes a key point of entry into Rancière’s thought, although it may be invoked less often than the “distribution of the sensible” or the distinction between politics and the police. The premise of equal intelligence leads to a reassessment of the value accorded to different forms of human activity, knowledge, and their modes of transmission. Rancière’s discussion of “intelligence” is primarily found in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons on Intellectual Emancipation (1987), a work that develops the insights of the radical nineteenth-​century French educator Joseph Jacotot. The notion of equal intelligence can be traced back to Rancière’s earlier polemical writings against Althusserian Marxism, as well as to his more recent investigations into aesthetics and politics. Doing so allows one to articulate how equal intelligence has remained Rancière’s theoretical lever for disrupting forms of thinking that establish and defend social and intellectual hierarchies. Rather than taking Cartesian method or Platonic maieutics as models for a discussion of pedagogy, The Ignorant Schoolmaster turns to the practical experience of Jacotot, to whom it attributes the following discoveries: everyone is equally intelligent; any intellectual experience contains all others; it is possible to teach what one does not know. An illiterate person, for example, could teach someone to read merely by making him or her attend to the task. Such insights, which seem to go against the practice of explanation at the heart of education, came to Jacotot in the 1830s when he presented his monolingual Flemish students at the University of Louvain with a bilingual edition of Fénelon’s Telemachus instead of teaching them French. The students were soon able to memorize and decipher the French text, thus mastering its language, without any external instruction. This accidental success led Jacotot to conclude that intellectual emancipation rather than explanation is the primary task of any teacher.

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Rancière draws on this experimental pedagogy to develop his own view of intelligence, as the most equally and universally shared faculty, echoing Descartes’s claim about “good sense.” Instead of using thinking as the basis of being, however, Rancière reverses the formula:  “I am, therefore I  think.”1 Philosophers do not have an advantage over farmhands according to this view, since specialized knowledge does not make one any more intelligent. Neither does adherence to a particular method guarantee access to the truth. Rather, the acceptance of the premise of equal intelligence is necessary for an individual to acknowledge their own capacity and develop it through the training of focused attention and will. The perceived difference between levels of intelligence is due not to some innate inequality, but instead to the varying levels of attention that people lend their abilities. “What stultifies the common people is not a lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence. And what stultifies the ‘inferiors’ stultifies the ‘superiors’ at the same time. For the only verified intelligence is the one that speaks to a fellow-​man capable of verifying the equality of their intelligence” (IS 39). Intelligence, in this sense, is like equality, which for Rancière is neither granted nor claimed, but practiced and verified. It is because a speaking being can address another that the equality of intelligence is always already verified. Any child demonstrates his or her intelligence by intuitively passing from infancy to speech, without instruction. The central locus of the equality of intelligence is thus language itself, especially speech, which serves as a basis for all intellectual exchange. Yet, it is noteworthy that the written word, especially the book, can play this role just as well as a living interlocutor. In this sense, Rancière’s analysis of intelligence continues his critique of the Platonic denigration of writing. Jacotot is not Socrates. His vision of intellectual emancipation is hardly comparable to the dialogue that leads its participants unknowingly to the truth. Emancipation is the acknowledgment that one cannot trick one’s own intelligence, nor refuse to allow it to be judged by the intelligence of another. The equality of speaking beings is inextricably related to the equality of intelligence. The verification of intelligence through practice remains threatened by the various institutions and attitudes that Rancière calls the “explicative order.” The “pedagogic myth” that one needs methodical explanations in order to learn splits the intelligence into two. The inferior intelligence “registers perceptions by chance, 1 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 35–​36; hereafter IS.

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retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need,” whereas the superior intelligence “knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex from the part to the whole” (IS 7). Children and common people supposedly possess the former, while intellectuals and teachers command the latter. Faith in such a distinction leads to an “enforced stultification,” an incapacitation of the individual mind. The belief in intellectual inferiority—​or superiority, which amounts to the same—​is actually a declaration that one is unwilling to invest the effort that a task requires. “I cannot,” Rancière declares, is another way of saying “I will not.” In other words, the method of equality is above all a method of the will (IS 12). From Descartes and Taine to Bergson and Piaget, intelligence remained an embattled concept in modern French thought, used to separate individuals from one another and make them comparable.2 Jacotot’s intellectual egalitarianism holds a marginal position in this genealogy, often losing its power to provoke through its very institutionalization at the hands of progressive thinkers and schools from the nineteenth century onward. Rancière contends that the thinker’s radical views remain largely ignored due to a “passion for inequality,” which imagines that society as a whole owes its progress to the realization of equality, an outcome that is infinitely delayed by its very actualization. Rather than sanctioning the vision of a future society of equals, Rancière’s writing begins invariably from the premise of equality. Similarly, intelligence is not the result of learning but its condition of possibility. The unitary view of intelligence is radically political as it revises the “very conception of the relation between equality and inequality,” suspending the hierarchies dividing rulers and the ruled.3 “Those excluded from the world of intelligence themselves subscribe to the verdict of their exclusion,” Rancière writes, adding, “in short, the circle of emancipation must be begun” (IS 16; emphasis in the original). The schoolmaster is ignorant because the object of his lesson is not knowledge, but an invitation to “actualize one’s capacity” or to acknowledge one’s own intelligence, alongside that of everyone else. It is not difficult to see how such an attitude toward intelligence informs wider aspects of Rancière’s thought, from politics to aesthetics. Specialized discourses—​be they academic or artistic—​tend to erase “the communism of 2 For a historical account, see John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–​1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 3 Jacques Rancière, “On Ignorant Schoolmasters,” in Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, Jacques Rancière. Education, Truth, Emancipation (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 6.

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intelligence, the assertion of the capacity of anyone to be where they cannot be and do what they cannot do.”4 In his polemic with Althusserian theory, Rancière “declared war on the theory of the inequality of intelligences at the heart of supposed critiques of domination.”5 Althusser’s Lesson argues that “all revolutionary thought must be founded on the inverse presupposition, that of the capacity of the dominated” (xvi). Such a premise questions the unimpeachable position accorded to philosophy in Althusser’s “scientific” Marxism. The latter contends that the masses have to be exposed to their own political condition by a theoretical discourse able to dismantle the dominant bourgeois and humanist ideologies that keep oppression concealed. In this view, the French Communist Party would lead the revolution since it alone constituted “the intelligence of the historical movement.” On the contrary, Rancière finds resources in Marx and Mao to argue for the equal intelligence of the masses and to describe a “space of a new intelligence—​the intelligence that is formed in the struggle, the knowledge reclaimed from the hands of the exploiters” (AL 15). While for many the critique of ideology promised emancipation from an ever-​larger society of control, Althusser dismissed the student-​worker revolt of May 1968 as “a petit-​bourgeois movement, one whose actors were in fact the victims of the bourgeois ideology they imbibed without knowing. They had to be re-​educated by the authority of Science and the Party” (AL xiv). By positing the intelligence of the masses as the true actors of history, Rancière expresses both his political misgivings in relation to the authoritarian tenets of contemporary Marxism and his theoretical resistance to theory itself, choosing to focus instead on the “multiple ways thought assumes form and produces effects on the social body” (AL xv). This shift led to a reflection on the historical conditions of production and sharing of knowledge. In Rancière’s study of the archive of the writings of nineteenth-​century workers, he found an empirical “break in the link of necessity tying occupations to forms of intelligence” (MPI 128). In light of this break, he increasingly came to study art and the aesthetic as domains in which the sensible could be reorganized, thereby effectively rearticulating the way political and historical divisions came to be instated. In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière makes an argument for the active intelligence of the audience, which recalls the gestures 4 Jacques Rancière, Moments Politiques:  Interventions 1977–​ 2009, trans. Mary Foster (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 128; hereafter MPI. 5 Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London:  Continuum, 2011), xvi; hereafter AL.

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with which he had defended the agency of the masses, not to mention Jacotot’s vision. The “paradox of the spectator” encapsulates the way the history of dramaturgy considers the audience: while all theater requires a spectator, spectators are doubly passive in their inaction and their ignorance of the proceedings on stage.6 Yet, Rancière argues that just as the masses do not require the philosopher to unveil their misery, or the student does not need the teacher to explain her ignorance, the theatrical audience is not composed of passive subjects awaiting illumination at the hands of the artist or the performer. The proper response to the vagaries of spectatorship is not a reformed pedagogical theater where the audience is stripped of its illusions, be it through radical distancing or participation. Rather, the spectator must be considered to already possess and display an intelligence that “confirms or transforms” the distribution of the sensible that occurs in any performance (ES 13).7 To consider viewing an intelligent act is to disarm critiques of spectatorship from Plato to Debord, as well as their more routine journalistic variants that decry the anomie of democratic life in societies of the spectacle. Instead, emancipated spectatorship blurs “the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body” (ES 19). From the classroom to the theater, Rancière’s project of writing history from below could thus be described as an attempt at showing the intelligence latent in forms of human activity that are commonly dismissed by those who know. Recent forays into the “aesthetic regime of art” gesture at scenes in which collective forms of intelligence may have emerged momentarily.8 Whether the intelligence of the individual could be realized in collective forms is a question that haunts Rancière’s project from the beginning. He has tellingly rejected any hope invested in a future democracy of the multitude emerging from a present state of oppression: “The collective intelligence produced by a system of domination is only ever the intelligence of that system. Unequal society does not carry any equal society in its womb.”9 In “Communists without Communism?” Rancière 6 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York and London: Verso Books, 2009), 2; hereafter ES. 7 Textual mediation plays a role that would be difficult to explore here; it should suffice to say that the text breaks the binary of spectator and performer in a similar way as the book comes in between the student and the schoolmaster. 8 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (New York and London: Verso Books, 2011). 9 Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York and London: Verso Books, 2006), 92.

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returns to his unflagging commitment to the political intelligence of anyone and everyone: “the only communist legacy that is worth examining is the multiplicity of forms of experimentation of the capacity of anybody, yesterday and today. The only possible form of communist intelligence is the collective intelligence constructed in those experimentations.”10 Any translation of intelligence into collective forms of life remains open to the disagreements that mark the political.

10 ‘Communists without Communism?’ in Rancière, Moments Politiques, 135.

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Mute Speech Alison James

The term “mute speech” (parole muette) designates the central paradox in Rancière’s analysis of literature, and serves as the title for one of the groundbreaking books in the elaboration of his aesthetic thought. Mute Speech theorizes the dissolution of the normative system of belles lettres and the emergence of literature, in the nineteenth century, as “a historical mode of visibility of the works of the art of writing.”1 Rancière takes as his initial paradigmatic example of this shift the stones of the cathedral in Victor Hugo’s Notre-​Dame de Paris (1831). Hugo’s novel inscribes meaning on these mute objects and confers on them the power to incarnate knowledge. Displacing the rhetorical organization of speech and the mimetic arrangement of actions that had characterized the poetics of representation, the eloquent stones enact a new mode of expressivity. Notre-​Dame de Paris reverses the previous poetic system through its animation of things and its corresponding petrification of human action and speech. A monstrous “prose poem dedicated to stone” (MS 58), it also exemplifies the rise of the novel as a false genre—​that is, as a genre that undoes the very principle of genericity, since it dissolves the hierarchical association of represented subjects with ways of representing. Mute speech is thus, first of all, the speech voiced or carried by mute objects—​ or more exactly, a form of linguistic doubling that gives written expression to the inherent poetry of things (MS 74). The visible world becomes a set of hieroglyphs, of embodied signs that must be transcribed and interpreted by a specific mode of language. The written letter is then, in turn, a “hieroglyph that bears its idea upon its body” (MS 46). However, the primacy that literature accords

1 Jacques Rancière, La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 13; trans. by James Swenson as Mute Speech:  Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 44; hereafter MS.

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to writing adds an additional layer of contradiction to the idea of mute speech as the embodied voice of things, and leads to the definition of a second, and polar opposite, form of mute speech. For the move away from the oratorical model of effective speech as a human act has as a consequence the proliferation of a disembodied letter: “orphaned speech lacking a body that might accompany it and attest to it” (MS 46). To characterize this second form of mute speech, Rancière redeploys Plato’s critique in the Phaedrus of the written letter as both dead repetition and uncontrolled logos, simultaneously mute and talkative (MS 107).2 In the formulation that Rancière proposes in The Aesthetic Unconscious, this is speech as soliloquy; it is the voiceless voice of “unconscious discourse,” the muted or muffled speech (parole sourde) of “a nameless power that lurks behind any consciousness and any signification, to which voice and body must be given.”3 With the disappearance of representative norms the two figures of mute speech come to delineate “the space of a single domain, that of literary speech as symptomatic speech” (AU 34). An apt figure for this double aspect of mute speech, rather than Hugo’s cathedral, is the Parisian sewer of Les Misérables, which is at once a reservoir of hieroglyphs and a site of egalitarian indifference.4 The constitutive contradiction of literature lies in this tension between the mute speech of things and the mute-​loquacious letter. Mute speech defines a regime of utterance in which human speech is petrified or dispersed, incarnated in inanimate objects or disembodied. As “quasi-​bodies”—​orphaned blocks of speech in uncontrolled circulation—​linguistic utterances do not produce collective bodies but rather “introduce lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary collective bodies.”5 In his introduction to The Flesh of Words, 2 Rancière’s reading of the Phaedrus clearly owes something to “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in which Derrida deconstructs Plato’s opposition between the living, embodied logos and the orphaned graphein—​ the written trace cut off from its origin in speech. While Rancière, like Derrida, questions the metaphysical priority of speech over writing, he is concerned less with the indeterminacy of writing as pharmakon (at once poison and remedy) than with the social order that assigns a proper place to different modes of discourse. Rancière draws out the political implications of Plato’s text most fully in The Philosopher and His Poor. See Jacques Derrida, “La pharmacie de Platon,” in La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), trans. by Barbara Johnson as “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–​171; Jacques Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Fayard, 1983), trans. by John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker as The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 39–​42. 3 Jacques Rancière, “Les deux formes de la parole muette,” in L’Inconscient esthétique (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 41; trans. by Debra Keates and James Swenson as “The Two Forms of Mute Speech,” in The Aesthetic Unconscious (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 41–​42; hereafter AU. 4 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2006), trans. by Julie Rose as The Politics of Literature (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 15; hereafter PL. 5 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible:  esthétique et politique (Paris:  La Fabrique éditions, 2000), trans. by Gabriel Rockill as The Politics of Aesthetics:  The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum Books, 2006), 39.

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Rancière further insists on this fundamental tension between the word’s striving toward corporal incarnation and the “chattering silence of the dead letter”6 that blocks this incarnation: “Literature lives only by the separation of words in relation to any body that might incarnate their power. It lives only by evading the incarnation that it incessantly puts into play” (FW 5). It is also this double movement of incorporation-​disincorporation that gives writing, as a particular way of staging speech acts, its political force. The “democratic circulation of the letter” (MS 104) has a disruptive power that the poetics of representation had previously regulated through its rhetorical model of embodied speech, its distinction between generic modes of imitation, and its circumscription of a specific space for fiction. With the dismantling of this system and its hierarchies, literature emerges as a field defined simultaneously by the indifference of style to subject matter (writing speaks of anything in any way to anyone) and the affirmation of a specific “poetic” mode of language. This tension is reconfigured in different ways by the Flaubertian absolutization of style and by the Mallarmean Book that seeks to materialize both the idea and the scene of its performance. Rancière’s account of the contradictory poetics of the mute letter lays the groundwork for the subsequent development of his thought on aesthetics, in particular his description of the regimes of art; thus the move from the normative poetics of representation to a new poetics of expression corresponds to the transition from the representative to the aesthetic regime.7 In terms of literary history and theory more specifically, the notion of mute speech allows Rancière to historicize the idea of literature while challenging the modernist paradigm that posits a shift from a communicative to an intransitive use of language. This approach emphasizes the underlying unity beneath the apparently disparate poetics of various movements (romanticism, realism, symbolism, etc.), which are all derived from the principle of mute expression and attempt to negotiate the resulting field of tensions. Rancière’s analysis of literature also builds on his earlier definition of politics as a displacement of speech, and of speaking subjects, which breaks up the ordered distribution of social bodies.8 The politics of literature is nevertheless split in two: literature, to avoid dissolving into the prose 6 Jacques Rancière, La Chair des mots:  politiques de l’écriture (Paris:  Galilée, 1998), trans. by Charlotte Mandell as The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 3; hereafter FW. 7 On the three major regimes of art, see Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 20–​23. 8 For Rancière’s definition of politics, see in particular Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente:  politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), trans. by Julie Rose as Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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of ordinary life, sets against the “radical democracy of the letter” (on which it nevertheless depends) an absolutization of literature that establishes a new community of sense (PL 13–​14). Rancière’s work reveals what is at stake in these battles of the literary absolute and the democratic letter: the force of literature as a distinctive way of linking the visible and the sayable, words and things; the paradoxical power of mute speech to disrupt, express, and signify.

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Regimes of Art Robert St. Clair

“Regimes of art” explicitly emerges as a problematic in Le Partage du sensible—​ esthétique et politique (2000), though important theoretical outlines of two of the regimes can be found in La Parole muette (1998). For Rancière, there are three regimes of art, each characterized by different logics, stakes, and, to a certain degree, temporalities: the ethical regime, the poetic or representative regime, and the aesthetic regime, to which we return in a moment. At stake in the ethical regime of art, then, is the production, distribution, and truth-​value of images as they correspond to an ideal essence (eidos):  are the proper subjects producing the right images of figures of authority, say, in theater? Are the right subjects doing the proper thing, or playing the right role, given their social station in the community, the polis, and if not what “moral” impact will this have on the well-​ordered community/​city/​regime (or, to borrow from Rancière’s lexicon, partage du sensible—​distribution of the sensible)? Are, for instance, shoemakers engaging in speculation as to the meaning of the word “justice,” are ancient heroes depicted as weeping? Is the imago, in other words, of authority “true” to the ethos of kings, heroes, and gods, or is it (ideologically speaking) improper? Rancière’s conceptualization of the ethical regime of art finds its roots in Plato’s treatment of the poets, Attic tragic theater, the myth of the cave, and the problem of mimesis in the Republic (or Politeia—​Regimes), a text to which Rancière returns frequently in order to interrogate the ways in which—​whether in cinema or sociology—​an organic body politic, with each person naturally in his or her station, status, or class is affirmed. As elsewhere in his oeuvre (cf., La Haine de la démocratie), the “ethical” designates a problem for Rancière. Antithetical to the emancipatory operations and desubjectivation (cf. Aux bords du politique) that are characteristic of the “political” (le politique), the ethical is the site where an identity of doing and being is affirmed, the type of which in the nineteenth-​century, for instance, held that workers were necessarily

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incapable of writing sonnets or debating politics for reasons having both to do with the type of “subjects” they were and the punishing temporal regimes of industrial capitalism (cf. La nuit des prolétaires). There is no stable divide between “art” and other modes of production (i.e., manières de faire) in the ethical regime of art. This very distinction—​between art and other activities or modes of representation—​is thus what distinguishes the poetico-​representative regime from the ethical regime of art. Indeed, as Rancière argues, the poetico-​representative regime gives visibility to “art” as such for the first time in Western history.1 Where the ethical regime was preoccupied by the “being” (or ethos) of the image and the political consequences of its “morality,” the poetico-​representative regime introduces a difference: the poetico-​representative regime conjures away the ontological and political problems of mimesis which so plagued the poets in Plato’s well-​ordered city by presupposing a conventional (i.e., an artistically necessary) relation between genre, speech, topic, and (the social status of) subjects represented. At the heart of this regime is thus respect of mimetic conventions and the technical artistry, or poetics, deployed to represent a given action, object, or subject. For this regime, representations are either “good or bad, adequate or inadequate (. . .) according to the rules of verisimilitude and decorum.”2 The twofold epistemological and rhetorical presence of Aristotle is easily discerned here (i.e., the choice of a speaking subject ought necessarily correspond to a given high or low genre and topic, etc.).3 But so too is the infra-​textual relation to prior, perhaps more explicitly politically oriented works, such as Les Noms de l’histoire and La Mésentente, where Rancière develops the notion of “lexis” along lines resonant with the poetico-​representative regime of arts, especially in the latter’s hierarchical subordination of genres, styles, and subjects into noble and ignoble (a division which in turn both reproduces and participates in justifying sociohistorical forms of domination and exclusion). In contrast to the representative regime is the aesthetic regime of art, so called because what distinguishes it from the others is a principle of rupture and anachronism, and of autonomy or emancipation from “any and all specific rules

1 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: politique et esthétique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), 28–​30. Further references will appear in the body of the text as PS followed by the page number. 2 “[B]‌onnes ou mauvaises, adéquates ou inadéquates (.  . .) selon des principes de vraisemblance, convenances (. . .)” (PS 28–​29). 3 See especially La Parole muette:  essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris:  Hachette, 2011), 21–​23.

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or hierarchic ordering of subjects, genres, and arts” (“toute règle spécifique, de toute hiérarchie des sujets, des genres, et des arts”; PS 33). Emerging essentially in the nineteenth century,4 for Rancière the aesthetic regime of art is simply another name for the historical, aesthetic, epistemological, and political phenomenon which otherwise goes by the name of “modernity.” In its indifference to subject matter, the aesthetic regime of art is thus an egalitarian one, exemplifying the logic of dissensus, the contingency of discourses and practices of domination, and the capacity of any body to do or potentially be otherwise: “as for the aesthetic regime of art,” Rancière states, “it functions according to an axiom of equality” (“[l]‌e régime esthétique de l’art fonctionne, lui, sur un principe égalitaire”).5 The aesthetic regime of art thus potentially constitutes eo ipso a demonstration that no hierarchical division pinning certain bodies to certain occupations, spaces, and temporalities (e.g., Plato’s golden souls versus souls of iron, the public versus the private, the time of leisure versus the time of work); no distribution of the sensible world (partage du sensible) based on essential(ized) demarcations located at the level of the truth, dignity, or narrative propriety of a subject or set of practices can hold without ultimately being revealed as historical in essence, as fictions that might be reconfigured, as so many roles that might be recast: “Artistic practices are ‘modes of production’ intervening in the general distribution of ways of doing, of human activity with respect to ways of being and the visibility of certain actors/​agents” (“Les pratiques artistiques sont des ‘manières de faire’ qui interviennt dans la distribution générale des manières de faire et dans leurs rapports avec des manières d’être et des formes de visibilité”; PS 14). If “Art” thus proceeds from a set and context of given/​dominant regimes or regimens of material and symbolic practices, norms, and discourses, it can also produce ruptures within them, a gap within which a potentially different partage du sensible can be apprehended. It is at this level that Rancière, following the Schillerian insight that “domination and subjugation are first and foremost a problem of how ontological roles get cast” (“la domination et servitude sont d’abord des distributions ontologiques”; PS 25), locates the point of intersection of the political and regimes of art: “the arts never contribute anything more to forms of domination than what they have in common with them in the first

4 Le Destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), 21. 5 Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués: entretiens (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2009), 389. Subsequent references to this volume will appear in the text as TP followed by the page number.

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place: namely, the positioning and mobilization of bodies, functions of speech, and the negotiation of what’s visible and what’s invisible” (“les arts ne prêtent jamais aux entreprises de domination ou d’émancipation que ce qu’ils peuvent leur prêter, soit, tout simplement, ce qu’ils ont de commun avec elles: des positions et des mouvements de corps, des fonctions de la parole, des repartitions du visible et de l’invisible”; PS 39). Ultimately, the aesthetic concerns, as its etymon suggests, that which is perceptible (or not) as a subject or point of dissensus for a given “regimentation” of the world (partage du sensible). Regimes of art are thus, qua aesthetic logics, epistemologically and infra-​textually bound up with other recurrent features of his philosophical corpus such as the logic of the political and of the police; the distribution of the sensible; democracy and literarity (put schematically, the democratic circulation of silent speech, the egalitarian potential of any subject to have an encounter with speech); and equality understood as a rudimentary ontological feature of any and all speaking beings—​an a priori, not a quality to be demonstrated. As Rancière states, “the aesthetic” is thus homologous to the political. It is a “configuration of timings and spacings, of the visible and the invisible, of articulate speech and noise—​a configuration defining at once the locus and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics concerns what one can see and what one can say about it; it is about who gets recognized as competent to see and speak, it is about the properties of certain spaces and what it might be possible to do with time” (“[L’esthétique] est un découpage des temps et des espaces, du visible et de l’invisible, de la parole et du bruit qui définit à la fois le lieu et l’enjeu de la politique comme forme de l’expérience. La politique porte sur ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on peut en dire, sur qui a la compétence pour voir et la qualité pour dire, sur les propriétés des espaces et les possibiles du temps”; PS 13–​14). Finally, though the three regimes could be thought to overlap with a certain historico-​epistemic periodization, with the ethical regime belonging to antiquity, the poetico-​representative regime corresponding to the classical epoch, and the aesthetic regime being that of modernity, it is important to note that temporal telescopings and anachronisms among the different regimes of art do indeed exist. They are thus, mutatis mutandis, not dissimilar to Foucault’s concept of epistemes and epistemological shifts, which, through attentive genealogy, are shown to be characterized by residual and emergent forces, by discourses and apparatuses that, though sometimes changing radically (e.g., the discourse on madness or medicine in the West, the prison

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system, governmentality), are often marked by a dialectic of continuity within rupture, or discontinuity within continuity.6 To take but one preliminary example: in 2011’s Aisthesis Rancière locates an exemplary case of the ethical regime in avant-​garde Soviet constructivism. Rodchenko’s reading of corporeality in Chaplin, for instance, is one in which a theorist-​subject operating from a position of epistemological privilege—​that is, laying claim to a particular arkhè from within a dominant, though for Rancière fundamentally contingent, structure or hierarchy—​sees a perfect harmony between (unthinking) individual and community, economic system, or historical period and is thus emblematic of what he understands to be the basic operations of the “ethical regime.”7 (It is also clear that, for Rancière, the stakes of the “ethical regime of arts” intersect with other key notions in his philosophical lexicon, especially those of metapolitics, arkhè, the logic of consensus.) Rancière’s tripartite schematization of regimes of art is thus to some degrees historically determined. Yet it corresponds less to a historical narrative about the teleologically driven development of Western art from Plato to Warhol than it does to an important and recurrent topos in the philosopher’s work: namely, the relation between the political and the aesthetic. “Art” is always understood in the singular for Rancière (“de l’art”), suggesting that at the core of all symbolic practice for Rancière resides a constant: the representation of human beings, activity, and history. The ethical, poetico-​representative and aesthetic regimes thus designate divergent understandings and discourses concerning the relation between human beings and the worlds and sociohistorical contexts they occupy, if not over what sorts of subjects can be considered intelligible or appropriate material for representation. Regimes of art thus conceptually signpost a dissensus around the question of what “counts” (as art). In 6 There are numerous and suggestive ways of reading Foucault with Rancière, perhaps the most pertinent intersections of which are around the notion of the scientific gaze and surveillance, the production of normative and the “abnormal,” equality and practices of the self, the latter of which consist, for Foucault, in developing strategies for a critique of the given, if not for micrological forms of emancipation (cf. in Rancière, the notions of dissensus, arkhè, the aesthetic, the logic of the police and the political, the distribution of the sensible, etc.). The reader interested in such intersections might fruitfully consult the interview entitled “Biopolitique ou politique,” in Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués:  entretiens, 215–​19. See also Todd May, “Equality as a Foucauldian Value:  The Relevance of Rancière,” Philosophy Today 51 (2007):  133–​39; Adeena Mey, “Rancière as Foucaldian? On the Distribution of the Sensible and New Forms of Subjectivity,” in Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality, eds. Jakob Nilsson and Sven-​Olov Wallenstein (Stockholm: Södertörn Philosophical Studies 14), 175–​83; and Gert Biesta “Toward a New ‘Logic’ of Emancipation: Rancière and Foucault,” http://​ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/​index.php/​pes/​article/​view/​1360 (accessed October 7, 2016). 7 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galiléeé, 2011), 179, 242–​43.

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Rancière’s reading of Balzac (La Chair des mots), Mallarmé (La Politique de la sirène), or Flaubert (Politique de la littérature), for instance, we see the aesthetic regime of art troubling the ethico-​mimetic logic of the other two regimes. For the aesthetic regime of art, from the nineteenth-​century novel to surrealism’s explorations of the everyday and the unconscious, up to contemporary cinema and photography, any subject may potentially occupy the space of the subject of art.

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Part Four

Interview with Jacques Rancière

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Understanding Modernism, Reconfiguring Disciplinarity: Interview with Jacques Rancière on May 11, 2015 Translated from the French by Patrick M. Bray1

Patrick Bray:  As you know, this volume is entitled Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism. There is perhaps something irreverent with the choice of subject, since, “understanding Rancière” would not only be reductive with respect to the diversity of your thought, but goes directly against your thinking because it suggest that the contributors to the volume understand your work better than ordinary readers do. Let’s say more modestly that the contributors attempt an understanding and not an explanation. As for the other half of the title, “understanding modernism,” you have expressed your doubts about the usefulness of the very concepts of modernism, postmodernism, or modernity. Nevertheless, is there something useful in studying the history of a flawed concept and of distinguishing the artistic movements that are associated with it? Jacques Rancière:  My work takes as a starting point the total critique of the concepts of modernism and modernity, a critique that needs to be placed in its context, since I always write within defined conjunctures. Thus I began to write about this subject in a context dominated by the idea of postmodernity, which was itself tied to other notions and dominant themes such as the end of history or the end of politics. I thought at the time that the concept of postmodernity was itself complicit in this modernism, which it pretended to relegate to the past. Both concepts identified modernity with a sort of historical destiny nearing its final limit, which would be the end of its own illusions, and first of all, of course, the illusions of emancipation.

1 I would like to thank Julien Meyer for his invaluable help with transcribing the interview and Lia Brozgal for her suggestions on the translation.

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray On the one hand, therefore, for me there was a rejection of this notion tied to an historical teleology governed by the idea of the end. On the other hand, there was the idea that this notion of “modernity” said nothing about its object and that it was necessary to rethink the system of conditions that had made new forms perceivable and thinkable under the broad terms of modernity and modernism. I took for a model the work I had already undertaken on the emergence of the notion of literature in Mute Speech, where I had shown that it was possible to analyze in precise terms the upheaval that led from belles lettres to literature—​a very slow upheaval which had nothing to do with the history of manifestos and exemplary works that we have tended to lump together with the emergence of artistic modernism. From this model, I set out to think through the aesthetic regime of art as a transformation of an entire regime of the identification of practices and modes of the perception of art, disconnected from the grand teleological narrative of modernity that had tied it to the temporality of the revolutionary dream, of its failure and its catastrophe. Then again, once you set aside this teleological vision of modernity, you still run up against the fact that the aesthetic regime itself has always connected artistic transformations to the transformations of ways of life and to the very fate of humanity. The constitution and the history of this regime display several striking instances where the destiny of art is linked to the destiny of the world. I  thus highlighted the Schillerian moment, which is also the moment of the French Revolution. At this moment the destiny of art saw itself tied to the idea of an aesthetic community, of a sensible [“sensible” in French can mean perceptible, sensitive, or sensible] community founded on the transformation of the very mode of perceiving, which defined itself separately from the political revolution, which is to say from the idea of a transformation of community life operated by the State, by the transformation of institutions and laws. And then there is also the great moment of effervescence which was the first twenty or thirty years of the twentieth century, the moment when there really were programs for the union of art and a new way of life. This new life is not necessarily only that of the revolution, it can also be the way that architects and designers, from the time of the Werkbund and Bauhaus, conceived of an artistic practice that was connected to the transformation of daily life—​objects, home décor, habitat—​ without being necessarily tied to the idea of radical revolution. There are therefore these striking moments where art emerges as a form of collective living and as an instrument for the radical transformation of this living. This defines what we can call an historical modernism, which is to say a moment when there is a will on the part of a certain number of artists

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to perform an art in synch with its time, in fact, an art that goes beyond the limits of art and thinks of itself as a direct agent in the total transformation of collective living. I tried to distinguish this project from a simplistic idea of modernism. Often, we see modernism through the Futurist prism, through the texts of Marinetti, by reducing it in the end to a type of slightly idiotic admiration for the machine, for speed, cars, electricity. I  tried to think of this historical modernism not as a simple will of adapting to the rhythms of modern life, but as a will to articulate temporalities and in the end heterogeneous modernities. For modernity is not the simple acceleration that it is often described as. It is itself made of gaps [“écarts”]. This is what I noted in Aisthesis while commenting on Emerson’s lecture on “The Poet”: Emerson describes a modernity that is not contemporaneous with itself, an economic modernity stuck in a backward way of life, and he gives the poet to come a mission which is to elaborate a new poetry capable of spiritualizing the prosaic world and of creating the bond of a new community, starting from the very lag between economic modernity and civilizational backwardness. This is, I think, the real modernist program, the one at work in the avant-​gardes of the Soviet revolution hidden underneath the naïve adoration of the machine and of speed. This is what I tried to show in Vertov’s films when he attempts to show communism already at work in the archaic practices of shepherds, fishermen, hunters or thread spinners of the Asian Soviet Republics (A Sixth Part of the World) or when he superimposes, in Man with a Movie Camera, the gestures of assembly-​line workers, miners, or typists with those of a manicurist or shoe shiner. He constructs the time of this new way of life by matching in a same continuum the repetitive movements of Taylorized industry with those of ancestral practices and even with inherited behaviors of class society. What counts is the potential present in the movements themselves. He consequently creates a sort of communist aesthetic, a type of sensible fabric of Soviet life. This doesn’t correspond to the Soviet leaders’ political program; nor is it an account of what was happening in the USSR at the time; no, it’s a way to construct, through artistic means, something like a communism ahead of its own time. There are the planners who say, “Look, if we follow the plan, if we’re well disciplined, if the proletarian avant-​garde leads the way, in 20 or 30 years, we’ll have communism.” Yet, what artists like Vertov, people of Tatlin, El Lissitzky, or Rodchenko’s generation, were doing with their constructions, their fabrics, their kiosks, their Workers’ Club furniture or even their posters was already to construct a sort of sensible landscape of communist life. We find the equivalent, in a different context, if we think about the role of design and all the ideologies of design in Western Europe developing

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray at the same time. There is this idea that we were going to get rid of both economic barbarism and all the outdated bourgeois junk if we make people live in uncluttered homes with functional objects. Again there was a resolve to match [“raccorder”] the modern world to itself. This is what we can truly call historical modernism, this project for an art that is outside itself, which is outside of its own limits in order to become an instrument in the creation of a new way of life, or an instrument that puts this new way of life in harmony with itself. And then, there was this thing that happened, at the end of the 1930s and 1940s, the invention of what I have called retrospective modernism, which is illustrated in Clement Greenberg’s famous texts. In Greenberg’s writings we find the proclamation of a modern task, an avant-​garde task which was in fact a 180 degree turn away from the project of historical modernism, since he says that art should no longer worry about keeping up with its time or of harmonizing different temporalities, but on the contrary, in order to preserve its status as an avant-​garde ahead of its time, it should go against the movement of its time. This moment saw the creation of retrospective modernism, which was a specifically American creation even if the Frankfort School’s thought contributed to it, or later, exploited it. This was a moment where the concept of the uniqueness of artistic modernity was created out of a completely isolated episode in the history of American painting, which was abstract painting of the 1940s. This concept was that art would only concern itself with art, would only work on its own materials and its own medium. This undertaking, then, succeeded in imposing itself as being the true modernism, even though it was an antimodernist reaction that it expressed. The fact remains that this concept took hold, and consequently the reaction against this modernism was called “postmodernism.” The desire to break with this model was not in the end constructed as a rediscovery of the meaning of the historical modernist aspiration, but on the contrary it is as if it grabbed onto this very artificial and very retrospective concept of modernism. We fell into this kind of trap where we had to choose between being modern or postmodern, even though the postmodern, for me, was a concept that had no content of its own, or rather whose content was purely critique. The reaction against this postmodernism was of course to reinforce the modernist postulates. This is what a thinker like Lyotard did by making abstract painting the exemplary art of modernity under the emblem of the sublime and by giving to this sublime art the retrospective mission of witnessing the catastrophe of humanist and revolutionary ideals. In the face of that, for my part, I tried to reconstruct something like a history of

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modernist aspirations conceived as a particular way of interpreting the logic of the aesthetic regime of art. PB:  Can we see this retrospective modernism as a sort of twentieth-​century Romanticism, with this nostalgia of rupture? JR:  I don’t think so. For me, it is really an extraordinarily reactive ideal, one that even goes against a certain Romantic ideology, namely an idea of the opening up of art beyond its limits, of the link between art and the life of the people. Clement Greenberg’s analysis has the idea that the great catastrophe of art is kitsch. But what is kitsch in his analysis? It stems precisely from the fact that the children of peasants started to go to the city and work in industry, and consequently, with the separation of work time and leisure time, they discovered the experience of boredom that pushed them to reclaim a culture made for them and thus provoked the decadence of great art. This particular modernism is not a return to Romanticism. On the contrary, it is a way of reinterpreting and inverting the meaning of the artistic practices of rupture founded on the determination to unite art to new ways of life. Think, for example, of the ways in which the whole history of abstract painting has been reinterpreted starting from the 1940s—​artists like Mondrian or Malevitch were transformed into champions for the autonomy of pictorial art, while in fact they had been in search of pure forms, but with the idea that these forms were also forms for constructing a world. They were in search of the principles of a new way of living in the world, which were echoed in the projects of Bauhaus architects and designers as well as those of the Soviet avant-​gardes. We completely lose the meaning of this initiative when we reduce it to the triumph of the pure pictorial surface. PB:  Why is it that modernity and modernism have had so much success as concepts? Is it partly due to the fact that the two terms are often used interchangeably and that their meanings can be either very similar or completely different? I’m thinking, for example, of Antoine Compagnon’s book on the “antimoderns,” who are supposedly more modern than the moderns. JR:  I don’t remember very well what Antoine Compagnon said on the subject. But my idea, which exceeds the strict framework of artistic modernism set out by Greenberg or the Frankfort School, is that there was from the beginning a sort of confusion about what is modern. And from the beginning, there was also, within the definition of modernity, an interweaving of an interpretation in terms of progress with an interpretation in terms of decadence. This is what I tried to analyze, perhaps less from the angle of artistic practices than from the angle of politics, by recalling the way in which certain

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray aspects of counter-​revolutionary ideologies have strongly influenced socialist theories, including Marxism. This grand ideology, created around the time of the French Revolution and directed against the Revolution, explained how the Revolution is the triumph of abstract individualism, the triumph of protestant individualism and of the abstraction of the rights of man—​to the detriment of ancestral forms of community, society’s great structures organized by the monarchy, the church, and the guilds which used to bring people together and protect them. This obviously has its origins in the total fantasies about community well-​being from the times of feudalism and serfdom. But it created an absolutely dominant model of interpretation, one that proposed that the social fabric was torn by a “protestant” individualism that was accomplished through the egotism of capitalist exploitation and at the same time through the revolutionary abstraction of the rights of man. This idea of a bourgeois modernity as a separation to be repaired is even at the origin of the sociological idea and of many types of socialism. Marxism itself relies on this interpretive model in its analysis of the rights of man and of the bourgeois revolution. Theories of evolution and eventually of social revolution were based on the idea of modernity as decadence, as loss of the common fabric of experience. This encompassing framework allowed for all the transformations of progressive and revolutionary ideas through more or less nihilistic analyses of mass individualism, of consumerism, of the spectacle, etc. The formation of Greenbergian reactionary modernism needs to be understood in this framework. His analysis of the becoming of modern art is clearly very dependent on Hegel. Hegel shows that from the moment when art is no longer founded upon a total way of life, an entire system of common values, it enters into decadence:  it becomes pure performance, a pure exercise in virtuosity. Art begins to imitate itself. We can always paint as much as we want, and practice whatever other possible arts, but Art as a total expression of a way of life is finished. What is extraordinary is that Greenberg borrows Hegel’s analysis, but flips it around. He explains that artists are effectively more and more cut off from any living reality, from any embodied community, from any system of values, etc. From Hegel’s point of view, and from that of the Romantics, it is a bit of a catastrophe, but Greenberg turns it around to make it the supreme value of art: the avant-​garde should take note of this isolation which leads art to imitate itself; it should transform art into an arm for fighting against the art produced by its time period, which is to say the art made by the rear-​guard for the children of peasants. The avant-​garde has, in short, a mission to push decadence to its radical extreme. I  think

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that all of modernism’s ambiguities as interpretation of art are tied to the interpretational ambiguities of the entire historical sequence that starts with the French Revolution. These ambiguities testify to the intertwining of an interpretation of history in terms of progress and one in terms of decadence. PB:  In order for a discipline to be taken as “scientific,” it seems to me that there has to be a certain spatiality to knowledge, whether understood as a domain or a field, but also that there has to be a temporality where researchers develop in the present a body of knowledge that distinguishes itself from what was done in the past and that tries to determine what will be done in the future. Since you often formulate your thought in terms of space, of “division,” “distribution,” “stage,” what is your relationship to the temporality of the discipline of philosophy? Is there a sort of disciplinary logic that always calls for framing “research” in the humanities as a progressive movement, call it “modernism,” that would define a politics of academic disciplinarity? JR :  I think there are several points to make. There is plainly a dominant model that has imposed itself on university knowledge, which is the model of the hard sciences, the model of science as having a field with objects that can be strictly defined, and a form of historicity marked by progress in the ways of approaching these objects and eventually of creating new objects. This is a model of science with its objects and its methods, transforming its tools and its methods and growing in a way that isn’t necessarily linear, but which is in any case constantly expanding with the discovery of new domains, new methods, the utilization of new tools. Of course, for the so-​called human sciences or social sciences and the humanities, this is first of all a model for legitimation. Not only a model for legitimation with regard to those in positions of power who give money and to whom it has to be proven that we are doing science and a science which is useful to society, but also a model for legitimation with regards to those who do the work. There is a very pressing need not only to prove to others, but also to prove to oneself, that one is doing science. The fact is however that most disciplines in the sciences are arbitrary divisions that don’t depend in any way on a scientific determination of a field. Some are inherited from the past, some are on the contrary fields that came about at a certain moment, but were assembled from completely heterogeneous objects and methods. The classic case is sociology. At first it was a theory of society as a living organism, a sort of alternative to politics’ “abstractions.” It became a discipline by incorporating things that had nothing to do with each other: philosophical theories, empirical descriptions, forms of investigation, and statistical techniques that belonged to completely heterogeneous forms

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray of rationality and historical traditions. It is just as striking in the case of what is called political science, where theories coming from political philosophy were incorporated along with journalistic analyses and techniques for polling and manipulating public opinion. In order not to ask ourselves the question of the legitimacy of these divisions, we subdivide them. We assure ourselves that the discipline really exists by redistributing the fields it encompasses: you can do the sociology of work or the sociology of culture, or I  don’t know what, and everybody is happy. Everybody does science without having to ask themselves the question of knowing exactly what that means, what is this object out of which was made sociology. In the realms of the humanities there is another configuration: a form of knowledge that comes from the past, but whose living practice has been lost. What exactly is a humanist training? Nobody really knows anymore what that means concretely. What relationship does the Latin taught in Classics departments at the university have with the teaching of Latin in middle school and high school when it was not only an object of instruction but the very language of instruction, when it wasn’t about translating from Latin but of thinking and arguing in Latin? There was a time when the teaching of literature was the teaching of models for writing. If today we’ve created departments of “Creative Writing,” it’s really because literature departments no longer have the vocation to teach the mastery of a language, but instead study authors, work on problems of civilization, or teach the continental philosophy rejected by philosophy departments, which themselves want to take on the airs of a science with its objects and methods. It is clear, then, that these disciplines don’t define a truly delimited field nor do they define a science that progressively investigates its principles or progressively widens its scope. At the same time, there is this urgent need to always think that we are in an ever-​expanding field where everything will add up in the end. So my idea is that in the field that we have come to call the “human sciences,” the social sciences, or the humanities, what counts in the end are first of all singular works. These are thinkers or groups of thinkers who have traced singular trajectories that traverse the whole gamut of disciplines and objects of knowledge. In my view, Foucault has been more or less exemplary: when he works on the asylum, on the hospital, or on the prison, was it philosophy, history, or sociology? What is interesting is precisely what defines a way of capturing the articulation of thoughts and practices that completely escape the disciplinary bounds defined by practices, research disciplines, and texts, and by the frontiers between history, literature,

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philosophy, politics, sociology, aesthetics, or others. What counts is the mode of visibility that makes an object visible as a problem, the type of discourse this produces, the kind of performance of thought that’s in play. And of course, it is always what I  have tried to do in my own work:  not to practice a philosophy of the beautiful or of history or of the sociology of art, but to see how a thing that belonged to a prosaic world enters into the realm of art, and what that implies both in regards to the history of the forms of visibility and also in regards to the meaning of the word “art.” This work, which crosses the borders between disciplines, is something else for me than interdisciplinarity, since interdisciplinarity is also established as a type of accompaniment and eventually a corrective to disciplinary rigidity. This is interdisciplinarity: there is a big problem, and to address it, we need a jurist, a philosopher, a sociologist, etc. We put them together and they are going to discuss. Each is going to bring his or her small contribution. No, a problem is always more or less created by a singular approach. The idea that there is a problem and that we are going to call on specialists from different fields to solve it is an idea that is completely beholden to an academic logic, which is a logic of the reproduction of institutions and not at all a logic of the advancement of knowledge. PB:  Does the problem define the discipline? JR:  Let’s say instead that it is a singularity that makes an object [of study] and a problem appear at the price of exploding the borders between disciplines. PB:  If for you postmodernism is not useful as a concept, do you feel that a new aesthetic regime is in the process of emerging? Foucault, at the end of The Order of Things, suggested that in the near future we could hope to see a post-​ human era. Are we about to see a post-​aesthetic age? JR:  For me, the very question of “post” is not so clear. It is clear that when Foucault talked about the end of man, he wasn’t defining a post-​human epoch in the way people talk now of the nonhuman and the posthuman. What he was saying was this:  the concept of man as the central concept organizing a certain universe of ways of knowing and of thought, this concept was going to disappear. This has absolutely nothing to do with what people are now investing in the idea of the post-​human. Foucault was not interested in ghosts, animals, or cyborgs, there was none of all that in his work. He did not define transformations in the realm of life, but transformations in the realm of knowledge. The concept of man is itself an extremely ambiguous concept and Foucault localized it very precisely as an organizing figure of a certain form of thought.

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray As for the post-​aesthetic, I would say that, if we take the realm of art, the majority of manifestations that we see continue to be inscribed within the logic of the aesthetic regime of art. More than ever we are in this typical all-​encompassing configuration where we have a sphere of art that is well established, with its institutions, its characters, its events, so art really exists as a separate reality. But at the same time, there are not criteria separating art’s things from prosaic things. On the one hand, we constantly have biennales all around the world, we see more and more factories abandoned because of offshoring that are transformed into spaces for art. We then have a constant expansion of the visibility of art as a social practice inscribed in the redistribution of social activities, when, for example, a new Louvre [the Louvre-​Lens] or a new Pompidou Center [Pompidou-​Metz] is set up in a former industrial region. On the other hand, the dominant artistic practices are the ones that create indistinction:  environments instead of works; compositions of signs and images that can be seen as either catalogues or as mosaics; video series that deny the separation between documentary and fiction; photographs that can be seen as paintings or as reportage; installations that are at the same time spectacle and the denunciation of spectacle; performances that are both art and political activism, etc. There is still a sort of radicalization of the tension inherent to the aesthetic regime:  well-​defined spaces as spaces for art as opposed to a whole series of objects, images, practices, performances that are not subject to judgment according to any criteria that separates what belongs to the realm of ordinary practice from what belongs to artistic practice, that separates the artistic object from the ordinary object, the artistic image from the ordinary image, artistic practice from political practice. Last, another important characteristic of the aesthetic regime of the arts—​namely, the intersection of the arts—​ is always dominant in the case of art installation, which puts together the theatrical use of space, sculptural monumentality, light projection, and the poetic play of signification. There is thus a whole configuration that remains very strongly within the aesthetic regime, on condition of course of being distinct from modernist ideology. The leading figures of contemporary art place themselves within this total logic of the aesthetic regime of the arts, even if there is an internal tension, because the aesthetic regime is itself a regime that allows for eclecticism, which allows for different logics to intersect and also to clash. These intersections and these conflicts also allow for pushing art to its limits. This is what I tried to describe at a certain period by talking about an ethical

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turn in art as in politics. There was a moment when there had been, with the concept of the sublime, a reinterpretation in ethical terms of works that in fact belonged to the logic of the aesthetic regime. Likewise, we can see today certain tendencies that have art fading into something like a global ecology, a way of creating environments, of rethinking the relationships between man and the world . . . Of course there are tensions, but I don’t see a radical exit. In order to leave the aesthetic regime, the very forms of the visibility of art would have to change. Now the fact is that people are going to see biennales, where eventually there won’t be a single painting, with a way of looking trained in museums of painting. I’m exaggerating a little, but I believe fundamentally that it isn’t a major change. There are of course changes in the ways of looking; we no longer go to see beautiful artwork, but rather interesting artwork, for example. There are going to be practices where people move more quickly in front of works, because of the gigantic scale of artworks that has taken over. But fundamentally, the very forms of visibility of the sphere of art would have to be broken in order for us to be able to say that we had left the aesthetic regime. I tried to say it but I think it remains true: this is precisely the regime where precisely anything can be art—​which has to be thought of in a completely positive way and not in the way people say “it is the institution that decides what is art.” What decides what art is, is a certain form of spatial and temporal distribution. PB:  There is a lot of talk lately about new museums in the world, like the Louvre-​Abu Dhabi. Are we seeing that the museum itself, the space of the museum, takes precedence over the object, or is it that the art object has left the museum? JR:  It’s a little complicated. There has been this turning point that has happened with, notably, these contemporary art museums that don’t have a collection or at least, if they have one, don’t show them or limit their exhibit space so much that the museum becomes a sort of performance space, a place for cultural activities—​exhibits being a part of these activities. There was this moment when institutions were created such that the performative function, to exhibit the life of art, of art in the present, took over from the patrimonial, or cultural heritage, side of the museum. That said, the patrimonial side remains extremely strong, especially with these new museums to which the old museums export a portion of their works, with an eventual change in their visual staging. Let’s take the Abu Dhabi museum, I don’t know exactly what the Louvre has sent, but I have seen—​since they were exhibited at the Louvre in a special exhibit—​what the Abu Dhabi people bought to round out their collection; and what they bought were second rate European paintings,

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray with a few big names represented by minor works. Despite everything, the heritage side remains important. Museums have become enormous cultural institutions. Libraries also have the tendency—​our Bibliothèque Nationale at any rate, I don’t know if it’s also the case elsewhere—​to become multipurpose cultural institutions. There is a tendency toward a reallotment of roles. We can say that the heritage function endures and gives itself a whole series of annexes, of extensions. Yet, there are also institutions that are specifically there in order to make art thrive as performance, as the idea of art, and no longer to present collections.

PB:  You have written that the ethical, representative, and aesthetic regimes coexist in some way at the same time (within a given period). I  easily see this when I read your books on “canonical” authors like Flaubert, Mallarmé, Proust, Woolf, etc., but is this also true for so-​called popular literature? And for non-​European writings, what some call “World Literature”? JR:  There is always this schema opposing a literary modernity for elites against all other literary productions, which would still be loyal to the old representative model. Accordingly, on one side would be experimental literary modernism for the educated elites, and on the other traditional narrative for everyone else. I don’t think that’s really true. Proust already said that “popular” literature as it was thought of in his time was written more for the aristocrats of the Jockey Club than for the workers of the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail, a major national trade union confederation]. Above all, I believe that literature’s inventions have been popularized in different ways. It’s what I  have tried to show about journalism. Journalism adopted techniques that came from literature: ways of insisting on the insignificant detail, on the small stage, on the quotidian. Ways of constructing mosaic visions. It is supposed to be popular because it is written in a simple style and because it talks about humble things. But “great” literature invented the art of reading a whole world in the smallest details and invented writing on the surface of perception. Even so called pulp novels [“romans de gare”] adopted ways of writing and of representing time that came from the literary revolution. There are few contemporary novels, including among the bestsellers like Marc Lévy’s books in France for example, that are going to narrate to you the whole saga of a family over several generations, the story of a young ambitious man who climbs to the top of high society, or the torments of an impossible love. Instead, they take the stories of ordinary lives, which have been accidentally shaken up, moments from daily life, where they insist on the insignificant little things that point to transformations in society. They treat their subject

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through short episodes, they mix objective narration with subjective experience, and they deliberately use free indirect discourse. In short, the popular novel isn’t what it used to be. We can also think about what has happened to a genre long thought of as the popular genre par excellence, the detective novel. There was a time when the detective novel seemed to represent a model for the rationality of plot, opposed to the literary dissolution of plot—​think of, in France, the novels of Gaston Leroux and the character of Rouletabille, the detective who didn’t believe in appearances but only in deduction and who led the reader to share in his investigation to find the murderer. The detective novel embodied then a model of strong causality that comes to contradict what happens elsewhere in literature, namely the dissolution of traditional narrative’s rationality in the form of moments that follow one another, of experiences that are juxtaposed. The detective novel has been a sort of counter-​model, a sort of return to the Aristotelian model of fiction, in a tradition that goes from Edgar Allan Poe to Borges. What is very striking is how the detective novel has deserted the model of rationality tied to causal investigation in order to become a novel of atmospheres, of the description of milieu and ways of being. It is clear that no one is going to read an Ellroy novel with breathless suspense in order to know who the guilty party is: everybody is guilty, the cops are corrupt, sometimes even more corrupt than those they’re pursuing, and the novelist is interested in this world that is falling apart. The detective novel’s shift goes back pretty far. It was already in novels from the period of Dashiell Hammett or Boileau-​ Narcejac in France. I tried to show indirectly with Vertigo, which takes its plot from the novel by Boileau-​Narcejac, how it was about a logic of the death drive that was at work, inherited from the literary nihilism from the end of the nineteenth century, exploding the logic of rational inquiry. And we know to what degree the great noir novels could sometimes be even more incomprehensible than the “elitist” works of Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Rare are those who claim to have understood The Big Sleep—​not just Hawks’s film, but even Dashiell Hammett’s book, where we sometimes have the impression that he didn’t even know himself why the characters did what they did. As for what people call world literature, well it’s not something that exists as a practice of literature as such. It’s an interpretive notion. Nobody sets out to write world literature. First, people always write in a given language. Second, any given language is liable to welcome forms of writing that are completely different. Third, there are ways of writing that cross the borders between languages. There are people in any country in the world who are writing like Céline, Faulkner, Maupassant, or Beckett. If we think about

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray the attempts to single out a francophone literature and in particular a black francophone literature, we see that there was a moment when it went through a sort of grafting of a reclaimed African heritage onto a certain surrealist heritage. The logic of the aesthetic regime, the logic of literature extends out a little everywhere. And this logic created the idea of “world literature.” The Romantic “absolutization” of literature was criticized. But it was what made the very idea of “world literature” thinkable as an ensemble made up of the most diverse forms of expression from all past and present civilizations, all on an equal footing. It’s very recently that some people have changed the meaning of this notion from its Romantic origins in order to make it into an interpretive method and a polemical tool. Principles and methods of interpretation have been grafted onto this notion that are in fact independent of it, but which are simply inspired by a shared “social” perspective:  Marxist principles of explanation of fictional forms based on social forms; sociological methods that privilege group phenomenon over individual practices, therefore the classification of genres and the diffusion of books privileged over their content or over the act of reading. This can be argued in the name of a struggle against Occidentalism, elitism, “close reading,” etc., but in the end, it’s the opposite: the idea that it’s good for lay people to read books, that what scholars do is to study books as objects of knowledge. This academic position overlaps with certain polemics coming from within the literary world, notably in France where some have adopted the term “littérature-​monde” or “world literature” as the standard-​bearer for writers whose narratives travel the wide world instead of locking themselves up in the minimalism and narcissism of modernist fiction. Novels would be favored then that take place in faraway countries, where the characters travel a lot, or where the story takes precedence over the writing and which can therefore be easily read in translation, etc. But none of all that defines a new paradigm of writing.

PB:  In the United States and even in France, people are starting to question the predominance of the materiality of the book and our ways of reading that seem so “twentieth century.” Digital media, the Digital Humanities, distant reading, etc. Are these simply new ways of avoiding thinking about the aesthetic experience of reading, or on the contrary, are there possibilities of rethinking our relationships to art through these new technologies? JR:  I think that all sorts of questions are tangled up in all that. First there’s the question of knowing what we mean by digital. The digital is a medium for conveying information; it’s clear that, at any rate, the way that we read words, sentences, that we insert ourselves into stories is exactly the same, whether

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we hold a book in our hands or hold a tablet. The medium has changed, but the emotional power and the intelligibility of the text remains the same. And digital formats no more encourage “distant reading” than “close reading.” It is true, however, that a digital book is nonetheless a book without a history. We lose something that makes up the historicity of books, which is a part of literature. There is a whole experience of the materiality of the book, which adds to the narrative experience, to the creation of affects. This experience is not specific to a kind of elitist connection to the book. Think about Proust talking about his connection to the book François le champi, read when he was a child, in which there is the warmth of a summer hour, an entire moment of life, as if a complex of sensations fused together. I worked on the autobiographies of autodidacts where there is always the obligatory episode of the discovery of the book, which is always a book in bad shape, more or less dog-​eared, falling apart, found in a spot that is out of place. Of course, these stories are for the most part fictions. They are all repetitions of each other. The fantasy of the materiality of the book blends into the materiality of the relationship to the book. But, even given this fantasy, the materiality of the book plays an important role. I’m also thinking about my own experience in libraries. I know that I have been able to write as I have, crossing disciplinary borders, because I have worked in libraries like the old Bibliothèque Nationale, where the spatial classification and shelving of reference books was totally haphazard, with the result that completely heterogeneous books—​law, patrology, ancient literature—​were all grouped together side by side. If you are in a library strictly organized by the Dewey decimal system of classification, it becomes a lot harder, or even the new Bibliothèque Nationale, where the different sections are very far from one another. The chance discovery of a book, the fact of taking a book in your hands, of leafing through it, all that is important. Whatever people say, it isn’t the same to leaf through an e-​book as it is to leaf through a paper one. There is a whole series of things like that that are part of the experience of the book, and which add to its actual textuality. Related to that, I think that the Internet, and in a general way, digital media produces contradictory effects. On one side, I am very happy with Google. Not only does it speed up searching for a book or an image spectacularly, but also, it is for me a kind of a slightly unpredictable library, like the old Bibliothèque Nationale. I come upon something by chance, I follow a lead, I  branch off, I  find something unexpected. There’s this aspect of immense discoveries, of new crossroads, which the digital made possible, and that can eventually compensate for the loss of a physical contact with the book. There

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray are even areas where we can say that the Internet has opened up our sensory experience. Think of all the films that can no longer be seen in any theater but that we can all see on YouTube. We still have the idea that a new technology produces radically new modes of perception and art. But recording and memory technologies always have a double effect. Their newness is that of instruments for conservation as much as for creation. We haven’t yet seen a radical artistic innovation specifically tied to the digital. However, there has been a maximum use made of the museum, library, and archival functions that the Internet has actually taken on. From this perspective, we could even say that the conservation side has overtaken the innovative side. The realm of art is made up of a coexistence of practices that are performances, creations, innovations, and others that constitute and manage an inherited tradition. Now the conservatory and heritage side finds itself reinforced by digital media. For the moment, even if the digital has furnished new technical means for artists, it has furnished ways for storing artistic heritage and making it available, more than it has provided radical ways of writing or of making art. It is a well-​known phenomenon: Malraux’s imaginary museum was possible only because of photography; today, with the Internet, we search for images by an obscure nineteenth-​century painter or of posters by an artist from the 1920s, and we find them almost every time. There is an availability of artistic heritage that has a greater weight than the creation of new forms linked to this medium—​at least for the time being. I can’t predict. Simply, I am always a bit skeptical when people think that because there is a new technique, it is going to create a radically new art.

PB:  Like with cinema, where people are saying that it’s the end of cinema. JR:  Yes, that’s it. What has the digital camera really changed in how films are made? It creates possibilities, it’s clear that we have instruments that allow us to make films more cheaply. Consequently, digital eventually lets minor cinematic projects exist that, maybe, couldn’t exist under past conditions, with heavy equipment. That’s an example. There again, it’s the tool’s availability that’s most important. But, that said, even so, with digital, blockbusters come out just like they did in 35 mm, and the same thing goes for “auteur” films. Godard has used 35 mm, video, and digital. He has always exploited what is unique with each one, but his style is there with whatever different medium. PB:  The New Wave was also made possible because of new cameras . . . JR:  Yes, of course. The cameras made it possible to leave the studio. But first there’s the idea that you have to leave the studio, that there are possible stories [“virtualités”] in the street that must renew the ones in our heads.

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PB:  You are very interested in the question of recognizing what is art, by making the argument that the aesthetic regime allows us to recognize literature as the historical mode of the visibility of the art of writing. In your own books, you use very different writing styles, I’m thinking especially of the journalistic essays in Moments politiques, of the free indirect discourse of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and especially of the very precise and sometimes difficult style of Mute Speech. Can we talk about a distribution of writing, a “partage de l’écriture,” in the sense that you emphasize to varying degrees the visibility of your own art of writing in relation to the conceptual development of your texts? In The Names of History, you talk about a “poetics of knowledge.” Does philosophy distinguish itself from literature and history, by its poetics, by its style, by an invisibility of its art of writing? JR:  This is a very long question. For me, the main point is that writing is actually a research process, a process of invention. In writing, it isn’t enough to simply find the form that expresses ideas about the world; it is essentially about finding world experiences through trying to write sentences. That was an important aspect of the literary revolution, between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. It was really about that; I mean not simply finding ways of transcribing new world experiences, but of getting to the point of identifying them by finding ways of saying them. What is fundamental for me is this profound solidarity: I mean we discover ways of living in the world (of making the world live) by trying to come up with sentences. We start a sentence that tries to capture something of the experience of the world and, at the end of the sentence or of a certain number of sentences, this experience takes form, it no longer exists outside of this work. It is something that literature has taught us, the specifically revelatory side of writing, which is not at all simply a means of expression. This is something I have always tried to apply to my own work. For me, writing a book is not about communicating ideas that I  have arranged in order or an expertise that I have acquired, but it is trying to advance along a path of discovery. So, starting from there, we can say that there are two ways of thinking about things. You just spoke about the different ways of writing that I was able to adopt. Retrospectively, we can say that this way of writing was necessary to discover what there was to discover. At the same time, it doesn’t mean I chose to do it that way. Rather, the writing style was elicited by the need to grasp the object of my research. Let’s take the example of Nights of Labor. Looking back, I can tell people that Nights of Labor tried to introduce a certain revolution in the way of

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray writing within the fields of history and social science. Usually, we accumulate knowledge about the social world. Within this logic, the social world is made up of people who work and people who are militants, who do things and eventually say things that express what they do; and after that comes the thought that can explain the conditions in which they live and that explains why they say what they say; and then there is writing that formulates this thought. In this simplistic outline, there is an entire hierarchical structure of speaking beings divided into two categories: those who provide the material to be interpreted and those who hold the thought that interprets. I wanted to break this hierarchy by establishing a principle of homogeneity between two writing performances: there is not the narration of facts on one end and their explanation on the other. There was not a writing of workers’ texts that is on one side of the facts that needs to be explained and a scholarly writing that explains the reality that these texts express. There is writing by workers that searches, by appropriating writing to transform the very fact of being a worker, and there is a writing that sets out to seize the work of appropriation and to make sense of it/​become aware of it, and in order to do this, must stick closely to it. The logic of this book is this mode of writing by small degrees [“par petites dénivellations”], which never separate the subject of writing from the objects of the writing. At the same time, I didn’t at all have a plan in the beginning. As I’ve often explained, I  started out looking for information on the condition of workers, and I fell upon a text by a worker that talked about a Sunday in the country, and all the philosophical, poetic, aesthetic happenings during this walk on a Sunday in the country. I wrote as an extension of this discovery. I felt that the material was powerful. I tried to go along with this power and to transmit it, with the idea that there was a much greater power in these texts than in any text I could have written to comment on or explain them. There is therefore a mode of writing that could be said to be tied to a certain practice of theory, a practice that consists of changing our modes of perception of the objects of thought, but that at the same time is not premeditated, that obeys a logic of the object. I think that we write according to the logic of the object, which means two things: we work according to the logic of this material to be organized, but we work, in some sort, in order to find where the power of the material leads us. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, there are texts written by an extravagant character from 150 years ago, and then myself, writing 150 years later in a completely different situation, where the language is different, the problems are different, and at the same time it is as if I have to carry out the transmission of the provocative force of these texts.

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You talked about free indirect discourse. As it happens, it’s a way of dragging texts from one time period into another, of launching the provocative force of these past texts into the present. In order to do that, you have to introduce flexibility into the status of the narrator: the narrator who today tells Jacotot’s story must be able to transform himself or herself into the voice of Jacotot’s disciple, this disciple must travel between his time and ours before letting the objective narrator declare the story finished, which is a way of giving the reader the task of pursuing it, which is effectively what happened. If you take a book like Mute Speech, the problem is different. It was about carrying out two operations at the same time. The first was to show that “literature” is not the great depository of works of the art of writing from all time periods, but a historically determined regime of this art. This takes up a precise historical investigation about the way this specific regime of the art of writing, calling itself literature, formed in the modern age. I tried to reconstruct the logic of what was called belles lettres in the eighteenth century and to show how it was transformed into something that from then on was called literature, how we went from one regime of the art of writing to another. The second operation I carried out in Mute Speech was to show that literature is not a specific use of language that we could deduce from a general theory of language or of signs. It is a form of the distribution of the sensible [“partage du sensible”]. We have to think of it at the heart of a total vision of what I have called the politics of writing—​namely, how words make history or how the power of words tears people away from their normal destiny, and consequently creates history. It is a vast transhistorical problem that goes back to how Plato staged the critique of writing in the Phaedrus, to the Christian incarnation of the Word, to Romantic thought on poetry as an expression of the life of the people, etc. The problem was how to articulate these two operations? First how to articulate them for myself? I  chose to start from the ground of precise historical investigation by reconstructing the elements of the historical system of belles lettres and then to show how the destruction of this regulated regime exposed again the question of the place of speech within the distribution of the sensible and put back into play the entire problematic of what I have called the politics of writing, which was much more vast and difficult to encompass. I articulated it this way: there was a moment when the rupture of the logic of belles lettres created a kind of line of flight. If we want to understand what is happening in Balzac or Flaubert, we have to go all the way back to Plato, to his critique of orphaned writing, which goes off to talk to anybody at all while destroying the ordered distribution of speech. Look

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray at how the Platonic myths of the destiny of souls are put back into play in the theme of the found book, of the role of the found book in the life of the poor, and then come back to Balzac and to the way in which the conflict between orphaned writing and embodied writing is going to determine the fate of literature. This knot between two threads of argument forced me evidently to adopt a much tighter mode of writing, more argument-​based in order to tighten my own knot between problems for which the facts did not obviously go together. These are examples of heterogeneous writing determined by different problems and different material. But I  never thought “I am a philosopher, therefore I am going to talk about that and here is how I am going to write.” While maintaining a professional identity as a teacher in philosophy, for a bunch of reasons it happened serendipitously that I was led to work on a bunch of things that ranged from texts by French workers in the 1830s to 1840s to a whole set of material from another era on the forms of perception of art from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. What interests me each time is to try to understand the logic of what is at play in each case. Understanding this logic means breaking away from ordinary logics that serve to classify forms of stories that correspond to the lives of workers or modes of representation of art and transformations in art. What I can consider as philosophical in my work is fundamentally changing modes of visibility, changing the ways which events, situations, ways of being are classified into disciplines, into categories, and relegated to types of discourse, to types of arguments. In order to do that, the way of writing has to be adapted. It happened that I wrote Nights of Labor as a kind of great biographical novel; I wrote Aisthesis as a succession of scenes because I wanted to show that at those instants when what we can call art[, art] is always in transformation and that we can try to grasp it on the basis of moments when something was introduced into the field of art that hadn’t been there, where all of a sudden the meaning of the word vacillates after one particular performance. For me it inevitably means a philosophical work, at any rate that is what interests me—​it doesn’t matter after all if it is recognized as philosophical—​it supposes that we change the way in which things are thought, perceived, and that writing is going to try to produce this change, and also try according to variable modes—​the event imposes its variations. I’m talking about really structured books. It’s different for books put together from lectures. When you have a lecture or an article to do, then you have time constraints, constraints of intelligibility. When I write a book like Nights of Labor or The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I don’t have to ask myself

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the question of the number of pages to fill or who is going to read it. When I deliver a lecture in a given place, I have to think how all of it holds together in a given timeframe, which allows me limited material and a limited number of articulations in front of an audience that has to process it at the same time. For a book, people are eventually going to leaf through it, happen upon a particular passage, and construct from there their own temporality of reading and of understanding. There are modes of temporal relationships to the book that offer the freedom of writing. For a lecture, people are going to listen to it once, even if they can listen to it again later on YouTube. It’s not at all the same thing; we don’t open up a random moment of a lecture. There are, then, constraints. When you talk about newspapers, it’s of course even worse. The journalist tells you, “you are going to tell me what you think about the situation, the explosions, the elections, the Front National.” And you have a certain number of words to do it. You look for an efficient way that is really tied to a performance. It’s a work that can be interesting, but that is more rhetorical in the sense that it’s not really the law of the object that predominates, but the time constraint and the public. To finish up, I can’t say what a philosophical writing should be in general. What is important to me is working on articulations of thoughts that no longer belong to a particular discipline. Even if for me philosophy has a meaning, its work is to break the separations between disciplines or to choose objects that are precisely on the border between disciplines, on the border between what is an object of science and a subject of science. A philosophical work is a work that shifts the status of objects and the status of utterances. Which means, then, essentially to transfer a problem from one discipline, from a field inscribed in a hierarchy of distributions of knowledge, to a sort of field of intelligibility that no longer talks to the norms of a scholarly guild, that no longer talks to a certain type of audience. Which means that it is more an interdisciplinary or anti-​disciplinary mode of writing rather than a mode of writing that I think belongs to the discipline of philosophy. But that’s my own reading. PB:  You have shown how literature and the arts, or the way of reading them, has influenced other disciplines (history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, communications). Do literary critics, academics specialized in literature or philosophy, try to deny this heritage by adopting positivist discourses or vocabularies, like the latest fad for “neurohumanities”? JR:  I don’t have a global vision of what academics are doing. I’m not talking about literary or artistic criticism [“la critique”]. Criticism is something that has more or less disappeared today. It’s a form of discourse that had its

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Translated by Patrick M. Bray moment of grandeur. It accompanied literature during its important historical moment of deciphering society. It also allowed literature to communicate with other arts, to change the visibility of painting, to welcome cinema as an art and as an object of thought. But there isn’t much left of criticism today. The university absorbed everything. Think for example of the role of Film Studies and Media Studies, which suppressed this profane form of approaching cinema. As for the university world, I  don’t have a wide-​ ranging vision of what is happening in all the countries of the world. I have the impression, if I take the French example, that there has been an opening in the last thirty or forty years, a new form of exchange between literature and other disciplines, in the instruments that claim to understand, that claim to explain literature. Therefore I have the feeling that things I have been able to say have been heard. By saying that, I don’t want to present myself as an inventor. In the generation of philosophers in France that came before me, think of Deleuze and Foucault especially, literature had a big role in the transformation of philosophy and the formulation of problems in philosophy and also the ways of writing it. So there was something that was embodied in this era in philosophy. Literature had produced its effects in philosophy, had created problems, and had created ways of dealing with these problems. What I  tried to remind people most specifically was how a whole series of modes of interpretation, which were applied to literature, are modes of interpretation that literature had itself created:  attention to detail, the way of finding meaning in insignificant details and of reading the whole in the fragment, the echo of surface and depth. There are a whole series of modes of interpretation, of modes of looking that have been disseminated later and eventually have been taken up again by sociological or other interpretive models. I have the impression that this way of seeing has nevertheless entered into common practice, even if of course there is always a desire for a good model of interpretation. We are no longer in the Structuralist era, we are no longer in the era of literary theory, of semiology, [when] we believed we could define the elements literature was made from and could construct a vast model on the basis of which we could read books. This model has not disappeared. But there is a non-​eclectic opening onto the plurality of interpretations and especially onto the reversibility of relations between the interpreted text and interesting discourse. What I can see, among the people now working on literature at the university, is that these people have heard a certain number of things coming from philosophy, from psychoanalysis. These people are attentive; they try to play off the tensions between these

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things and literary critics themselves without necessarily looking to create a sort of new model of interpretation. Apart from that, of course, there very well can be the idea of creating a new interpretive model starting from a type of particular knowledge and of transforming it into a new discipline. As for neurohumanities, I only have a very vague idea of what that could signify, but I see it as a new form of the positivist tendency that is coming back because, like we were just saying, there is a need to prove that you’re doing science, that even if you’re talking about literature, you’re not doing literature. You’re not going to bother with what is in the books, but you’re going to look to see, through medical imaging, what’s happening in our neurons when we read books by such and such an author. We can interpret this in two ways; we can interpret it as a desire on the part of a certain number of positivist disciplines to encompass things that they have so far left out. Before they did analytic philosophy or cognitive science and didn’t care about the rest: literature was for phoneys or for elitists. We can interpret it as a desire to go explore fields and types of experiences outside the world of the “cognitive sciences” or of analytic philosophy, to tackle something else. We can, however, see in it a slightly imperialist will to show that nothing resists science and that science can effectively understand with its instruments things that could counter it as exterior or antithetical to science. For the moment, these are relatively limited experiences and it’s hard to know what will come of it. That said, I think that, when it comes to literature, there are so many heterogeneous things, so many factors involved in a paragraph of literature, so many things involved in the course of a reading, that you have to be able to carry out very quick singular syntheses between these heterogeneous approaches in order to feel and to try to communicate what is happening in a literary text. Now medical imaging is a little clunky, and until “cognitive science” has found all the experimental devices that could account for the multiplicity of factors that enter into the writing of a text, in the connections of one text to another, in the reading of texts, in the way in which reading a text belongs to a multiplicity of different experiences, I think that it is running a race it is bound to lose. It was already the problem with experimental psychology: a heterogeneous group can be accounted for on condition that it is reduced to a certain number of very narrow factors that the experiment has a hold on. The problem is not the relationship between the coldness of the machine and human warmth, it is something else. It’s the relationship between the number of factors that enter into practices of writing and of reading and the number of factors for which an experiment can truly function and produce results.

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PB:  One of the fundamental ideas in your work is the presupposition of the equality of intelligence and the questioning of those who claim to speak for those who do not speak. We’re starting to see, in the United States especially, an apparently similar, but perverted, neoliberal discourse, where it’s said that with the supposed equality of the Internet and with a more and more democratic society, we no longer need the liberal professions—​doctors, lawyers, or professors—​who in fact are more and more regulated by bureaucratized institutions. Instead of professional expertise, there is the expertise of professional “managers,” those who openly declare having no specific competence other than an excessive faith in the invisible hand of the market. How can we resist a falsely democratic discourse without falling into a professional elitism? JR:  That’s a very broad question. I think that there are several related problems. It is clear that there are forms of access to knowledge that have been democratized, that are accessible to everybody, and in many fields, specialist privilege becomes problematic. There are academics, professionals, journalists who hold onto the old argument that the more information there is available, the less poor ignorant people are capable of dominating this mass of information and that there is a greater need for people to guide them. I think that these arguments don’t hold up. You have to start from the fact that there is not only a broad expansion of the fields of knowledge accessible to everyone, but also that with the Internet, we can perfectly reproduce modes of access and of information to learning that were traditionally the monopoly of professionals. There are a certain number of arguments for specificity that no longer hold. To say it another way, there is a form of inequality that is losing its legitimacy. From there, the question is what is going to take its place. It’s clear that what most naturally takes its place is another form of inequality: the idea that we can organize the explanatory system at less cost with some generalized forms of managing data and a few specialists of data processing. It’s another way of surrendering equality to inequality: everything is available to everybody, therefore it’s enough to have people to organize the data and that’s all there is to it. But equality is not simply the fact that there is a ton of knowledge available, it’s that there is also a circulation of language practices and a distribution of knowledge, which has nothing to do with the idea that knowledge exists and that it’s enough that there are people who regulate the way we are going to use it. At the same time, it’s an extraordinarily difficult thing; we are not really at the point of realizing it for the moment. I think that most of the defenses for academic specificity are weak and that there has to be an attempt to think about a way of putting processes of research, writing, and speech, into circulation that

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is at once open to everybody and that, at the same time, doesn’t fall into an established order of knowledge. There is the whole problem of the outsourcing of knowledge. And, since there is an outsourcing that is the very fact of capital, people conclude that it’s the same thing and people wind up saying that intellectual emancipation is no different than neoliberal ideology. No, we need to encourage one type of outsourcing over the other; we need to affirm another way of circulating words, thoughts, knowledge, images. But this is something that is not arguable according to the bureaucratic logic of the rational organization of knowledge. It is an opposition between different ways of living speech, of living knowledge, of living thought, of living exchanges. There is not a strong rational scientific argument that can really justify the need for a certain intellectual anarchy in the face of managerial logic. It justifies itself by what it produces. PB:  So we need to find meeting spaces . . . JR:  Yes, we need meeting spaces, which means first of all a symbolic space outside of hierarchical distributions and outside of preformatted audiences. It also means forms of writing, forms of knowledge and of the sharing of knowledge that create an egalitarian communication crossing the borders not only between institutions but also between habits of thought. There isn’t just information available and then people who know how to use it. That’s a managerial logic. No, there is expertise everywhere. We have to get to the point where all of these forms of expertise meet up; it’s something else entirely. But also we need to do away with the separation between useful expertise and the haphazard forms of circulation of thought. Progressive ideology was founded on an implicit division between the vast majority of humans who need a culture of the useful and the small minority who can offer themselves the luxury of the useless. But equality is not the optimization of the useful, it’s about the need to become sensitive to something like the ways of dividing up and sharing the useless [“le partage de l’inutile”]. It’s what I tried to show with the role of “aesthetic” experience in worker’s emancipation, especially through Gauny’s texts: the “disinterested” look takes on meaning only if it’s possible for everyone, if it is effectively adopted by those for whom it was not destined. Modern culture, in the strongest sense of the term, was built on the sharing [partage] of “disinterested” judgment, of the useless, of leisure, of flânerie, of free time, of free experimentation of anything at all, of anyone at all entering into whatever field of knowledge or of appropriation. Modern culture was made from a blurring of the lines between active and passive, useful and useless. It is not something that we are ever going to impose in the form of a rational argument opposed to neoliberal talking points.

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PB:  So, for a last question, is there a big difference in the way your books have been interpreted in France, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States? Are there errors or misunderstandings that keep coming up? JR:  My books, at least a certain number of them, are like unidentified objects, at any rate, we are constantly on the verge of misunderstanding. There are forms of rejection pure and simple. A philosopher is going to open Nights of Labor and say “that’s not philosophy.” It’s a classic reaction, against which there’s not much we can do. In the English-​speaking world and especially in North America, “critical theory” can welcome a lot of unidentified objects, but on the flip side, there is a very strong classificatory tendency. People want to know which school you belong to, if you are Marxist, deconstructionist, poststructuralist, or something else. There is a splitting up into schools and periods that creates other problems in reading when people can’t tell very well if you are a Marxist or a post Marxist, structuralist or poststructuralist, modern or postmodern. In France, these labels have little importance. But there are still big divisions; people want to know if you do theory or not theory, if it’s empirical history or if it’s philosophy, etc. It plays a big role to know how people will classify you, where you should be located. My books have always had problems at bookstores and libraries. Most of them are impossible to classify as books of philosophy. Therefore they are scattered between the philosophy shelf, the history shelf, art or cinema shelves, while my whole work has been to break down the frontiers between specialties and more profoundly between categories of discourse. At the same time, I have the feeling that now there is beginning to form, and maybe coming from places on the margins of the dominant intellectual scene, a type of sensitivity to what I have written that responds exactly to the shifts I have tried to produce. It’s the case for the narrative aspect of many of my books, which is something rather shocking for the usual ways of thinking what is called theory. I have been very struck by the way in which Nights of Labor was translated into Hindi and received in India. I was struck by the reaction of the intellectual and artistic milieus where it was presented: people gave the narrative aspect its whole depth and its whole force, without asking “where’s the theory?” I  sometimes have the impression forms of sensibility are created from the “peripheries,” East Asia or Latin America for example, and then take over the English-​speaking world. There was a very long period especially when people would only read what looked like theory. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy looked like theory, like political philosophy, and people were rather happy with it. Conversely, Nights of Labor, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, works like that, were mysterious. The Ignorant Schoolmaster

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was read by artists, not by teachers. And now, I  have the impression that people perceive what I wanted to do, or rather what was done through my books without me necessarily wanting it. I  have felt recently coming from more or less everywhere, among students, researchers, artists, a new sensibility to the slightly unclassifiable, shifting aspect of what I have been able to write. Of course that could change, there are going to be new waves of positivists for whom this isn’t going to be acceptable. But I have the impression that right now maybe there are generations that enter more directly into the affective content of what I have written. PB:  Retrospectively, is there a unity to your work? JR:  I don’t know. Even for me, the unity is yet to come. But there is in any case a displacement in the way of looking at what I write: the accent falls more on the thought process, on the type of approach, on the way of writing that the approach involves. I know that there are a lot of students in the United States, in the field of literary studies, who work from what I’ve written on literature. But what I’ve been able to write on literature is absolutely not a theory of literature, it’s not a method of interpretation, and nevertheless, apparently it speaks to them. And not only does it speak to them, from what I hear, it helps them write their own theses or dissertations . . .

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Index 2Fik 153–​5, 157–​9 ADAPTE 219, 227 Adorno, Theodor 148, 179, 180, 205 Agamben, Giorgio 104, 183, 188, 196 Althusser, Louis 1, 34, 42, 43, 64, 102, 161, 203, 220, 245, 248 architecture 22, 29, 43, 92–​3, 95, 168–​71, 173–​5, 177 archives 1, 4, 34–​6, 40–​1, 49, 89, 93, 102, 105, 107, 119, 127, 211, 248, 278 Aristotle 5, 19, 26, 30, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88, 94, 112–​13, 118–​19, 122–​4, 165, 192, 214, 240–​2, 256, 275 Artaud, Antonin 101, 167 Auerbach, Erich 84 authorial intent 60–​1, 231 autobiography 6, 38, 45, 120, 170, 202, 277 avant-​garde 36, 75, 80, 84, 162, 176, 179, 180–​1, 196, 197, 223–​4, 240, 259, 265–​8 Badiou, Alain 4, 19, 31, 43, 107, 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail 123–​4 Balibar, Étienne 1 Balzac, Honoré de 14, 20, 91, 114, 118, 124, 165, 260, 281–​2 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 113 Barthes, Roland 5, 18, 60, 61, 91, 124, 168, 175 Baudelaire, Charles 20, 117–​20, 122, 164 Bauhaus 264, 267 belles lettres 98, 103, 165, 169, 251, 264, 281 Benjamin, Walter 5, 20, 117–​20, 123, 175, 221 Bergson, Henri 174, 247 Bibliothèque Nationale de France 274, 277 Blanchot, Maurice 60, 101, 105 Boileau-​Narcejac 275

book (materiality of) 55, 56, 60, 62–​3, 65, 104, 106–​8, 134–​5, 225, 253, 276–​7 Borges, Jorge Luis 275 Borreil, Jean 203, 208–​9 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 18, 34, 42, 52–​3, 64, 199–​218 Brecht, Bertolt 87, 133, 142, 205 capitalism 17, 150, 256 Chaplin, Charlie 196, 259 Chateaubriand, René de 210 Christianity 27, 106, 171, 189–​90, 281 cinema 2, 4, 73–​82, 93, 104, 108, 127–​45, 174, 181, 213, 226, 235, 239–​42, 255, 260, 278, 284, 288 Cixous, Hélène 1 common sense 147–​8, 158 communism 128, 176, 247–​50, 265 community of sense 36, 155, 228, 254 Conrad, Joseph 30, 83–​4, 117, 241–​2 Corneille, Pierre 192 Costa, Pedro 92–​3, 95, 145 Cox, Renée 153–​5, 157–​9 Craig, Gordon 92, 122 Debord, Guy 83, 249 Deburau, Jean-​Gaspard 122–​3 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 2, 29, 73, 106, 128, 132, 183, 211–​12, 242, 284 democracy 3, 11–​13, 20, 22, 31–​2, 46, 97, 104, 105, 111, 113, 114, 117, 120, 123, 127, 163, 224, 225, 241, 249, 254, 258 democratic torrent 3, 11–​13, 17 Derrida, Jacques 1, 28–​9, 100–​1, 252 Descartes, René 23, 27, 129, 130, 245–​7 design 7, 29, 264–​7 Desnos, Robert 92, 95 Deutscher Werkbund 264 diagram 130, 132, 137, 143, 145 digital media 71, 77, 276–​8

292 Index disciplinarity 3–​5, 7, 28, 34, 52–​3, 65, 71, 89, 161–​2, 269–​71, 282–​5 dissensus 6, 147–​50, 157–​60, 172, 203, 205, 208, 231, 257–​9 distribution/​partition of the sensible 2, 6, 36, 83, 103, 106, 155, 158, 164–​5, 176–​7, 220–​4, 235–​7, 245, 249, 255, 257–​9, 281 distribution of writing 279 Dulac, Germaine 240 École Normale Supérieure 1, 201 ecology 28, 181, 273 education 3–​4, 34–​5, 42, 51–​72, 85–​6, 105, 202, 217, 245 effet de réel (reality effect) 5, 18, 91 Ellroy, James 275 emancipation 1, 2, 4–​5, 6, 21, 31–​6, 42–​6, 59, 60–​72, 81, 84, 89, 93, 95, 100, 102, 166–​7, 182, 187, 196, 197, 203, 219, 224–​5, 230–​1, 237, 245–​8, 256, 258, 263, 287 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 176, 265 Epstein, Jean 73, 75–​7, 80, 240 Ernaux, Annie 199, 202, 217 ethics 6, 87, 127, 141, 211, 255, 260, 272–​3 Euripides 194–​5 Evans, Walker 95 event 4, 18, 19, 30, 34, 40, 73, 77, 83, 91, 94, 95, 103–​4, 107, 115, 120, 121, 168, 171, 175, 204, 242, 272, 282 eventality 97, 106 fable 2, 6, 22, 73–​82, 129, 239–​43 Faure, Élie 76, 77 feminism 5, 6, 47–​8, 147–​60 Ferry, Jules 20, 52 Flaubert, Gustave 2, 14, 18, 30, 79, 83, 84, 85, 95, 101, 112–​17, 120, 165–​6, 168, 180, 184, 200, 205, 241–​2, 253, 260, 274, 281 Bouvard et Pécuchet 28, 166, 204 Éducation sentimentale 112–​14 Madame Bovary 2, 11, 30, 85, 112–​15, 117, 166–​7, 180, 200, 204 “Un cœur simple” 95, 112 Foucault, Michel 1, 3, 29, 105–​7, 195, 258, 259, 270–​1, 284

France 4, 11, 34, 36, 52, 66, 85, 101, 107, 220, 274, 275, 276, 284, 288 Fifth Republic 4, 34, 52 French Revolution 5, 103, 111, 112, 117, 124, 264, 268–​9 July Monarchy 37, 90 Second Empire 11, 12, 16, 20 Third Republic 20, 52, 59 Frankfort School 266, 267 Freud, Sigmund 6, 129–​32, 145, 188–​91, 193, 195, 196 Fuller, Loïe 19, 93–​4 futurism 265 Gauny, Louis-​Gabriel 35–​6, 40, 41, 210, 213–​14, 287 Gautier, Théophile 20, 122 Genette, Gérard 98–​101 German Romantic Aesthetic Theory 6, 98–​100, 103–​8, 120, 150, 204, 267–​8, 276, 281 Godard, Jean-​Luc 73, 128, 278 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 210 Greenberg, Clement 84, 163, 176, 179, 266–​8 Guerrilla Girls 149–​59 habitus 6, 18, 31, 199–​200, 202, 213–​17 Hammett, Dashiell 275 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 24, 25, 147, 166, 181, 194, 203, 206–​7, 268 Heidegger, Martin 25, 100, 101 hexis 201 history 1, 21, 25, 33, 39, 42, 52, 72, 89, 93, 97, 98, 103, 108, 113, 115, 119–​20, 123, 130, 163, 177, 181, 227, 240, 242–​3, 248–​9, 256, 259, 263, 269–​71, 279, 280, 281, 283, 288 historicism 97, 106, 108 historicity 91, 97, 103, 108, 269, 277 history of art 152–​3, 196–​7, 266–​7 literary history 4, 97, 101, 105, 111–​12, 124, 239, 253 Hölderlin, Friedrich 194 Hugo, Victor 22, 37, 44, 79–​80, 89, 90, 111, 120–​1, 165, 180, 184, 251–​2 humor/​jokes 5, 127, 129–​43, 206

Index Ibsen, Henrik 6, 92, 93, 182, 188–​96 The Lady from the Sea 193–​4 The Master Builder 92 Rosmersholm 188–​91 identity politics 46, 167, 204 Ingres, Jean-​Auguste-​Dominique 149, 152–​7 intellectual equality 2, 4, 6, 59, 65–​6, 71, 215, 245–​50, 286 stultification 59, 64–​5, 86, 246–​7 interdisciplinarity 3, 161, 271, 283 Internet 71, 215, 277–​8, 286 intersectionality 157–​8 Jacotot, Joseph 2, 3, 4, 36, 43–​4, 47, 51–​72, 85–​6, 245–​7, 249, 281 Jameson, Fredric 123–​4 Joyce, James 164, 275 Kant, Immanuel 89, 100, 103, 105, 155, 156, 158, 164, 182, 186–​7, 194, 195, 200, 202, 208 kitsch 84, 179, 212, 267 Kracauer, Siegfried 20, 164 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Philippe 99–​100 Lapointe, Savinien 36–​8, 44–​5, 49 Latin America 6, 219–​31, 288 Leroux, Gaston 275 lexis 256 linguistics 39, 60–​1, 72, 78, 99–​100, 104, 106, 108, 168, 180, 242, 251–​2 Lissitzky, El 265 literary revolution 117, 180, 274, 279 Louvre 272, 273 Louvre-​Abu Dhabi 273 Louvre-​Lens 272 Lukács, Georg 5, 123–​4, 185 Lyotard, Jean-​François 104, 147, 148, 163, 266 Macherey, Pierre 102, 106 Maeterlink, Maurice 91–​3 Malevitch, Kazimir 267 Mallarmé, Stéphane 19, 60, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 121, 165–​6, 168, 179, 253, 260, 274 Malraux, André 278

293

managerialism 286–​7 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 265 Marx, Karl 14, 29, 33–​6, 42, 83, 119, 176, 220 Marxism 1, 40, 47, 49, 64, 102, 105, 118, 123–​4, 127, 163, 179, 203, 221, 245, 248, 268, 276, 288 May 1968 1, 52, 53, 61, 107, 220, 248 medium specificity 175–​6, 179–​81 Melville, Herman 130, 183 Bartleby: The Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street 130, 183, 188, 196 memory 6, 30, 76, 168–​9, 172–​5, 278 micropolitics 20, 23, 25, 31, 259 milieu 3, 13–​14, 16, 19–​32, 137, 275, 288 Mill, John Stuart 200 Milner, Jean-​Claude 53, 65 mimesis 84, 87–​8, 91, 94, 98, 112–​20, 165, 208, 218, 240–​2, 251, 255–​6, 260 modernism 1, 4–​7, 18, 31, 60, 72, 74–​5, 83–​5, 90–​1, 93, 95, 112, 124, 127, 162–​5, 175, 179–​82, 195–​7, 243, 253, 263–​9, 272, 274, 276 historical modernism 1, 266 retrospective modernism 266 Molière 78 Mondrian, Piet 267 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban 204–​8, 214 museum 7, 95, 149–​55, 181, 186, 211–​12, 215, 273–​4, 278 mute speech 6, 97–​109, 251–​4 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 1, 99–​100 neoliberalism 6, 12, 219–​20, 224, 227, 286–​7 nervosisme 24, 119–​21 New Wave 5, 128, 278 patchwork 91, 95 pathos 6, 180, 182, 188, 190–​7, 213 photogénie 240, 242 photography 4, 15, 83, 87, 91–​2, 95, 174–​5, 208, 260, 272, 278 Plato 2, 12, 13, 26, 31, 42, 83, 86, 89, 100, 106, 107, 200–​2, 245–​6, 249, 252, 255–​7, 259, 281–​2 Poe, Edgar Allan 120, 164, 275

294 Index police order 6, 12, 22, 31, 42, 46, 69, 147–​8, 157–​9, 167, 202, 230, 245, 258, 259 politics of the amateur 5, 128, 145 Pompidou Center 272 popular culture/​literature 1, 35, 104, 107, 204, 241, 274 post-​human 271 postmodernism 3, 60, 86–​7, 103–​4, 124, 162–​3, 175, 195, 263, 266, 271, 288 Proust, Marcel 6, 101, 104, 106, 161–​77, 218, 274, 277 psychoanalysis 188–​90, 193, 195, 283–​4 Rancière, Jacques Aesthetics and Its Discontents [Malaise dans l’esthétique] 103, 151 The Aesthetic Unconscious [L’Inconscient esthétique] 188, 193–​4, 252 Aisthesis 3, 12, 18, 20–​1, 24, 32, 84, 87, 91, 94, 163, 176, 181, 196, 202, 204, 206, 259, 265, 282 Althusser’s Lesson [La Leçon d’Althusser] 1, 34, 53, 161, 248 Disagreement [La Mésentente] 3, 13, 31, 69, 167, 237, 253, 256, 288 Dissensus 109, 208 The Emancipated Spectator [Le Specateur émancipé] 83–​95, 104, 248, 249 Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués 205, 259 Film Fables [La Fable cinématographique] 4, 73–​7, 81, 239–​42 Le Fil perdu 3, 5, 12, 18, 30, 32, 80, 83, 85, 87, 90, 111–​24, 240–​2 The Flesh of Words [La Chair des mots] 112, 117, 163, 170, 183, 252–​3, 260 The Future of the Image [Le Destin des images] 104, 175, 180, 257 The Hatred of Democracy [La Haine de la démocratie] 3, 11–​32, 53, 249, 255 The Ignorant Schoolmaster [Le Maître ignorant] 2, 4, 34, 35, 43, 44, 47, 49, 51–​72, 85, 88, 93, 102, 245–​7, 279–​80, 282, 288 The Intervals of Cinema [Les Écarts du cinéma] 73, 78, 127, 213

Mallarmé 121, 260 La Méthode de l’égalité 128, 204 Moments politiques 250, 279 Mute Speech [La Parole muette] 3, 4, 12, 74, 97–​109, 112, 117, 162–​3, 165, 167, 172, 240, 251–​4, 255–​6, 264, 279, 281 The Names of History [Les Noms de l’histoire or Les Mots de l’histoire] 167, 176, 177, 240, 243, 256, 279 Nights of Labor or Proletarian Nights [La Nuit des prolétaires] 2–​4, 33–​49, 88, 102, 111, 122–​3, 236, 256, 279, 282, 288 On The Shores of Politics [Aux bords du politique] 46, 255 La Parole ouvrière 35–​9, 44, 90 The Philosopher and His Poor [Le Philosophe et ses pauvres] 2, 18, 35, 39, 42, 47, 53, 102, 200, 252 The Politics of Aesthetics [Le Partage du sensible] 12, 103, 104, 148, 163–​6, 181, 208, 220, 235–​8, 252–​3, 255–​6 The Politics of Literature [Politique de la littérature] 12, 35, 165, 252, 260 Short Voyages to the Land of the People [Courts voyages au pays du peuple] 209, 288 Staging the People 48, 214 Ray, Nicholas 78–​9 regimes of art 2, 6, 80, 82, 253, 255–​60 aesthetic regime 6, 79, 104–​5, 147, 154–​5, 158, 166, 179–​97, 221, 237, 249, 253, 255–​60, 264, 267, 271, 272–​4, 276, 279 ethical regime 147, 237, 255–​9 representative regime 103, 151, 154, 165–​6, 183, 185–​6, 190, 196, 237, 255–​8 representation 1, 2, 17, 32, 86, 93, 98, 100, 112, 121–​2, 149, 151, 165–​6, 192, 221, 223, 235–​6, 240–​2, 251, 253, 256, 259, 282 reverie 6, 32, 80, 89, 179, 181–​2, 185–​7, 195–​7, 206–​7 Rodchenko, Alexander 259, 265 Rodin, Auguste 24 Romanticism 100, 101, 150, 253, 267 Ross, Kristin 51, 59

Index Rosselini, Roberto 127 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 89, 182, 186, 194–​5 Russian formalism 60 Sainte-​Beuve 14 Saint-​Simonianism 39–​41, 47–​9, 111 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 19, 42, 64, 99, 123, 124, 162, 163, 175 Schiller, Friedrich 89, 103, 182, 186, 194, 206, 208, 257, 264 Schopenhauer, Arthur 193–​4 Shakespeare, William 88–​9, 92, 93, 121, 152 socialism 39–​40, 48, 268 sociology 5, 6, 13, 17, 21, 22, 26–​8, 32, 34, 42, 52, 161, 199–​218, 221, 265, 268–​71, 276, 284 Socrates 64, 100, 195, 246 Sophocles 192–​5 space 6, 13, 16, 21, 24–​32, 43, 45, 59, 61, 79, 93–​5, 98, 107, 114, 122, 133–​4, 143, 155, 168, 204, 212, 216, 219–​31, 235–​7, 239, 248, 257–​8, 260, 269, 272–​3, 287 spectator 4, 34, 55, 76, 80, 83–​96, 134, 137, 139, 142–​3, 152, 154, 166, 181, 194–​5, 204–​5, 208, 213–​16, 231, 249 Spitzer, Leo 24–​9, 32 Stendhal 6, 19, 32, 89, 115, 179, 182–​96, 241 The Red and the Black 19, 115, 182–​7 structuralism 60, 99, 124, 284, 288 surrealism 61, 101, 260, 276 Taine, Hippolyte 3, 11–​32, 247 Tatlin, Vladimir 265 Tel Quel 100, 163

295

theater 4, 34, 78, 83–​95, 120–​3, 128, 222–​3, 240, 242, 249, 255, 278 time 2, 6, 21, 26, 28, 32, 33, 41–​2, 55, 79–​80, 87, 90, 91, 106, 111, 120–​1, 132, 137, 142, 145, 170–​8, 191, 195, 197, 202, 206–​7, 210, 214, 216, 220, 222, 226, 239, 240, 242, 243, 257–​8, 265–​8, 274, 281, 283, 287 translation 28, 44, 47–​9, 51, 57–​62, 65, 68–​9, 88, 90–​1, 250 translationality 49 Untranslatables 26 Trigueros, Carmen Elena 227–​31 universal teaching 51, 53–​5, 58–​62, 67, 69–​72 Valéry, Paul 164 Vertov, Dziga 265 Voilquin, Suzanne 36, 41, 43, 47–​9 Voltaire 17, 155, 192 Walsh, Raul 5, 128–​45 They Drive by Night 5, 127–​45 will 6, 62–​3, 106, 108, 112, 114, 179–​97, 208, 246–​7, 264–​5, 285 Woolf, Virginia 30, 85, 91, 93, 116–​17, 119, 124, 164, 242, 274–​5 work 1, 2, 4, 14, 30, 32, 33–​49, 88, 102, 129, 142–​3, 182, 204, 214, 230 world literature 274–​6 writing 1, 5, 55, 61, 71, 86, 100–​1, 104, 108, 115, 162, 164, 168, 170, 172–​3, 179, 246, 251–​3, 270, 274–​6, 278–​89 Zola, Émile 20, 91–​3