|
NOTES
ON : Rancière, J. (2004) The Philosopher
and His Poor. Trans John Drury, Corinne
Oster, and Andrew Parker. Durham and London:
Duke University Press
by Dave Harris
Chapter one: Plato's Lie
[I am no philosopher, and I don't want to intrude
on private grief. I recognize some of this
criticism after reading Deleuze
on Plato—the idea that the notion of an essence
had an important political function in separating
out those with genuine claims to participate as
Athenian citizens from mere impostors. That
is the line I'm going to go with in reading this,
and I'm going to keep it brief]
The Republic begins with considering
relations between four or five particular persons
or roles, so it is a founding text for
sociology. The philosophical task is to
develop the notion of justice, to separate out
greater or lesser tasks and natures in the name of
the common good. The first issue turns upon
whether there are some roles that are more
indispensable than others [the four original roles
were farmers, masons, weavers and
shoemakers]. There is an initial hint that
shoemakers are probably not that necessary, and
the shoemaker takes on particular negative roles
in Plato's argument therafter. Overall, the
argument is that artisans can only do one thing at
the time, that it is more efficient to
specialize. This is not just for economic
reasons, because a division of labour is probably
not actually necessary in a subsistence
economy. There is some notion of the
rightful way to spend one's time. There is
also an argument that we all have different
natural aptitudes and our occupations should
express this. There are still problems, for
example with farmers, who have to synchronise
their labour with growing cycles. Again
Plato knows this, but sees something dangerous in
the notion of leisure, goes on to develop an idea
of the social nature of human beings. We can
see that 'another game is being played' (5).
We have to be able to differentiate natural
differences between the trades. These
natural differences underpin the division of
labour even if it is 'economically improbable'
(6). Implicit in all this is a theory about
how time should be allocated.
For Plato, there is a notion of appropriate time
regulating social, economic and political
life. It is related to the issue of
exclusion and prohibition as well as
compulsion. This is the importance of
discussion of leisure. Leisure, its type as
well as its absence, has always been seen as a way
of deciding social worth—for example, farmers were
seen as the best defenders of the city because
their outdoor life left them with enough leisure
to focus on public affairs, while artisans worked
indoors which left them only the leisure to worry
about their own work and family.
Alternatively, artisans had too much leisure which
meant they could participate in civic life
indiscriminately, and even pose as thinkers.
Neither version sees the artisan as a good
citizen. So which occupations provide the
best sort of participation in political
life? Plato particularly noted that it was
impossible to do more than one job at a time,
linked to the idea that any sort of dualism is
evil, and he had in mind 'the imitators' (8).
The ideal society of only four or five roles was
egalitarian and functional, but what of modern
cultured cities?. These are disordered and
unjust, and require new forms of sociability
[initially based on the table manners at
banquets,apparently]. However, these
arrangements risk confusion and merely simulated
discourse. There is no longer the simple
notion of roles and functions, but a whole range
of new needs, including luxuries. In
particular, there are those that still produce
goods, but a new group that produce images or
imitations. It is not that luxury goods
themselves corrupt cities, since the pursuit of
them is a major source of the war and the
development of specialist warriors. However,
imitators corrupt, and introduce excess.
The theatre is a particularly corrupting form,
especially since even artisans can participate as
an audience. Artisans no longer have simple
and positive roles which can be demonstrated to
them, and no longer a simple relation to
functional objects. Painters, for example
can imitate the appearance of objects, and are not
confined to material ones: the theatre can imitate
works of nature as well. Artisans do not
possess enough leisure to become corrupt, or even
to be sick. They are living embodiments of
the virtues of necessity. They can even act
as models for warriors,although they can never be
warriors.
The notion of leisure has changed in these
discussions, to become a matter of time devoted to
professional training, as in apprenticeships, but
also in persisting quality of workmanship.
Skill requires practice and therefore
specialization again. The division of labour
is no longer just a functional one as a result,
but turns on persistence and quality which
indicates a particular nature, aptitude or
gift. Relative social immobility confirms
this view [apparently few champion draughts
players came from humble origins, for example --
which shows the importance of practice and skill
improvement]. Justice is now a matter of
conforming to nature, and there are additional
qualitative dimensions to the notion of social
rank. Some philosophers awarded warriors the
highest rank, for example, not because warriors
were socially indispensable, but as a matter of
the warrior's nature. Warriors can do
something else, they can attack members of the
community as well as enemies, and so they require
a special education. This education is to be
left to philosophers.
Philosophers also depend on luxury and excess, and
need to seek an adequate function. They
claim to have a particular nature. They are
also threatened by imitators, 'rhetoricians or
sophists, false politicians or false
experts'(15). They can claim to be more
effective in their particular work, preparing
people for instruction, practicing
dialectic. They are like dyers and weavers,
preparing and interlinking elements of the social
order. However, they need to be able to sort
and select, to distinguish pure thought from the
views of mere artisans, and also from the
simulations of fine language. These
comparisons lead to attempts to welcome the arts
of the artisan, but also to distinguish it from
thought, which can only be the product of
'philosophical breeding' (16). Artisans are
also welcome in attacking imitators, and
philosophy as artisan technique dignifies it: yet
art is not philosophy, and only sophists would say
that it was.
Everything depends on the ends to which technique
is put. Technology itself when ignorant of
its ends is counterfeit, falsely universal and
just as likely to be involved in the production of
appearances. The impact has to be regulated
by a social rule that insists that artisans must
not play or lie, in principle.
The point of hierarchies [social and referring
to knowledge] is to regulate the simulacrum.
The threat arises from the productivity of work,
away from the original simple production of use
values, and the development of leisure.
Growing technology threatens a democracy, where
tradesmen become equal to every one else.
Excesses can be soaked up in luxurious lifestyles,
war and philosophy, but additional philosophical
criteria are needed to regulate hierarchy.
It is to depend on differences in nature.
These are not simply something irrational, not
even ideological concealing social
interests. Differences in nature have to be
made explicit and to be the object of
education. Only philosophers can analyze
differences in nature, in terms of relations
between means and ends. Ironically, for a
project that aims to expose lies, philosophy must
begin with one as an axiom, 'a noble lie'
(18). This particular lie involves the three
metals [gold, silver and bronze] mixed in human
souls by god.
Plato did not invent this myth, but he develops
it. It is egalitarian in its way, since
children do not always have the same mixtures as
their parents, and some can be elevated and others
dropped, as a kind of meritocracy. Of
course, not everyone will have the leisure to
reveal their true souls, and not everyone attends
school. As a result, the main task is to
exclude pretenders from the elite,although it also
prevents the newly rich from joining the
elite. The philosophers who guard the whole
system must not be corrupted by becoming rich, and
could not even handle ordinary gold or silver, or
engage in business which might distract
them. They do not deny that other people can
also become citizens, but warn that their ordinary
commercial activities can corrupt them.
Trade itself involves 'egotism and the war of all
against all' (20). Modern political
theorists might also consider that 'work and
community are strictly antagonistic' (21).
Those at the top of a hierarchy, out of the daily
struggle, can claim to be the only ones capable of
acting for the common good.
At least some ranked as worthy will be permitted
some privileges, but these have to be compatible
with their natures. Work is still essential
in order for people to recognize these
natures. It is more difficult for the
philosopher-guardians, though, who might be
pretending. Artisans can pretend as well,
but only if this helps them develop their
specialities. This becomes a notion that
true shoemakers never pass themselves off as
anything else, but remain fundamentally as
shoemakers, even when they are pursuing leisure
and idleness. The most threatening is the
artisan turned philosopher [apparently, one
sophist, Hippias, was exactly one of those], who
will never leave behind artisans' values and ways
of thinking. Philosophers must be completely
separate from artisans, even to the extent of
having none of their virtues, and artisans must
also be excluded from anything else: this becomes
more important as a principle than competence in
shoemaking. Indeed, incompetent shoemakers
are useful to philosophers in demonstrating the
ultimate insignificant of such specialisms.
We have developed a system that sees virtues as
distributed neatly with social categories.
These virtues are not just defined by skill and
competence in practice, but by nature, defined
independently. There is even a virtue in
accepting one's nature even if it leads to a lower
rank, a virtue of obedience or of
acceptance. Slaves can be bullied into
accepting their place, but artisans are different,
not exactly free men but not slaves. This
leads to an unacceptable hybridity, seen as having
a dangerously ambiguous nature which is unreliable
when it comes to producing virtues. Warriors
can be educated to their virtue, but labourers
have no virtue, no self mastery, no natural
wisdom. Their wisdom lies only in accepting
the social order, and that can only be defined by
philosophers.
Justice turns out to be an easy matter after
all—it is the wisdom of the state in preserving
different natures, including courage for warriors
and moderation for artisans. This is seen as
simply functional, but it is also supported by a
convenient fiction, although one that is also
common sense. It becomes the working
ideology of autocrats, better politically than
claiming that the elite are very different from
everyone else, possessing an unusual kind of
wisdom, or advocating a state of permanent
hierarchy and division. This would produce
order but not happiness: the issue is how to live
well. Happiness lies in remaining in your
own place, not even developing your skills and
competences. Philosophical wisdom that
argues this is also not just a matter of
competence.
However, there are still problems, for example
those presented by the sexual division of
labour. Does this also reveal genuine
differences of nature? Sexual differences
are easily noted and apparently natural, certainly
more easily recognized than differences in the
metal content of souls. It is not that
artisans have differences among themselves,
however, since they can pursue different trades,
but this is another thing that makes them
untrustworthy and liable to confusion. It is
the big social differences that are important [and
big enough to look natural?], and these do not
permit interchange.
So after a long attempt to define social orders
initially as functional, all we have now is the
philosophical distinction based on a lie.
'All that remains is the prohibition' (29), and
existing practice confirms the lie.
Chapter two: The Order of Discourse
The real enemy of the philosopher is the parvenu,
driven by the interest in promotion, which
philosophers do not have. Parvenus are also
dualist, but so too is the philosopher
-guardian. Philosophers are also likely to
be corrupted by their sponsors and leaders, or
pupils, and they can also be tempted to be
imitators. Sticking to pure thought also
risks exclusion from city life. We have
already seen that philosophers lie, but the
argument is that they are specializing in a
particular kind of imitation and lie, and this is
where normal liars, especially sophists who look
like philosophers. We have already seen that
some are artisans made good.
Sophists deny that there is a truth. They
are parvenus par excellence, claiming the freedom
of proper philosophers. They are usurpers,
dwarfs acting like men, recognizable from their
artisan bodies. Plato uses these physical
characteristics to make his point, an old imagery
in Greek philosophy, not present in distinguishing
artisans from warriors say, but brought to bear
here, to emphasize 'the argument from nature'
relating to philosophers specifically (32).
Philosophers need this extra support to claim they
are not just workers of another kind. Manual
laborers bodies are a sign of their servitude, and
servitude itself becomes a justification for the
dignity of the philosopher, no longer just an
economic necessity.
Similarly, philosophy claims to free people from
slavery, but Plato also argues that slaves do not
always want to be freed, and if they do, it is for
the wrong reason. Slaves also attracted by
the wrong things in philosophy, 'fine titles,
beautiful forms, and new clothes' (33). The
philosopher's role becomes one of selecting
suitable slaves who are not seeking these popular
forms of prestige. Warriors show they are
worthy by renouncing wealth and ownership, and
philosophers say they are worthy because they do
not desire power but are forced to acquire
it. It follows that those who are interested
in power, or in making a surplus, or gaining some
pleasure do not have a suitable nature to be a
philosopher.
Instead, it is a matter of establishing people's
natures as the only reliable test. Aspiring
to be a philosopher just shows 'the native
infirmity' (34) of the aspirant [is this the first
example of catch - 22?], confirmed by their bodies
and soul marked by manual labour. The
product of any thinking is necessarily a bastard,
sophism. Bastardy is discursively necessary
to prove purity and the dignity of real
philosophy. The difference between the
highborn philosopher and the aspirant is a
difference of bodies, a matter of 'moral
hygiene'(35). There may have been real rival
philosophers involved here who were bastards or
jumped up artisans.
Amalgamating the two categories is particularly
effective against those who would extend the
possibility of virtue to the common people.
Philosophy is forbidden to crippled spirits,
bastards, twisted souls, or those with congenital
defects, and they are suspected particularly of
simulating rather than simple ignorance—they 'will
to know nothing of science' (36). Cynics say
that anyone can be a philosopher, but this is
simplistic. Real philosophy requires
initiation. The real problem with cities is that
they support the power of the people.
Sophists themselves and other pretenders are
dangerous in that they are popular with the people
who can shout down reasoned opposition and flatter
tyrants. Oligarchs support particular kinds of
philosophers who are populist.
Only a philosophical elite practicing proper
dialectics can exercise real democracy [as
meritocracy], and not populism. Ordinary
knowledge is already widely available—the sophists
have got that right—but not philosophy. In
practice, the possibility of proletarians being
able to philosophize once having been selected
'exists only by philosophers decree' (38), but the
possibility disqualifies autodidacts and those who
merely reflect on their knowledge [sounds quite
like Bourdieu on the dissimulation of the
education system here]. Philosophical virtue
cannot be taught, and cannot be comprehended nor
transmitted. If virtue is to be liberated,
practical opinions of artisans have to be
confined. Divisions in knowledge harmonize
with divisions of the social order, and only one
discourse and group can exercise real freedom
rather than mere improvement. There is no
popular philosophy, except as an imitation,
supported by the opinion of crowds.
Philosophers claim to be kings not because they
separate social groups, but rather modes of
discourse.
Another myth makes this understandable, on the
origins of writing. Writing is seen as an
inferior medium, removing the need to memorize,
strengthening appearances. Writing is a
simulacrum which cannot engage in discussion or
defend itself. It is the opposite of the
dialectic method and resembles rather
rhetoric. It is also excessive and can be
taken from context and distributed to the wrong
people. It cannot keep quiet, and speaks
even to the uninitiated. [So it will
inevitably confirm popular opinion?].
Proper philosophy must separate itself from the doxa
and the sensible world, and must resist copies and
[normal] dualisms as well as technique. The
Idea has to be separated from the normal
world. Rhetoric does not do this, but 'only
mirrors the relationship of the rhetorician with
his public' (41), and rhetoric is also aimed at a
mass public, at numbers. The pleasure of rhetoric
arises from the people's pleasure—it caters
to popular tastes. It is not even a set of
useful techniques. Rhetoric can undermine
philosophers but not philosophy. It is
business as usual—'it does, in short, its own
business' (42). It cannot grasp the higher
pleasures like delirium or love, which is divine
[especially when expressed as a passion for
philosophy] and not grasped by technique and
routine, despite a number of popular discourses
about it. Artisans are too bound up with the
utilitarian to access it. Poets and
philosophers can grasp it, if only imperfectly, as
a kind of superior imitation. False poets
and counterfeits, like painters, remain in the
popular world. False poets are even worse
since they refer to the divine. In Plato's
hierarchy of souls, non philosophical poets appear
as sixth, above only artisans and sophists, below
the barrier that separates the utilitarian from
the divine.
The notion of a divine delirium separates out the
world of imitation and leads to intelligibility of
the One, while false delirium falls back to
populism and persuasion. The theatre has an
ambiguous role, though. It was once confined
to educated people who witnessed the performance
in silence, but the audience now consists of the
people and pedagogues. This follows the path
of music that is both divinely inspired, but also
open to public judgment. Now, everyone
thinks they are able to charge music and
performance, but the real issue is divine
delirium. Talented performers are suspected
of imitating divine inspiration, but really
manipulating the audience, through spectacle.
Theatre has become theatrocracy. The people
can only love beautiful things, not the
Beautiful. Applause from the multitude is
self congratulatory. Spectacle becomes a
matter of numbers.
Of course artisans have no choice [and here the
shoemaker becomes a generic term]. Populist
philosophers, specially writers, cater for
populism. Populist versions of philosophical
argument are understandable, in giving people a
break from 'the aridity of the reasoning' (48),
but this raises the spectre of inappropriate
leisure again. Leisure should properly be
used to pursue true pleasures, not populist or
bodily ones. Philosophers should not over
indulge in populist pleasure, especially sleeping
amicably in the sun, since it will enslave
them. Philosophers must ceaselessly think
and speak, one meaning of the dialectic is an
endless conversation.
It is appropriate for philosophers to isolate
themselves from the popular and from the city to
head for sanctuary in the 'theatre of the green
world' (49). The role of the philosopher is
not to regulate systems, but pursue the
divine. The city offers only imitation
pleasures. There is even a justification for
driving out imitators, so they might also mend
their ways outside. Only in sanctuary can
philosophers meet with real poets, avoiding
fabrication and flattery, and further justifying
social divisions [as an example of how everything
must be divided into two]. Knowledge differs
between philosophers and artisans, so does memory
and discourse, and love of theatre and of bodies.
The real fear is not that artisans will get to the
truth, but more that 'artists will get hold of
appearance' (51). The real problem is to
isolate the artisan from the deceptive world of
appearances. He has to be kept in his place,
to discharge his proper functions, and also
confined to suitable aesthetics and leisure, so he
can avoid sophistry [also produced by one who has
departed from his role]. At least this is
all out in the open with Plato, less so with later
'epistemologies and sociologies' (52). It's
not just a matter of division of labour, but an
exclusion from aesthetic realms as well.
Philosophy is based on an noble lie, but artisans
have to be excluded from artistic lies, from
simulacra masquerading as philosophical and
cultural truths. Philosophy claims all this
is in the interests of slaves and artisans.
It doesn't so much want to exclude them as
safeguard its own exclusivity. However,
philosophical autonomy depends on 'an arbitrary
discourse on nature and nobility' (53). This
is never free from imitation, however. [The
chapter ends with a discussion of Nietzsche which
I didn't really understand, although I think the
argument is that Nietzsche's criticism of the
elitism and pomposity in classic philosophy and
culture is still limited by an unwillingness to
acknowledge 'the modest poetic pretension of the
shoemaker']
[I can see how this is going to produce link with
Bourdieu as an ultra left Platonist or whatever it
is, but some substantial differences have to be
obscured first, especially the one that turns on
whether social divisions are underpinned by nature
or not. Divisions heavily underpinned by
capitalism and its need to reproduce are precisely
non natural. By contrast, Plato seems to
bend over backwards to root his division in
several overlapping operations which he takes to
be natural. I suppose Rancière would argue
that it amounts to the same thing in the end?]
Chapter three the Shoemaker and the Knight
[This starts the section on Marx. It is really
good, and very well written -- so I have
vulgarized it a good deal. I have a gloss on it here]
[We carry on with Nietzsche and others and then a
critique of Wagner, and his acc9unt of the fate of
the fictional shoemaker Hans Sachs. It is
all about the transgression of shoemakers crossing
boundaries into arts, as a continued awareness of
the Platonic notion that shoemakers should only
make shoes. Rancière makes a connection with
his work on French 1830s workers who also
transgressed.].
This has been inherited by workers from Plato, and
it has an effect, becoming 'the role of their
internal hierarchy' (58) which valorizes
themselves, but at the expense of making the
shoemaker a pariah [very apologetic way of
describing hierarchies of craft]. The
carpenter instead is the 'geometer-king', who
organizes all the other crafts, and preserves his
status, and there is a whole hierarchy ending in
the shoemaker at the bottom. This hierarchy
is disturbed in the 19th century, although low
status persists for the shoemaker.
Internalized social judgment replaced external
constraint, although some shoemakers rebelled
against the hierarchy. There was more
swapping of trades. There was more criticism
of work, by workers, as oppressive and growing
interest in culture and philosophy.
Socialist organizations also enabled mixing
between workers and nobility, especially with
Saint-Simon. This hybridity was still widely
condemned, even by some socialists. The
figures of the shoemaker and the imitator are
still prominent in this condemnation, even the
spread of literacy and writing. Aesthetic,
political, social, and symbolic disorder
combine together, and the answer was to restore
confines of trade. Even Karl Marx was
denounced as a shoemaker! (61).
[More on this theme in Wagner, where artistic
shoemakers are denounced, and their aspirations
seen as a brief day of carnival. Women
likewise. This time, the artist is seen as a
popular spokesperson, not to be imitated,
transferring authority for social division to the
democratic masses in the modern age.
However, both Nietzsche and Marx objected to this
populist turn. Even popular artists are
still imitators, and populism is still
conservative].
Marx had nothing but contempt for German
sentimentality, and the farcical revolutions of
1848, which added militarist adventure. In
correspondence, he refers to past combinations of
cultural elements in the petty bourgeoisie.
The later critique of ideology was to be read as
the struggle between authentic and farcical,
modern and traditional histories, those who want
to move beyond capitalism, those who want to
return to the state before it.
He offers no materialist analysis of this
bastardized culture in Germany, but saw it instead
as 'the mixture of two contradictory natures,
industrial activity and artistic creation' (65),
and argued that this mixture had been thoroughly
commercialized. Rancière thinks that this
hybrid culture actually has more potential for
developing socialism, than Marx's own pastoral
nostalgia, which even when achieved will not
include industry. However Marx saw
revolutionary potential in the industrial workers
of England or Holland, in large scale industry,
which had made redundant the old crafts like shoe
making. Mechanization is the way forward to
socialism, and that will completely destroy the
bourgeoisie—but also first ruin proletarians and
deprive them of any autonomy. However,
sentimentality and philistinism persist for a long
time, as a bastard mixture, which accounts for its
very survival. Marx has always been in
favour of separation, the classics, conventional
children's upbringing. Modern production in fact
depends on imitation and bastardy. Marx's
disdain for German sentimentalism did not realise
this [he saw it as a decadent version of
production].
Marx saw all history as a matter of tragedy, but
tragic heroes struggling to resist only show
'tragic grandeur and comic pettiness' (68) [the
example is Don Quixote]. However, for Marx,
Panza is the one who battles windmills and wants
to defend common sense. Even his debunking
of chivalric illusions is ideology, which does not
understand nobility and its tragic role.
Panza is the foolish worker. Marx had no
time for artisans and then dreams, except as bad
history, preserving hybridity instead of
contradiction, unwilling to sacrifice petty
matters of status. The future lay with
workers prepared to forsake leisure in the
interests of mechanization, 'science, and combat'
(69). Marx preferred tragedy to comedy,
contraries to mixtures. As a result, the
history and the dialectics of revolution are
disconnected ['never meet' -- a dig at what Marx
said about Feuerbach].
Chapter four The Production of the Proletarian
It looks as if there is one principle of history,
in The German Ideology, where everything
turns on production of the means to live.
Marx has an echo of Plato by insisting that
production must take up most of our lives, even
for knights and philosophers. History is
nothing but a history of production and its
accompanying class struggle, ruling ideas are
nothing other than the expression of a 'dominant
material relations' (70), and proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains, in the Manifesto.
Production therefore appears as a positive
principle to explain history—but it also has a
dark side.
Production is the essence of all activity, the
defining characteristic of human beings.
Since it involves cooperation, we have to begin
with that before we get to individual
consciousness. There is no link between
natural and urban societies—both are
products. All interests and ideas have a
material base in production. Bourgeois
philosophy can be seen as imitation of the process
of production.
There is also a criticism of backwardness in the
criticism of philosophy, specially with German
philosophy which is limited by its cultural
traditions, including vulgar appetites. It doesn't
even produce anything. It can easily be
denied as self sufficient once we discover the
empirical conditions from which it emerges.
This reduces the whole notion of a philosophical
order which is to be replaced by materialist
science—but somehow, this has to escape material
determinations of production itself. Marx
initially believed that it is possible to simply
observe empirical conditions to see this
development of history, but how can this actually
be done?
In fact, 'there is no German ideology' (74), since
German philosophers are simply expressing their
experiences of a backward Germany. Marx
claimed to be able to see this only after he had
left Germany, although he was to discover further
forms of ideology in France and England. It
looks like he is arguing that ideology is simple
business as usual, as before, although some people
do not see this clearly, or see it upside
down. People like Proudhon are too limited
to what is, and cannot see the future, especially
the positive role of mechanization. Vision
is limited by having to toil, as Proudhon did,
before he became a philosopher. If you want
to change things, it is not enough to see them [in
the sense of recognizing them via ideology or
common sense]—hence Proudhon can never climb the
ladder to knowledge. Marx is arguing that
the commonsense of the worker is virtuous, but it
becomes a vice with philosophers! [Rancière
is arguing almost the opposite, at least when it
comes to Marxist philosophers]
Bourgeois philosophy simply shows us how ordinary
knowledge works, no differently from commonsense -
'Ideology is just another name for work'
(76). Reality is hard to penetrate, although
industry and commodities are everywhere.
'Hieroglyphics' preserve the mystery of the
commodity. Worker philosophers and artists
can do as well culturally as bourgeois ideologues,
as some heroic socialists showed, but their ideas
are still fabrications.
What is needed is a new kind of philosopher, who
is both scientist and proletarian, a free floating
one having escaped from the commonsense of
particular societies. But what makes it
science? It is not just a matter of
accumulating empirically verifiable
evidence. The Manifesto offers a
different test—social polarization will enable
everyone to see the workings of history.
Ideology is overdetermined, both buying culture
and by the realities of work. Science is
almost an accident, and begins with
criticism. The Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
shows how we can criticize German thought by
demonstrating the real role of modern history,
even if that is found only in England or
France. It can't be seen in Germany, but the
proletariat is emerging there, ready to dissolve
the social order altogether.
This notion of science now runs the risk of
looking like positivism, the science of things as
they really are. It is useful to criticize
philosophers like Feuerbach who take developments
as abstract rather than as having an actual
history, but there is a risk of seeing history as
evolutionary. Instead, Marx wants to see
history as offering a story of decadence. It
is not enough to demystify, because that can
preserve existing arrangements. It is
necessary to criticize to destruction. This
change is detectable in this shift from The
German Ideology, to the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, turning on the
notion of labour.
Only ideologues, including Proudhon, want to take
the point of view of labour, act as a spokesman,
but he risks joining those who see the development
of Labour's creative powers as the development of
capitalism. This notion of development is
why Feuerbach finds it hard to explain
revolutionary change. The bourgeoisie are
very good at transformations, and have a role in
developing the forces of production. This is
a materialist counterpart to Hegel's notion of the
Absolute Spirit—the 'absolute
Bourgeoisie'(78). It is a kind of self
improvement demonstrated in the master/slave
dialectic, and it will lead to seeing
constitutional monarchy as the key to the
reconciliation of interests. Marx saw there
was no negative impulse in labour itself, and
turned instead to Hegel's Logic, the
dialectic, the change from quantity to quality,
the anticipation of destruction. However,
materialist dialectic requires a distinctive
philosophical break [an epistemological one?
Soon to be rebuked].
Production shows itself to have two aspects, the
accumulation of transformations, and a
revolutionary tendency. The latter will end
with the abolition of labour and so on
transformation. Labour itself is not the
point, rather its appropriation and subsequent
reappropriation, first in the form of a worker,
then as an agent of history. Labour needs to
lose everything first, including its creative
artistic powers, whether labourers realize this or
not. Extolling the virtue of labour is what
sentimental capitalists do and there needs to be a
complete break if the real role of labour can
occur—the revolution. This break requires
proletarians not to do something different, but to
lose what they already have, so they can
experience the contradictions between owning
nothing and owning everything. We see here
the same uncompromising division that we saw with
phrases like 'nothing else' earlier. The
proletarian is 'the negation of the worker' (81),
and workers who are not yet proletarians can be
condemned, as petty bourgeois, or as
lumpenproletarians, as some inconsistent group
with no role. It is not enough to say that
the revolution has been delayed by history,
because it is a matter of consciousness which is
not entirely dependent onobjective conditions [for
those with a world historical role?].
This still has echoes of Plato, even though
production replaces divine commandment.
Proletarians still cannot see what Marxists can
see, but they will if they can only overcome the
barrier of the revolution. However, [catch -
22 beckons again], the artisan's own status
prevents him from becoming the subject of the
revolution. This time, the artisans are
responsible for this barrier themselves, but the
division also depends on a notion of different
times—of the early history of production, of the
revolution, and of the communist future.
Heterogeneity simply shows the persisting weight
of the past, and backwardness. The old style
artisans were known in Germany as Straubinger.
But Marx knows that hybrid workers were not just
nostalgic. They wanted something more
positive, besides just work. Marx originally
saw this as a sign of their nobility [EPW],
but later realized that nobility should not have
emerged until after the revolution. Straubinger
were not particularly keen to have the revolution
before heading for communism. They had to be
convinced that what they thought was socialism was
in fact illusory, through a new 'aesthetic
education of humanity' (83). There is a
danger that the wrong kind of education will
simply increase the numbers of Straubinger.
The idea of a future world where machines do the
work was actually particularly popular. This
was the communism enthusiastically embraced by
some workers in London, including one CP member
who set off to propagandize in Scandinavia [some
of his letters home are reproduced]. He did not
urge the development of proletarian organization,
though, so this was not the right sort of
communism for Marx, even though it opposed the
nostalgia of some artisans. Engels
criticized the wanderer as mistakenly operating in
the barbaric and backward territory of
Scandinavia, as if there were some parallel
between enthusiasts for mechanism and
pre-industrial societies [and Engels has some very
harsh and elitist things to say about the
Norwegians and Icelanders]. In this form
London communism itself shows the backwardness of
the Straubinger [and their failure to
grasp Marxist theory properly], and they came to
be seen as a drag on the development of Marxist
politics. Rancière says Marx and Engels saw
it as too much to try and 'prove to communist
proletarians that they are not communist
proletarians' by comparing them to some future
proletariat that did not actually exist as
yet! (85). So London communists had to
be abandoned, while the mechanisms of history
worked to produce the correct future. However,
this might also make Marxism redundant as a
separate force, unless the point is to develop the
[currently not existing] proletariat that will end
classes. The episode certainly shows that
the alleged fusion of Marx's theory and the labour
movement [say in Althusser]
was far more complicated!
Marx and Engels continue to produce the
Manifesto with the London communists, yet
there was never a unified communist party.
Some Straubinger might have been converted
to Marxist theory, but then they were notoriously
able to assimilate 'every idea that comes to hand'
(86). The real purpose of the Manifesto
was not to unite but to divide, to recommend
working classes be divided into proletarians and
others. The communist party takes on the role of
the [abstract] negative in the future. Again
the philosopher dominates the discussion.
Eventually Marx and Engels were to split with
their old comrades, and come to rely on
themselves—and Engels' 'jubilation' at the demise
of the London party is recorded: they are 'a herd
of jackasses' (87).
The International seemed more promising, and
developed against existing national working class
organizations. Spokespersons went off to
police and criticize national worker associations
[ineffectively, Rancière tells us scornfully]
. They acted in the name of the people but
as a kind of 'burlesque' (88). [They are
less representative than those in bourgeois
plays criticized by Marx and Engels {but then, Marx
liked bourgeois art and even fairies}
leading to some clever remarks about various
plays, and rhetorical flourishes like accusing
Marx of replacing Hegel's cunning of reason with
the subterranean mole of revolution!].
Chapter five: The Revolution Conjured Away
[Full of clever tropes and allusions, most of
which I have vulgarized]
Marxist discourse has to keep going despite all
its setbacks and disappointments, and we find term
such as 'we see' or 'we witnessed', still the
notion of an underlying motor of history that
would generate contradictions. Optimism is
also gathered from the shift of emphasis to the
bourgeoisie as the developers of their own
gravediggers, rather than the disappointing
proletariat. The communist party still gets
a role, but mostly as something to frighten the
bourgeoisie, taking on the existence of something
opposed by the authorities. If there is a
spectre, there must be a subject, but not an
abstract Mankind as in Feuerbach. The
German Ideology talked about living
individuals. The Manifesto could not
refer to 'the sad reality of actual communists'
(91). A suitable revolutionary subject must
be one that also alludes to a totality. The
Party comes to take on this role as the unifying
totality opposed by all sectional interests.
The proletariat becomes a kind of double of the
all-powerful bourgeoisie, the only agent of the
universal in capitalism, something which sweeps
away all the old forms. The only hope was
that it would eventually undermine itself. The
proletariat only now have bit parts,
gravediggers. Even their unification is
imposed by industrialization. They only
represent nothingness, stripped of everything,
because they have even lost their old consolations
like family and religion.
The bourgeoisie have a positive role of
demystifying and concentrating, but this received
a particular blow with the revolutions of 1848,
and the rise of Napoleon III. It looked from
the outside as if this was the final stage of the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, with no
illusions, but instead, there emerged 'a troupe of
substitute comedians… The clown Louis
Napoleon' (93), the return of conjuring and
mystification. This challenges the whole
shift from classes in to classes for themselves
politically. The proletariat could be
forgiven as inadequately developed, but 1848
showed the incapacity of the bourgeoisie.
It's possible that 1848 represented a sudden
vision of the future of class struggle for the
bourgeoisie, the dangers of its own rule.
Nevertheless, this does not square with the notion
of the dialectic of history and the radical role
to be played by social class. The
bourgeoisie seems to have been timid at the start
of its career not the end. Napoleon was just
to be a figurehead, but he also grasped the
reality of power. He restored order but
denied political power to the bourgeoisie.
He also forestalled capitalist development, such
as delaying investment in railways. Overall,
this is a serious challenge to the notion of
social class, and indicates 'a process of
decomposition attacking every class' (95).
Decomposition had already been noticed with the
lumpenproletariat. Marx thought that the
lumpenproletariat were the main recruits to the
Mobile Guard in 1848 that put down the
proletariat, but Rancière says this is mistaken,
and that the Mobile Guard were drawn from the
elite of the proletariat. Marx was simply
rehearsing an older myth, of troublemakers
challenging social order, 'the phantasmal image of
a vagabond army in the pay of the bourgeoisie'
(96). This was similar to the bourgeois fear
of the rabble. Marx might even have got the
term lumpen and the idea itself from Heine.
Such decomposition could be good if it helped
polarize the classes, but it can also hold classes
back, disaggregating the proletariat. Marx
saw the same betrayal and undermining in later
compromises following industrial prosperity in
France.
Bourgeois timidity can be seen as the same kind of
reformism, sacrificing class interests for
immediate material interests. Again, there
is an inner 'double' or stratum, this time a
'finance aristocracy, a class of conjurers that
lives off productive wealth' (97). This is
the group encouraged by Louis Philippe, despite
being thought of as a bourgeois monarch.
Finance capitalism simply bred greed and
parasitism, and Marx explicitly refers to it as a
version of the lumpenproletariat, in bourgeois
form. The revolution of 1848 did not disturb
it. Indeed, finance capitalism was now quite
significant for a number of people including semi
bourgeois. The effect has been such as to
disaggregate the bourgeoisie and divert it from
its productive role. Individuals now pursue
their own affairs, acting as vampires, glad to be
permitted to act like this by the state and even
to draw state salaries. The bourgeois class
has become 'only a band of speculators'
(98). The Communards were to seem heroes by
comparison.
Decomposition can be seen in two mythical
forms—'the smallholding peasant and the Napoleonic
mobster'. It is not that Marx applied class
analysis to the peasantry, rather the opposite—the
politics is no longer explicable in terms of
class. Marx is driven more by his personal
scorn and distaste. Some of this is
misapplied again [one example is that Marx derided
the peasantry for living in houses without
windows, and used tax declarations for his data,
but this might simply have been a way of fiddling
tax returns]. Marx sees the peasants as
represented by Napoleon, and adds in all sorts of
'images of medieval decay' (99). There is no
materialist analysis of different social classes
here. Every member of a class seems to have
a lurking residual identity. Napoleon's gift
was to express this class corruption.
Somehow, he managed to add together all these
corrupt doubles, ruined bourgeois together with
jailbirds, swindlers, tinkers and beggars.
Again, this was an imaginary list, not one
produced by analysis, going back to Plato and the
fear of the polloi, a world upside down,
hybrids and mixes.
There is no analysis of this backwardness or its
history, simply an announcement of the
unworthiness of the bourgeoisie. There is a
hint of an analysis of the state as a regulating
parasite, an agent of decomposition, but the
analysis mostly turns on the notion of unavoidable
comedy and corruption. Social contradictions
are caricatured in the Republic, political
discourse is 'an ironic reversal of science'
(101). Economic reality dawns in the form of
needing to escape creditors. A clown-king
has come to power not a philosopher-king, a
crowned conjurer. Individual interests are
the only things that matter, although this can
also be accompanied with the masquerade with
costumes and postures.
There is still a problem with materialist
science. Marx and the revolutionaries can
also be seen as an artificial class, in exile as
Napoleon once was. A similar figure in exile
apparently haunted Marx in London, a certain
Kinkel, who loved the old 'artisanal junk'
(101). There were other 'fauna of bohemians'
(102), [a lovely list on 102] including Marx's own
associates, his Secretary and his brother in law,
former members of the Party who ended up mad or
alcoholic, or dying of consumption. Even
Engels was an eccentric, and did little to recruit
any one to the International. Even Marx had
to fight off his creditors.
There seemed to be no material base for Marxist
science, which led Marx and Engels to hope for
future crises, world wars, new worlds, and
sacrifice in order to bring about a better
world. While Napoleon tinkered and posture,
Marx would wander through his own desert like the
Jews, and labour to produce a new science for the
new men. Science now represents the
totality. Only science sees real
contradictions underneath social and political
delay and corruption. But it now also runs
the risk of not belonging to the real world, of
being quixotic. There is an odd alliance
between this status and the claims to be on the
side of rationality. Indeed, not belonging
now becomes science's only guarantee, as a 'pure
non-place' (103) [shades of Adrono on totally
negative dialectics etc. Or Deleuze's lonely
journey away from normal society into pure
critique].
Marx and Engels had no time for those who wanted
to reconstitute the Party, and they designated
themselves as direct representatives of the
proletariat. It was increasingly difficult
to sustain the view that the cunning of reason had
produced all the decomposition and disaggregation
that they saw around them. Instead, the
comedy of Napoleon can be seen as a kind of
Shakespearean tragedy. The double nature of
materialist science makes it right for the times
after all. This is still likely to be seen
as revolutionary fantasy, as vulnerable to
bourgeois social order as it is potentially
critical. We can even see this in the
personal circumstances of Marx and Engels, who
both depended on capitalism, Marx explicitly
so—Engels' workers were funding a scientist who
would bring about workers like them as the
proletariat, 'the pure subject of the destruction
of capital' (104).
Chapter six: The Risk of Art
The revolution of 1848 was not really a classic
development of the productive forces in the
Marxist sense, nor did the rise of Napoleon do any
more than reintroduce 'the normal temporality of
economic cycles and crises' (105). The
Austro-Prussian war of 1866 was the real force
behind the modernization of capitalism in
Prussia. So 'imperial parody', and
'nationalist comedy' respectively were responsible
for developments which confirmed Marx's model of
normal progression. The singular events are
rendered as a universal process by Marxist
science.
The expansion of economic contacts with the new
world lead to Marx and Engels to prophesy
substantial competition with the old, leading to
an unprecedented crash [initially focused on
Russia]. However, opening up the new world
instead reproduced 'all the old rubbish of
peasants and lumpenproletarians' (106),
Californian speculators and Australian
convicts. Colonization eased some of the
crises in the old world, and also modernized
Europe [sheep farming moved to Australia].
But the familiar degeneration was rapidly
apparent, decomposition into individuals, the
emergence of a calculative social order between
these individuals crossing class boundaries.
The European working class lost some of its
leaders to the gold rush, but, worse, the British
working class were prepared to compromise in
growing affluence at home, especially as
capitalism seemed to have absorbed its crises,
much to Marx's bafflement. There were still
crises affecting investment in things like
railways, and an emergence of finance capital to
replace the risks of productive capital. The
English proletariat was now seen as thoroughly
conservative [here and elsewhere, letters are
referenced, this one between Engels and Kautsky in
1882]. England becomes uniquely dominant as
a colonial power, and this meant it was less open
to revolution. In 1884, Engels has to explain [in
letters] that the industrial revolution in France
and England has happened, but that this has only
stabilized living conditions for the proletariat,
but revolution might still be possible in Germany
because of the uneven development of industrialism
there: industrialism still has an effect on the
old handicraft workers and peasantry, producing a
general social revolution.
The relative calm of England was seen as
beneficial in permitting Marx to develop his
science, and there was still hope that a
fundamental crisis would erupt, say in Prussia,
permitting even more devotion to pure
theory. However, Prussia won the war, and
Marx was soon forced to interpret that victory to
fit—by arguing that superior Prussian military
technology [the needle gun] confirmed materialist
theory. Engels was apparently a military
expert, but he got that wrong too, predicting an
increased role for the cavalry! Marx
meanwhile gets diverted into a blind alley by
admiring a book that suggests that soil structure
is the basis for evolution! Rancière argues that
these examples show that it is wrong to think of
Engels as the corrupting devotee of science—Marx
had the unbridled enthusiasm. The Dialectics
of Nature is a way of defending
revolutionary thought from science. Marx
flirts with geological determinism [here and
elsewhere, with all the stuff about earthquakes,
and classes springing from the soil].
Science attempted to bring a little seriousness to
stave off the great 'threat of comedy' (111), in
the form of ridicule or satire as well as
farce. However, the science is not one of
military strategy, or even of geology once
revolution occurs, more a matter of 'the
spectacular physics of whirlwinds'. It is
important to avoid being dragged in, another
reason for not being tied to a party. It is
important to attempt to remain more objective,
although it easier to be so afterwards. This
produces the cautious waiting that characterizes
Marxism, and suspicion of spontaneism [supported
by a remarkable quote from Marx in a letter to
Engels 1858, which derides those agitators
pressing for revolutionary change— '"the
revolution will only make things worse"'(112)].
Everything had become bourgeois, even
revolutions. Science was now the only way to
maintain something outside capable of 'negation of
the bourgeois world'. Sciences developed at
leisure were now equated with 'the total
dedication of the militant' [spot the links with
Plato, of course]. Science is now separated
absolutely from popular opinion, and Marx argues
that the masses only deserve contempt.
Devotion to science is a matter of
sacrifice. Apparently, Flaubert agreed with
this view, despite his reactionary politics,
leading Sartre to see him as a militant for the
bourgeoisie [an ideologue?]. Rancière sees
both Marx and Flaubert as quixotic.
Similarities with Flaubert show that Marx is not
just devoting himself to the cause of the
proletariat, however, because by then he had
decided that there was no proletariat outside the
bourgeois order— it now has to be brought into
being through science. Marx proceeds to draw
upon the British government's Blue Books
to describe the conditions of work, a descent into
proletarian hell. Marx can even see the
similarity to his own overwork. He ploughing
through the Blue Books as something to
occupy his time, 'when illness and fatigue do not
permit him to pursue his scientific
investigations' (114). Fact gathering is the
myth of science, the real work is to descend into
proletarian hell in order to give them a voice, to
reconstruct them as active agents not just a
'motley crowd'[Rancière's own historical writing
could be seen in the same way?]
Marxist science really turns on an argument that
capitalist production contains explosive
contradictions, as 'the identity of
opposites'. It does not turn on the
revelation of the secret of surplus value, since
'everyone knows that secret' [even Ricardo didn't,
surely?] . The point is to argue that
reforms like Proudhon's cooperative exchanges
between labourers will not work. That would
merely reduce the whole logic of production and
contradiction into 'the baseness of the economy of
labour' [the creativity of labour is not the only
reasons for revolution, indeed it is a bourgeois
and humanist perception -- in Critique of the
Gotha Prog I think, cited in Althusser's attack
on humanism] . Marx wants to preserve
instead a contradiction between notions of value,
united in the commodity. This makes
'Proudhonism...impossible'.
The proletariat, the party, and science have
become united. Marx's work is now an
infinite task of making this unity unassailable,
showing it can analyze every crisis and every
document that seems to preserve capitalism.
Capitalism has shown that it can exhaust all the
possibilities, so Marx must attempt to deal with
them all.
Marx's physician urged devotion to the the task of
completing the book, although young Jenny wanted
him to put his health first. Marx saw
himself as devoted to the practicalities of
writing a book, and saw Capital as
'"an artistic whole"', requiring a grasp of the
entirety (115). He contrasted his technique
with other writers, including Jacob Grimm the
philologist, who eschewed dialectic. Marx's
work was then endless. He had to learn
Russian to read Russian documents. He did
not want to conclude the book, although he could
have done so, as Engels discovered after his
death. Marx sought pretexts for
continuing. He admired Balzac's notion of an
eternally incomplete masterpiece, an absolute
work. He wanted to write a book that would
be his, not a Marxist book, something that might
be written by a party hack [Rancière's gloss on
Marx's statement that he was not a Marxist].
This explains why he was so pedantic and obsessed
with matters such as the Gotha Programme: it did
not really matter what the formulation was,
because it would have been altered on application
any way. Marx's purpose was to 'guarantee
the programme through all "applications"'
(117). The text must be respected for its
own sake, while politicians will always make a
mockery of it.
Marx was always particularly irritated by
discussions of labour, constantly patrolling
political texts to make sure that no one confused
labour power with labour. It is a matter of
'principle, of ontological dignity' (117).
Just as art is a pure form of labour, Marx's
theory also disengages pure production from actual
production, and sets itself beyond [vulgar] price
as a result. [There is a hint of Barthes' distinction
between works and texts here]. Marx wants to
contrast works produced to express the artist's
nature with those produced for the market, artists
from mere artistic workers. We can see an
underlying critique of productive labour as
opposed to the pure labour of artists. This
underpins Marx's admiration for the Paris Commune,
where workers replaced paid state functionaries as
an expression of themselves. We can also see
the old notion of leisure as the most important
form of work.
A new relation is established between the work and
the actual revolution, independent of economic
development or the emergence of classes, not
dependent on politics, not aimed at mastering any
particular object. The notion of production
involved effectively separates it from any mere
techniques or practices, an ironic separation for
a materialism. Instead of offering guidance,
it offers interpretation, after the event.
Radicals are now artists, free of the wage system,
distant from and opposite to mechanical
workers. Marxism takes on the 'absolute risk
of art confronted with the density of the
bourgeois world' (118).
The real critique of the bourgeois order is not
that it is ideological, since ideology only means
business as usual anyway, and even labourers now
agree with the main principles. The
important thing is to find a place outside the
order. This can no longer be guaranteed by
the processes of crisis and development, or the
development of productive forces. Marx's
writings do not support either reformism or
revolution, but develop the notion of an outside
science, a separate and antagonistic view of the
world, distinct from the practicalities. Capital
is not to be seen as a list of practical
recommendations, although some Marxists have seen
it that way, and it written in an obscure elitist
way to avoid the dangers of diffusing knowledge
that we saw with Plato. Any search for such
recommendations is bound to be confused by the
text itself, since the ends of the text are quite
different.
The ends themselves are no longer the subject of
agreement—'everything is a matter of individuals'
(120). Science offers 'not knowledge but a
way of being'. There are no laws, only
models, and these are to be used so that people
can decide whether to be scientists for
themselves. A nostalgia for the 16th century
is apparent [the renaissance]. [Marx's
admiration here actually looks like a celebration
of hybrids like da Vinci after all? or are they
totalizing artists? ]. Arts and reminiscence
are to provide the training for the new
giants. They are to counter the weight of
existing social relations, the obsession with
utopias, the political comedians and
conjurers. Sciences to interpret and rebuke
these lesser offerings. Napoleon's pantomime
must be contrasted with real theatre, a theme
taken up by Brecht. As he argued a pedagogy
that merely raises consciousness 'by unveiling
exploitation and its mystifications is a very
impoverished virtue'(121), and the point was to
show that performance is both everyday and
contradictory, the notion of 'humour, the art of
performing on stage where opposites never cease to
interchange themselves'.
People have to become suitably sophisticated
historical agents, not just bearers of
forces. This is how they will resist the
bourgeois order, seeing them as fakes and
impostors. The problem is the irony of
history and how to overcome it with new authentic
actors, 'the young proletarian… Endowed with
humour'.
Humour requires distance, and Marx and Engels
wanted to maintain such distance, even from the
International. Science is to exploit this
distance to develop itself ready to properly
educate the new agents. Engels inherited the
task, assembling Marx's notes and hieroglyphics
into publications, enrolling Bernstein and Kautsky
as the only two assistants, and publishing a few
of the initial works, including the Manifesto—'fine
for copying as long as they cannot be understood
[and corrupted]' (122). He must preserve the
authorized versions and continue to oppose any
pretenders, including Dühring. Bernstein
carried on the task of representing theoretical
purity on the International.
Chapter seven: The Marxist Horizon
[This is particularly beautifully written, so I
have vulgarized it as usual]
Marx the artist knew that some of what he wrote
was 'non - sense', dubious and best understood as
produced by humour, but the work then solidified
and became a theory of everything, the world
'defined by the laws of production and
circulation', where everything had been produced
and thus could be deciphered against these laws
(127). It is not that these are poor
illustrations of Marxist science, but rather that
technological machinery provides 'part of its
founding myth', a necessary 'decor or setting' to
define the new industrial world and its
rationality against the feudal one. It is a
matter of developing a 'line of flight reduced to
backdrop, from which we perceive the scene'
(128). It doesn't matter that these mythical
creations are not themselves scientific.
Production comes to the fore, not human nature,
and not science or humanity. The precision
of the machine was what appealed, liberating
analysts from having to deal with 'the sluggish
digestions of consciousness and syrupy musics of
the soul'. Now, human consciousness is a
machine like any other, it works productively to
create meaning [a footnote suggests that the
notion of the machine has always appealed to
French philosophers, including Deleuze and Guattari on
desiring machines]. Philosophy is now
redundant in the face of 'the democracy of
productive bodies'. This is a democratic
conception, but at the price of losing a claim to
humanity featured among radical shoemakers.
Instead, nonproductive notions like the soul are
now seen as backward, without value.
Cultural activity [with the metaphor of
philosophical music] means that the concept will
eventually become a workshop or studio where
nothing overflows, 'where "all musical doing will
be absorbed into a praxis with nothing left
over"'[the reference is to Barthes] (129).
A new issue for philosophers arises from an old
debate about whether perspectives on the world are
of equal value. People like Berkeley wanted
to 'validate each gaze in its place', and to
oppose any superimpositions—what had become
visible depended on the activity of divine speech
[and a footnote refers to Lenin on Berkeley,
saying that empiricism also conferred this
relativist status on perception. Rancière
argues that an additional problem for Lenin was in
trying to see scientific materialism as a creative
and dynamic force, not just a matter of recording,
which would restore the balance between what
looked like the exclusive activity in
idealism]. Science looked as if it would
replace this sort of debate with the notion of
scientific truth and permanence, enabling us to
denounce nonscientific perceptions as dealing with
illusions. This became a new element of the
doxa, leaving philosophy to attempt to justify
these distinctions, even explaining the
differences between illusion and science, even
accepting that philosophy itself might be 'the
great optical illusion clouding the work of
science and enjoyment of appearance'(131).
The emergence of social theory adds another
dimension. It began as 'a thinking of the
poor, an inventory of illegitimate modes of
thinking, or a science having for its object the
thinking that has no time to be thought' (131),
aiming to expose philosophy as the vain pursuit of
the leisured. Philosophy was forced to
attempt to accommodate this discourse too, and
does so in the form of 'the permanent exchange
'between limited notions of truth and 'social
knowledges of acculturation'. The latter
offer 'a philosophy of misrecognition'.
Modern social science in particular necessarily
interacts right back with philosophy even while
denouncing it as a matter of illusion. It
does this by claiming to be able to research
social positivities, using privileged methods,
but, a note tells us, even while pretending to
critique philosophical illusions, social
scientists 'interiorize, as given or rules of
methods, notions of principles that are merely
commandments ... [dealing in]... philosophical
prohibitions whose origins efface themselves' (n9
240). This makes social sciences into a kind
of Platonism, reproducing the distinction between
those who produce by nature and those who develop
science at leisure from their nature, with a
necessary notion of the misrecognition of the
history that human beings make, and with a
necessary tribunal of theorists to decide whether
people are being true to this divided nature.
Marx's early rebuke of the need to see technology
as an effective break with rural conceptions
appears in the Theses: Feuerbach's
critique cannot escape the limits of classic
philosophical contemplation, rather than breaking
radically into a new conception of scientific
knowledge. Here, it is practice,
transformation, that become central, both to
producing the social events and the perceptions of
the actors of them. Actors produce their
social world and the decor, although they do not
realize that they do—they make history, but it
goes on behind their backs. Producers
produce the world, but simultaneously produce a
knowledge that misleads them, that misrecognizes,
and this in turn becomes another horizon or decor,
or spectacle. Paradox reappears, just as it
was once a central to rhetoric and
sophistry. [I think that Rancière goes on to
argue here that rhetorical tricks which often
depend on 'simple wordplay based upon the
deliberate vagueness of ...words' (133) also
underpins a lot of the ambiguity of words such as
making, doing or history in Marxism].
However, it is not tricksters but the machines
themselves that produce these paradoxes, 'illusion
machines that turn technical demystification into
generalised simulacra' [back to the issue that
skilled crafstmen could simulate art etc].
Marx recognized this paradox and chose to opt for
science and truth rather than demystification,
classical rather than popular culture. He
was never that interested himself in how popular
thought emerges, but noted buffoonery and
irrational elements in the political universe of
France. A particular problem arises for his
disciples, especially those who want to elevate
praxis to a central role. They wanted to
safeguard against a particular notion of decadence
that might threaten productive modernity [trivial
consumerism?] , and a reduction of the notion to
the mere 'labour of engineers and the
prestidigitations of politics' (134). They
are also aware that the notion of praxis could
serve the needs of autocrats [and some actively
collaborated].
The real issue is that the world itself cannot be
separated from its simulacra. This may not
matter as an abstract issue of truth, but it is
crucial to the notion of justice, and to those who
fear deep manipulations. It is the notion of
justice that fuels the notion of misrecognition,
and it has also led to [Stalinist] terror directed
against saboteurs 'who are recognizable by virtue
of the fact that they do not sabotage to hide all
the better their sabotage' (135) -- not true but
just. Philosophers who want to both
celebrate praxis and criticize Stalinism have to
develop particularly complex justifications, which
will turn on philosophical generalizations [and
this chapter ends with some quotes from Sartre].
Chapter eight: The Philosopher's Wall
[This is all about Sartre, and I have never really
studied him, so much of it seems to be obscure to
me. The style is also particularly allusive,
with lots of references to Flaubert, sometimes in
terms of where Flaubert lived, who seems to have
been a particular figure in Sartre's work—an
earlier chapter suggests that he has been compared
to Flaubert much to his annoyance. There is
also some discussion on painting, and luckily I
have been able to find the paintings being
discussed on the web—what on earth would we do
without it? The only theme I can relate to
immediately concerns the Marxist notion of praxis
is the foundation for a politics. I remember
it being used in Britain at least to describe a
number of activist forms of politics, virtually
any kind of activity, but then mere 'practice'
being contrasted with some notion of a superior
kind of praxis based more rigorously on
theory. I think that dilemma at least,
including how you tell the difference, and how the
two are related, is at stake in some of these
discussions. I use the distinction between
practice and praxis now and then to show this
link]
There is the usual problem of trying to find a
place for philosophy and to relate it to
politics. Sartre wants to be more than just
a rhetorician, but instead to serve to analyze and
report historical trends and concrete political
movements. Again the issue is that it is
hard to see in the current working class any kind
of subject behind any of the processes
involved. We can see already that Sartre has
to speak on behalf of workers as some universal
subject, 'the worker', and it is hard to make this
figure actually appear [fancy French way of saying
it is hard to find actual examples] . It is
no longer possible to say that the universal
worker is some kind of essence displayed in
empirical workers. That would be too
speculative, and there is a need to find some
material flesh and bone subject that is still not
just a collection of empirical individuals.
By now, there is no need to ask actual workers for
their views, because they do not have the time to
formulate adequate political analysis, nor the
leisure: Sartre talks about the crushing weight of
fatigue in actual work. This problem is
exacerbated in the age of mass production.
It is only these circumstances that stop workers
becoming politically active, but that is
enough. Workers themselves cannot and do not
think freely, but need a party to do it for
them. Free thinking and intellectual
activity looks like a luxury for those with
leisure. There is no room for an
anarchosyndicalist optimism about skilled
workers. The activist political worker is no
more. The bourgeoisie have increasingly
eliminated them, by 'regressive productive
structures' (139). Some still exist but as
endangered species.
The party must now actively negate this notion of
the worker, and constantly assert the notion of
the proletariat, even in its nonbeing, as a pure
concept or act. There is the usual [catch
22] logic: those actual workers who want to
criticize this view only show their separation
from their real class. Purity opposes
dispersion. It is no longer possible for
workers to criticize the Communist Party.
However, this also means that real workers do not
have to follow the Party. All sorts of
paradoxical consequences follow, for example that
the Party serve to represent the workers, but not
actual workers who are dispersed and
passive. Similarly, actual workers can
cheerfully disregard the Party which expresses
their needs. Increasingly, actual workers do
not support demonstrations and activities
organized by the Party, which forces Party
activists to organize 'street theatre: a
demonstration put on by party hardliners for the
masses about what they should have done if they
had not remained precisely what they are - the
masses' (140). Nonparticipation only
confirms the extensive fatigue experienced by
actual workers. There can be no positive
reasons for nonparticipation. The Party becomes
the only mechanism to combat such fatigue.
Now however, given the pure mission of the Party
and the concept of the 'pure nonbeing of the
proletariat. Only the philosopher knows why
the party is right' (141). Philosophers are in an
equally difficult position, however, unable
to speak to the masses, but also unable to add
anything to the reasons of the Party. Only
other philosophers are suitable targets who can be
demonstrated to be wrong.
Philosophy is limited to a discourse on particular
circumstances. [Circumstances here seem to
be events that affect mundane activity, that is
most activity]. Philosophers opposed to
circumstances some notion of 'continuous
creation', incorporating the pure proletariat and
the pure party. Sartre was criticized for
this view [by Merleau-Ponty] for abandoning the
dialectic, simply opposing the limited empirical
perceptions of the disadvantaged with the pure act
of the party, with only the philosopher able to
reveal the link between them [with the party
showing how the masses misrecognize their
position, and offering the truth instead].
Such a view unites the idealism of the
revolutionary future with extreme confidence in
material circumstances producing politics, with
the former 'indefinitely pushed back to the
horizon' (142). Philosophical rigour
involves rejecting any 'universe of mixture lying
between the two', or of any open or incomplete and
techniques and actions. For Merleau-Ponty,
it is precisely this 'realm of hybridity and
ambiguity' which is the realm of the dialectic,
the dynamics between the effects of things which
inscribed people, and the awareness of their
relations. For Ranciere, Sartre's subsequent
book Critique of Dialectical Reason is
'merely a long response'.
Sartre addresses this 'interworld' in that
book, trying to show how passive syntheses
result in group dialectics. He also wants to
show that these processes are related to the
status of worked matter itself, which can also be
seen as a kind of synthesis of a
multiplicity. Interacting with such work
matter provides a springboard to the development
of group consciousness [maybe]. Dialectical
praxis shows us how things can be reclaimed as
human, and how political action can become
realized and thing-like in its turn. A key
role is played by signification, which is
inscribed in matter, and this is how human
projects become opaque and permanent, they 'become
Being' (143). It is not a matter of
rethinking fixed matter to resolve it back into
knowledge. Material activity is required, in
labour. Labour enables us to act on matter
and change our lives. Future prospects
become possible only when we can labour on things.
For Rancière, Sarter has developed an 'entirely
materialist dialectic, an entirely dialectical
materiality'. There is no gap between nature
and history, merely a series of transformations
between subjects and things. But it is the
relations between things that provides the key to
understanding this and developing further
transformations. However, problems
arise. The [normal practical] activities of
subjects on things 'is in fact only a simulacrum
of dialectic', and [normal or at least capitalist]
human projects involve only repetition.
Here, Sartre developing the distinction between
praxis and ordinary practice. In the latter,
human reason has been stolen or distorted.
Practice is as inevitable as the fatigue of the
work is, however. Ordinary things are needed
to sustain working subjects, and also to organize
social relations in a clear way, as opposed to the
old mystifications and conservative
contentment. Sartre has already rejected
this misleading past of 'rustic and peasant
happiness' (144), using a story about himself
observing a worker and a gardener separated by a
garden wall, unaware of each other's presence,
working separately and in mutual ignorance.
The philosopher observer also suggest there must
always be a third person or term which objectifies
and can see relations in social objects: it also
justifies the role of the philosopher.
Sartre has to rapidly deny that he is arguing for
any sort of transcendental subject or
privilege. However, we can say that the
philosopher needs to build a wall between the
workers in order to restore the right sort of
relation between them. He does not intend to break
down the wall, because that would permit mere
reciprocal relations between the workers rather
than a proper relation mediated by material
things.
The wall is the Idea materialized, an essential or
categorical element. Another example is
provided by discussing working women who cope with
the dullness of mechanical labour by pursuing
erotic reveries. What they don't realize
that this is a suitable way of permitting them to
act mechanically, something really imposed from
outside, by the machines themselves. The
same critique can be applied to
anarcho-syndicalists, who failed to realise that
worker autonomy is provided by and limited to the
operations of the machine, and to the potentials
of worked matter [it sounds an awful lot like
actor network theory here!] This limited freedom
really serves to crush and reduce the skilled
worker to matter. Rancière says this
provides workers with their own particular
fatalism.
This is the simulated dialectic operating at the
level of practice, producing 'the enchantments
have worked matter, the whirlpools of seriality
that they orchestrate, the dreams of freedom
reflecting it' (146). Fully group practice
is required for serious social change, and the
point is to explain how this might develop from
ordinary practice. Happily, there is some
prior fundamental free praxis exercised by
individuals, before 'opacity' sets in.
Individuals do exercise free choices, even if the
meaning of those choices is provided from the
outside. For example, strong social
pressures arising from Malthusian ideas have long
operated on family life. For Sartre, this is
the main form of aggression against workers'
bodies. There can be no resistance to it,
'no place for vulgar freedom', since there is no
space for thought and leisure. There can be
no choice about having children, no artistic
pursuits, no worker societies.
The main problem actually is not just hybridity
but autodidacticism. There are only limited
kinds of freedom, and leisure activities must be
removed in favour of those that must be devoted to
the party. Only the party offers proper
emancipation, so we should not waste our time
pursuing various other 'pathways and dead ends'
trying to become human. Only philosophers
possess true freedom, and this is defined
precisely against 'the impotence of serialized
individuals' (147). Only serious
philosophical work leads to freedom.
This time, philosophers are observing ordinary
life in cities as workers themselves, this time in
order to try and clarify the collective—'" the
two-way relation between a material, inorganic,
worked object and a multiplicity which finds its
unity of exteriority in it"'[147, quoting Critique
of Dialectical Reason]. Apparently
isolated individuals are already linked by many
kinds of interior relation, not just the gaze of
the observer, but a number of market forces,
social arrangements like work schedules and so
on. Again there is a hint that this confirms
the power of the philosopher himself in conveying
some potential or power to the social
collectives. This is in effect a version of
the philosophical specialism of the negation of
the negation, a contradiction of apparent fixed
relations, one which workers themselves can never
developed. Here, the claim is that impotence
can be negated by this power.
In normal life, people are unified in their
impotence, their passive participation in a
collective,the 'seal on their multiplicity'
produced by the object [many hints of Deleuze
here]. However, this unity also has a
potential contradiction, or realization of potency
[shades of Hardt and Negri now]. A mere
serial unity of oppositions escalates into a
contradiction between same and other '"demanding a
unifying praxis"' (148) [Critique].
This is rather like what happens in street theatre
and demonstrations, when the party shows the power
of the masses. Now however, it is the
philosopher, 'the royal dialectician working at
the heart of words' who conveys this power
[through wordplay including formulations such as
'"(...at once," "at the same time," at the very
same moment"), and through the action of the
formative verbs conjugated in the reflexive form'
(148-9)]. This wonderful insight is still
not available to the fatalistic workers, however
who can never grasp the idea of the negation of
the negation. They can only mimic it by
referring to the notion of a glorious death as an
alternative to living like a slave. Thus
groups have constituted themselves as political
agents, when they are directly threatened by
necessity, when they come to see the need for a
fundamental negation of what looks impossible, but
they tend, like the silk workers in Lyons, to see
this in terms of negating the impossibility of
living by dying. Instead, only this
particular philosophical notion of freedom can
provide the real practical unity, as a necessity,
as the very inversion of what exists.
If the silk workers revolt of 1831 showed only the
impotence of worker collectives, the storming of
the Bastille is more promising to show the
emergence of a revolutionary group. Sartre
is not arguing for spontaneism—the gathering of
the Parisian mob was as a result of outside
forces, especially the threats of the King to
encircle the city with troops. Parisians
were then united in being equally threatened by
extermination, and the only solution was to take
collective armed action. In this way, an
active group emerges from a gathering, and the
Bastille became a clear symbol of the external
threat. In this way, each member of the
group acts as a constituting third party for the
others.
Generalizing from this example, royal praxis can
be seen as having the same power as worked matter
to constitute groups. It also presented no
alternative, appearing as a constraining Other,
something purely in opposition, not emerging from
the mob with all the compromises that that
entails, but offering a choice between activity or
extermination. The emergence of the group as
a rational actor therefore depends upon the
'absolute subjectivity of the sovereign
individual' (151). The Revolution arises to
negates the counter revolution. This royal
sovereignty may have been imaginary, but that does
not matter as long as it provides a suitable myth
of origin. Stalinism is also capable of
being understood as the embodied negation of royal
power, 'As the negation of the negation. As
the Terror'. Apparently, Sartre leaps over
all the intervening struggles to move from 1789 to
Stalin, and all the intervening struggles for
worker groups to become active political
groups. There is a lurking apology for
terror here as necessary to preserve the group and
to unite it in the face of further
dispersions. The major theme is the need for
sovereignty to prevent bureaucratic organisation
and dispersions, to preserve the group as an actor
rather than a mere collective, to work a series of
negations and negations of negations.
However, it is not as black and white as this
rather mechanistic 'functional analysis'.
Politics has become much less certain since this
earlier work. The main actors remain as the
bourgeoisie dominating and exterminating the
proletariat, fatigued labourers,
anarcho-syndicalist ideologues, the need for pure
social bonds and pure acts, however, Sartre no
longer speaks with the Party, but rather 'from the
interior of Marxism' (152) to which Party activity
must be subordinated and integrated, made to serve
the pure negation of the negation. The Party
certainly cannot represent the working class
directly, nor can the proletariat become an
effective dictatorship, until it becomes a pure
group. The usual apology for Stalinism, as a
substitute for the dictatorship of the
proletariat, a first stage, can no longer be
maintained—Stalinism reappears as an absolute will
of the sovereign. Possibly, he is still best
seen as a positive force of the proletariat, or
even as some spokesperson for the future of
humanity. However, these arguments make
philosophy redundant, and all the lofty aims of a
rational end to history and a society based on
human hopes would look unnecessary [I think the
problem is that if Stalin can be seen in any way
as representing Marxism, then it looks as if
Marxism can be achieved through the conventional
political mechanisms of dictatorship].
Dilemmas emerge in discussing events like the
Hungarian uprising. As a moralist, the
position is clear, but Sartre as a philosopher
also has to show that the Soviet intervention was
not actually necessary, that Hungarian communists
could have fought off their own bourgeois
opponents. This analysis followed the actual
events, of course, but Sartre pursued it in terms
of a struggle between petty bourgeois and workers:
confusion arose because some petty bourgeois were
sent off to be reeducated as workers, and so
appeared as if they were workers, which made it
difficult for true workers to deal with them,
until it was too late. By then the tanks
were on the street. Sartre claims to have
done research by asking '"trusted witnesses"', but
Rancière suggests all this was worked out in
advance. It is also contradictory, because
there can be no pure working class group to be
diluted, nor could Hungarian workers effectively
ever turn themselves into a pure party—they had no
leisure, after all. They might at best have
been able to achieve consciousness in response to
petty bourgeois politicians ordering the police to
fire on the demonstrators. And petty
bourgeois infiltrators could also have acted as a
stimulus to cement real worker organization.
Nevertheless, this is a justification of the
Soviet invasion as somehow acting on the part of
what the working class would have done had they
had time.
The analysis links to the general philosophy
[although this is a very dense part of the
argument, 154-5]. The whole thing seems to
depend on the emergence of important
simulacra—worked matter as a false synthesis,
normal practice which simulates the dialectic,
fictional royal orders, fleeting group unities, a
focus on ends as somehow implicit within things,
and on organizations as containing a
potential. This makes the philosopher
himself a parasite, first explaining the reasoning
of the party, and then of Marxism itself,
illustrated with a quote from Sartre saying that
Marxism needs a philosopher like him to fill in
its voids [fleshing out the notion of praxis as
central to labour and politics].
However, for Rancière, Marx chose not to develop
bridging notions like praxis. [Some very dense
argument follows] Marx, 'by instinct rather than
by cold calculation… rejected a world
defined completely by practice, a world in which
everyone would be right' (155). This is seen
by the role played by buffoonery in Marx's
analyses, and there are also the excursions into a
dialectics rooted in nature. Sartre wants to
oppose both tendencies to restore ' a history
grounded completely impractical
rationality'. This is sufficient to see off
Engels, but it makes theoretical critique of
Stalin impossible [as we saw above, since Stalin
might well be seen as helping things along a bit,
to overcome any residual bourgeois, so the
critique can only be made in terms of whether it
was necessary to do so]. This also imposes a
practical necessity on philosophy, to see the
whole history of liberation as a matter of
technique.
It cannot be ordinary technique, however, since
this involves detachment from ends, simulations,
and collective rather than group efforts.
Sartre refers to artisans who inhabit these worlds
as '"amphibians"'. They are not responding
to the pressure of the Nothing that produces a
response to construct the All. Some notion of
'great technique' is required, something
unconditioned except by 'the single absolute of
the End'. This 'super technique' offers continuous
creation and also a limit to ordinary
technique. Freedom lies only in the
former. Super technique responds to exigency
rather than to the mundane. However, there
is still the risk of imitation, and philosophical
dialectic can only counter with some kind of
rationality, which 'is exactly like magic'(156).
It is no longer possible simply to take the
position of the most disadvantaged, for example,
as some principle of historical development.
Siding with the proletariat is a matter of only
'moral exigency'. This clearly runs the risk
of finding philosophy in alliance with tyranny
which also claims to speak in the name of the
disadvantaged, and may actually act on their
behalf. The alternative is to abandon
philosophy in favour of moral discourse and
judgment, and this is what Sartre goes on to
do. He ends up by saying that the crimes of
capitalism [and he was a member of some high
powered international tribunals] were [simply] not
necessary, and he separate himself philosophically
from any concrete political position like
maoism—he can advocate it but 'he will be
very careful not to be their philosopher'.
We are still not told why history will move from
series or collectivity to group, except by
force. There are no reasons except moral and
ethical ones to favour groups as the necessary
agent to pursue proper ends. There might be
a nostalgia for the universal. More likely,
it is a way to defend philosophy in a
technological world. Rancière suspects that
there is a 'fundamental aversion' to mundane
practice, to artisans and their culture and
freedom, an echo of the old worry about 'the
artisan - king' (157).
Evidence for this can be found in some rather
marginal stuff written about painters.
Painting could be seen as an example of a proper
human relation to matter which avoids the
banalities of representation and reified meanings,
some pure relation of matter to itself.
However, purity can also be threatened if painters
turn out to be artisans after all, and this is the
criticism Sartre had directed at Tintoretto '("The
Little Dyer")'. Although Tintoretto broke
with the conventions of representation, he did not
paint in order to express anything—he produced
things to sell. He masters matter as does
'the worker in general', but for mundane
ends. Sartre's commentary here echoes
Plato's anxieties about sophistry, as Tintoretto
shows that he 'executes Veroneses and Pordenones
better than nature'(158). It is a
disenchanted picture of the world, emotionally
numb, 'excessively calm' (161) [the example here
is his Massacre of the Innocents—available to view
online. Sartre sees it as technically cold,
with no sadism on the part of the soldiers, and no
incipient rebelliousness on the part of the
innocent], and representing social hierarchies
[The Last Judgment is the example here] .
Tintoretto invents new perspectives, he works hard
in arduous and difficult positions. He
produces a new 'perspectival space', apparently
depicting figures as weightless. Sartre
thinks that the painting displays 'tricks of
imitation to smooth over the new disturbances'
(159). He wants to work to earn his living,
and severely limits his experimentation with
space. Mere 'optical trickery' (160)
results. Nothing else was possible until all
the conventions of representation were called into
question 400 years later. Sartre sees this
as a matter of emerging courage to confront
reality, and sees this as unattainable by a mere
artisan. Instead we get a compromise between
disenchantment and technical skill, production and
imitation, a challenge to the mundane world and an
acceptance of hierarchy and the need to ascend
one.
This is the world that Sartre rejects, and prefers
eternal fatigue for workers, and an exposure to
death and nothingness. He has no time for
ordinary radical intellectuals, including Camus,
but wants to preserve some abstract universal
encounter between persons and things, 'an
aesthetic universality in the Kantian style' (161)
[I thought Rancière approved of this idea].
To achieve this utopia requires going beyond the
usual notions of equality, practice, social
relations and resemblance in art and design, a new
relation to the world [actually 'the becoming -
world' (162)—more shades of Deleuze]. Where
individuals, whether workers or philosophers,
'will no longer be technicians but virtually,
already, subjects of the group). The example
of painting that gets close to this is Lapoujade's
Les Foules [also available to view online], where
the unity of the demonstrating masses is indicated
by nonrepresentational painting. The painter
can see the meaning of this sort of collective
activity, using a pictorial language to translate
it-- but the workers who took part no longer
understand this language.
There is a lingering notion of the Kantian notion
of 'the idea of the Beautiful as a promise of
equality' (163), and Sartre use the idea when
discussing literature. However, the
democratic notion of the aesthetic is replaced by
some 'fascination with the kind of self
organization in which matter tends to be
identified with its own idea'. Thus an
abstract dream of matter replaces any active
notion of democracy. Rancière suggests that
this was inspired as much by the need to
distinguish his position against bourgeois
artists, especially Flaubert.
This dream of self organization still runs the
risk of supporting quietism, or a world without
workers and material disturbances. Sartre's
real position, however, arises from a tension
between a passion for justice and his
philosophical analysis of Marxism, or recognition
of an unjust world, but a reservation about worker
activism. This explains that he is able to
be on the side of worker hopes sometimes, but take
a more abstract and idealist stance on other
occasions. He wants to attack a dialectic of
nature, for example in order to preserve the
intelligibility of practice, but he also needs to
condemn practice that leads to mere
representation. This might be an inherent
double commitment whenever philosophers attempt to
work with Marxism [which might be a very vulgar
reduction of the argument on page 164].
Chapter nine. The Sociologist King,
165-202.
[Understanding this critique is not easy, partly
because it is full of elitist allusions of the
kind we have come to expect of French sociologists
and philosophers. I have a gloss on it here .
It also assumes a pretty extensive knowledge of
Bourdieu and his work. Both Bourdieu and Rancière
claim to be demystifiers and democrats, but both
write in this extremely exclusionary style.
Meanwhile, here are some homemade definitions of
some of the terms Bourdieu uses and Rancière
criticizes or mocks. You can already see
perhaps why these are going to piss off a
philosopher:
Allodoxia — apparently a particular kind
of misrecognition identified by Plato. The
misrecognition specifically involves attempting to
apply familiar categories to new situations, and
the example usually given is ethnocentrism.
Used in the work on education, for example, in
chapter four of Homo
Academicus, to refer to the struggles
to reorient one’s self and restore one’s career in
the confused situation of the fundamental changes
to universities in the 1960s.
Doxa — the set of taken for granted
beliefs that seem to be a natural description of
the social world, mostly because there is a deep
integration between the subjective (perspectives,
expectations, ambitions) and the objective (actual
possibilities open to people, such as the sorts of
careers available to people of particular
kinds). Again lots of references in the work
on education, to refer to the mindset of academics
and the way they adjust themselves to the
objective possibilities on offer.
Illusio — based on Pascal, and referring to
the total acceptance of rules of the game, so that
one can play it as a full member, without critical
reflection. In articualr, you think you are free
(but really restricted by the rules andother
constraints) or that it is the real you (
but it is really what the systemt wants for you)
-- so the objective and the subjective coincide.I
think I chose to pursue my career in an odd little
marginal place but that is exactly where the
system would fit me in This is also used to
describe academic life, especially a philosophical
perspective on it, and it is one of the things
that prevents philosophy being able to analyze
itself, according to Pascalian
Meditations. Philosophers are
critical and free -- but not to criticize
philosophy. I also like the connections with
leisure. Academic life is literally a game -- we
argue playfully and within the rules etc.Note the
deep connection with skhole - leisured
philosophy. The snag is -- isn't Bourdieu's
sociology also an illusio? Free to criticize
everything except its own rules? Reflexivity is
limited to thinking about how the system has worked
for us?]
One argument is that philosophers have not
properly grasped events or their political
consequences because they cannot understand their
own place. In particular, they are too
absorbed with philosophy to worry about social
hierarchies and boundaries, and they fail to
realize that they are really occupying an
aristocratic position (in thought).
Although Bourdieu can be read against the notion
of freedom in Sartre [discussed earlier], views on
the role of the elite in shaping tastes are very
similar. Sartre's views developed in the
context of taste in the Soviet Union, and they
argue that modern art frees itself from bourgeois
taste but 'only at the price of cutting itself of
radically from popular taste' (166)—hence Soviet
to policy to discourage modern art. However,
this can be seen as a rationalization to privilege
Stalin's own tastes, an imposition on
revolutionary culture of a particular ethos.
This is where sociology wants to argue with
philosophy, that philosophers carry on in their
usual operations, but unconsciously adapting to
their own objects. This can be seen as a
further example of the Platonic notion of the
right opinion [also discussed earlier --
roughly that education is about imprinting the
right opinion on people, but only some kinds of
elite people warrant this —the masses do not need
to worry about opinions as they just do their
jobs]
For sociologists, it is now necessary to consider
the opinions of the masses, how they are ranked,
and what part philosophy plays in this ranking
activity. Philosophy is to be subjected to
rigorous, positive practice, ending the old
speculations. However, becoming interested
in the poor could be seen as pursuing the same
philosophical approach, looking at the poor in
their allotted place, providing useful empirical
data, and only for the ends of sociologists.
This apparently is Sartre's judgement of sociology
as well.
Marx also has to be rejected since he 'took
sociology backward' by explaining civil society in
terms of the relations of production and
productive forces. The study of these
relations and forces, of ideology and of
revolutionary politics leaves sociology 'only the
leftovers' (168). Sociologists seem
constantly to be outstripped, Comte's positive
science by a Marxist science, the critique of
orthodoxy by its explanation in terms of
productive forces. The only object left for
analysis is how truth gets misrecognized, how the
doxa should be grasped—but only through the
production of another doxa. Revolutionary
insights became knowledge of the inertia of
collective thinking, and Marxist economics and
philosophy were both recaptured by seeing them as
elements of the doxa— [philosophy as the
reproduction of aristocratic tastes] Marxism as a
part of the general disenchantment of the
bourgeois world, ideologies linked to the economy
as a particular case 'of the economy of symbolic
practices'.
Even so, sociologists can only use rather
compromised devices such as statistics and opinion
polls [not specifically designed methods?].
However, these seem self sufficient, not requiring
any additional sociology. For example there
were already statistics showing that schools
tended to promote bourgeois sons at the expense of
proletarian ones, or that the patterns of
consumption were already linked to class revenues
[revenues but not tastes -- until Bourdieu].
Statistics already demystify and reveal domination
[Bourdieu's statistics do more than just describe
though] . Do they need further
interpretation? Only if these appearances
themselves need to be explained in terms of
exploitation and domination at least in the last
instance, so that class variables in schools have
to be seen as serving bourgeois domination.
Opinion polls raise another problem. On the
one hand, they seem to offer authentic opinions,
but this was already questioned by Plato in terms
of whether these were the right opinions.
The problem is always that surveys offer clichés
to respondents for their reaction, 'a
prefabricated doxa awaiting its subject without
surprise' (169). This point explains some of
Bourdieu's responses [as we shall see], and leads
to him interpreting ' vague anomie' as allodoxia
[Rancière assumes he know what responses really
mean] . Sociologists are not inventing these
opinions, they are actually out there
independently, 'on the streets', but there is a
circular quality to them when considered as
responses to standard questions. The only
alternative is to argue that they are not the real
truth: 'truth, by definition, does not roam the
streets'.
Sociologists are always being told off for
operating only with banality, at the same time as
offering obvious untruths. [If I have
understood this properly, Rancière is agreeing
that popular opinions can sometimes consist of
prejudices and misunderstandings—it would be very
strange to argue otherwise, of course -- a kind of
democratic nominalism where there no hidden
aspects to amything, and anyone can grasp the
immediate truth of the objects they perceive]. So
it is necessary to distinguish banality from
falsehood, to qualify evidence, and this is done
by assuming there is something hidden. Only
sociologists claim to be able to uncover this:
'because the law of the system is to hide things
[from people]'[quoting Bourdieu Sociology In
Question]. This looks like an innocent
addition to the project to study popular
opinion. We do not need to justify sociology
as a description of popular opinions any longer,
or to worry why people deride it. It follows
that dissimulation must be roaming the streets as
well.
Sociology proposes to study the doxa by arguing
that it is paradoxical and two-old.
Everybody knows things, but this very universality
is suspicious. If people do not want to know
about sociology and its findings, is because they
do not want to know. Thus 'all recognition
is a misrecognition'. The education system
eliminates proletarian students but normal people
do not know how it works—it dissimulates this
process, and then, even more fiendishly,
dissimulates 'the way that it dissimulates' (171).
Bourdieu and Passeron argue this in The Inheritors
and in Reproduction.
They start with brute statistics, showing uneven
class chances of entering higher education.
One popular explanation is that the parental
income and conditions prevent working class kids
from attending school. An alternative is
that school crushes such children because it is
authoritarian, and at the time of writing Inheritors,
this was the dominant view of left wingers in the
student union, who were arguing for more
egalitarian work groups instead of lectures.
Many of the latter were students of philosophy!
Attempting to break with the 'pincers of economy
and ideology', sociology offered an
alternative. School does eliminate
proletarians but not through explicit
procedures. Schools affect what people
believe about schools. They believe that
schools do not eliminate, but that many people are
not gifted and able to profit from study. As
we saw, school must then dissimulate its
dissimulation, ironically, precisely by
eliminating people. Thus it is not so much
examinations that eliminate, more that there is a
large drop out rate before taking the exam, with
no need to submit to the judgement of
school. In this way, the exam plays a major
part in dissimulation, or, as Rancière puts it
sarcastically: 'the examination dissimulates, in
its dissimulation, the continuing elimination that
dissimulates itself in the school that pretends
not to eliminate' (172).
This role for examinations is also seen as being
contaminated by the overall need to eliminate
proletarian kids while appearing not to.
This takes the form of smuggling in class bias
into tests, especially in subjects where there are
unclear criteria, the dissertation or the oral,
and where matters of style and manners or posture,
even clothing can be used in overall judgements.
However, this overemphasizes 'initiating
ceremonies or ritual discourses' as the key to
understanding education. The evidence is
used here backwards—comments of an assessor are
used to describe 'the reality of its practice',
and are supported by all sorts of other reports of
experiences of examiners, comments about
literature classes, and feelings of shame
exhibited by proletarian kids. [Surely,
Rancière is not advocating any kind of better
empirical procedure here? What should we
make of his work that uses comments of workers and
reports of their experiences in this way?]
This shows how the demonstration of charisma, and
the affectations of style transcend mere
schooling, and make success depend on nuance or
knowledge of classical works. This involves
a necessary distinction for those who already have
such knowledge, or those who are gifted enough to
transcend their background..
Rancière seems to be wanting to demand evidence
[or he might be arguing that these arguments are
actually untestable because they take such a
paradoxical stance towards statistical
evidence]. He suspects that these great
mystifications only exist 'in the cutting words of
the demystifiers' (173) [could we ever get to some
sort of test of who is right?] . He denies
that public schools were ever interested in equal
opportunity, but rather political equality, with
the social mobility to be exercised marginally to
separate out gifted kids of the common
people. In those circumstances, the notion
of gift actually promoted the chances of
proletarian kids. There is also far too much
placed on charismatic teaching, and some
generalization taking place between explicit
elitist allusion and simply teachers making
judgements based on their own experience.
Real elite education is more mundane, and Bourdieu
and Passeron are talking it up by exaggerating
examples of witticism and allusion, or the
puzzlement of students trying to predict topics
for the exam. [Bourdieu et al. did do some
empirical studies of actual lectures and student
responses, noted here,
while Rancière seems to be drawing on 'what
everyone knows'. R is right to critique empirical
knowledge, although he has only mentioned opinion
polls.Is 'what everyone knows' more reliable
though?]
Sociologists know that 'ordinary educational
practice or bourgeois conversation' is far from
riddled with literary allusions. There is
also some evidence that knowledge of elite culture
is not significant in privileging bourgeois
kids. They are still suspicious about any
attempts to break with elite culture, as when they
say that teachers who want to encourage opposition
to this culture are still complicit in it, still
'persuading the neophytes to worship culture and
not the university' (174).
This stance rebuked those philosophy students who
wanted to challenge authoritarian pedagogy and
propose a collective alternative. They are
merely advocating some sort of laissez faire where
'inheritors' will profit most [still true].
They are refusing rational pedagogy [Bourdieu's
particular version?] that would preserve academic
content without a charismatic ideology.
Radical student critics also misrecognize.
Their case also reveals another fundamental
claimed insight—the importance of leisure in
developing 'the aristocratic values of
dilettantism' (174). In the case of radical
philosophy students, this reflects itself in the
disdain for the need to organize time effectively,
and to insist on their aristocratic freedoms.
The connections between school and leisure appear
in the [Platonic] notion of skolē,
and reveal the importance of the freedom of the
dominant class, especially in developing a
suitably neutral and distant disposition to social
events including the arts and the body [citing Sociology
in Question].
Again this is improbable, since all school kids
experience routine, rewards and punishments [seems
like another empirical generalization to
me]. It is a mistake that sociology
lecturers make when talking to schoolteachers and
assuming that the lecture room is the 'essence' of
the class. This myth of leisure is Platonic
in origin, arising from freedom from the pressures
of time leading to the myth of free choice [are we
still paraphrasing Bourdieu?]. Schools must
imitate this state in order to conform to the
leisured elite. This leads to an even more
dark suspicion, that compulsory education [or
maybe raising the school leaving age] will only
expose working class children even more to this
alien environment, and thus push them towards
eliminating themselves [I said something similar
for the Open University -- here].
This poses as anti Platonic, a scientific
explanation for myths, but it is
conservative. It does not open the
possibility for working class kids to enjoy the
leisure provided to study. Bourdieu wants to
explain working class kids who do succeed as
special cases—they have come from an unusual
social circle, or they might actually have
exceptional abilities, even if they are delude
themselves that these are gifts. This risks
tautology, and features condemnation of the
parvenu as a class traitor, accepting individual
success but only by legitimating dominant notions
[is this actually in Bourdieu, or is it an
implication that Rancière draws?]
Bourdieu does offer something more collective in
the form of rational pedagogy, taking implicit
knowledge and making it 'an egalitarian
apprenticeship' (176). This still has risks,
in replacing one arbitrary form of legitimacy with
another, and it can only ever operate at the
margins, for 'the better situated members of the
dominated class'. This too will perpetuate
class relations, and it is 'as illusory a utopia
as libertarian pedagogy'.
Sociologists cannot oppose this deep rooted logic
of reproduction. Even if rational pedagogy
worked, it would only break the solidarity of the
working classes. It would also raises
questions about the legitimacy of sociology as a
science, since it would break through
misrecognition. This misrecognition is already
highly limited, because it cannot turn into
Marxism with the dominant role given to the
productive forces. The sociology of
reproduction is therefore forced [by some strange
conditional argument—it would be forced if
Bourdieu had drawn back from rational pedagogy
because it saw the threats to scientific
sociology] to transform educational misrecognition
not so much in terms of content, but 'merely of
itself'.
Bourdieu and Passeron need to add the notion of
symbolic violence to prevent any undue precedence
given to simple exercises of power. Again,
this is hidden, but rational pedagogy would
threaten to expose it. As a result, symbolic
power must be 'irremediable', beyond any kind of
recognition by normal agents. This is seen
in the discussion of education as arbitrary: the
culture of the dominant class is reproduced, but
this particular approach makes alternatives look
impossible [I think this is what he is driving out
here, 177].
It is possible to recognize the first kind of
arbitrary, the link with the interests of the
dominant classes, but not the second, at least not
in any kind of rational pedagogy which must not
denounce itself as arbitrary for fear of losing
its right to be heard. All pedagogy involves
this necessary claim to legitimacy, which is a
necessary misrecognition of its arbitrary
nature. [Rational, or critical] pedagogues
cannot denounce this kind of misrecognition
[probably cannot penetrate it either].
This involves an interesting paradox [traced back
to Parmenides and earlier discussions in the
book]. If everything is arbitrary, how come
some of it became necessary? Pedagogy
authority bridges this gap, and is legitimated in
its turn when the arbitrary appears
necessary. Prophets only speak to the
converted, but markets also take something
arbitrary and make it necessary, hence the endless
reproduction of the conservative habitus.
For Rancière all this is paradoxical.
Sociology wants to be a science, and denounce the
activities of markets, but can only be so on the
grounds if it fails to acknowledge its own role in
making the arbitrary necessary [maybe—178].
Bourdieu and Passeron have criticized Platonism in
an uneven way, rightly exposing the myth of free
choice, but leaving to one side 'the "pedagogic"
myth of the three metals'. This myth in fact
would leave sociology with no place [I think
because it already argues that the truth is
dissimulated by the myth, but I would need to read
more of the book]. The myth of free choice
can be used to describe the workings of symbolic
power [as ideology] , and criticizing it
[from science] can lead to the scientific claims
of sociology against philosophy. However, it
would have been equally possible to start with the
myth of the three metals to expose the true limits
of the autodidact [a version of the same account
of dissimulation].
[I think the point is that] whereas
Philosopher Kings approved of fixed ranks,
sociologist take the side of the lowly ranked, but
this still accepts the notion of ranks [this fits
the critique of Althusser
better] . The difference is that we get to
the [apparent] necessity of ranks starting with
the illusion of freedom. [I think the
argument is that this will prove to be a less
powerful critique of the necessity of ranks and
their reproduction, than Plato's demonstration
that the three ranks actually began with an
arbitrary, a myth]. Bourdieu evidently
thinks that the existing order will always
perpetuate itself through its very existence [some
notion of conatus here, later attributed
to residual functionalism?], and thus will never
be grasped as arbitrary in origin.
Sociologists have 'absolutized the arbitrary',
fought off philosophy with sociologism and
turned Marx on historical necessity into an
eternal necessity. Class struggle in fact
now becomes banal [in the sense that it is widely
known about, although its secret is ignored]: its
banality doesn't generates class terror any more,
and lends scientific status to sociology which can
constantly claim to denounce 'eternal forgetting'
(179).
The most lowly ranked have been
ignored, or are particularly prone to
misrecognition. Sociology offers them
nothing except an explanation about why
philosophers have misinterpreted the world.
This amounts to an argument that 'in the long-term
[sociological] science will be more useful to the
lowly ranked than… pedagogy' (180).
Only science liberates, not action. Bourdieu
leads to no political or pedagogical action,
leaving 'only the position of the psychoanalyst'
[bad if you are a real political activist like
Rancière]. This in turn helps the lowliest
rank adjust and accept their lot 'without guilt or
suffering'. There is a further paradox, in
that only people with sufficient technical capital
and interest can understand sociology [apparently
admitted in Sociology in Question].
This admission points to a deeper collusion with
the elite. Elites, including university
professors, like to analyze best the elitism of
those below them, which is another kind of
adjustment to social positions.
It is hard to know what would be gained by making
elite knowledge accessible to the lowly-ranked
anyway. Would it lead to new claims to
privilege? Would elite culture be rejected
on the grounds of its social foundations?
This is already an effect what is supposed to
happen, from the pressure of necessity. Or
should the excluded stop wanting access because it
only makes them miserable? This is quietist,
and seems to advocate remaining with what is your
destiny.
Who is supposed to be the audience for this
discourse any way? With the end of Marxism,
sociology has become 'the imaginary of the
Sartrean communist party' (181). [good
point, but who is the audience for libertarian
activism presupposing equality?]. Of course,
this involves a claim to represent the working
class, to assume 'mute support', and this is a way
of guaranteeing sociology, making it different
from 'the games of cultural relativism where it
seeks to confine the others'. However, this
sort of denunciation on behalf of an absent class
becomes routine, a part of the new doxa, like the
struggle against [other people's] elitism, found
in politicians of all stamps. This sort of
'scholarly disenchantment' helps reinforce their
'usual lack of cultivation' (182). The
struggles have left a legacy in the removal of
elitist literature and culture from the
university, although what the gains are for the
common people 'is another story'.
Fears about reproduction extend to the analyses of
practice. Here we focus on small
reproductive machines, with characteristics
according to their place in social fields.
We can look at actors who reproduce the
traditional habitus, and we can look at the impact
of the market offering only an illusory
freedom. We can see practices as a game,
again where knowledge of the rules can be
transcended by 'the science of the moves'.
We move to the concept of illusio, the
feel for the game and its objective structures,
producing a fusing of subjective and objective
meanings. The science of Bourdieu's game is
to include the rules, the opinions of the players,
and 'the objectivation of the ethnologist's
objectivation procedures' (183). This has a
claimed benefit for the lower orders here, by
teaching them the rules of the game, and how
domination works. Again this game turns into
dissimulation, however. Kabylian villagers
can outwit ethnologists, but they must dissimulate
if they are to reject objective analysis [I think
this is the argument, 183], especially the role
Bourdieu says is played by the productive forces
and agricultural labour. Again, sociologists
have to avoid economic reductionism by also
pointing to a role for symbolic capital, and how
it is produced by converting economic
capital. In this way, the symbolic game
becomes 'merely the euphemizing of domination'
(183). The poor never grasp this and live in
a closed social environment, dominated by apparent
necessity. As a result, the turn to
practice, which was meant to overcome the
pessimism of reproduction gets closed off
again. The habitus is still dominant,
although some of its power can be diminished by
knowledge [presumably, the knowledge to develop
strategies within the rules?]. This
knowledge can never produce real freedom, nor will
it ever be just determined by the economy,
although marxists would have no problem in showing
that it was.
Sociologists get out of this problem 'by combining
the two economies'. This is what happens in Distinction.
The critique of Kant involves contrasting some
notion of social reality to the apparent pure
exercise of judgment and taste. Taste is
united where Kant divides it, and divided where
Kant argues it is common. Thus the same
taste judges 'works of arts, wines or table
manners', unlike Kant's division between beauty
and pleasure of the senses. There is no
universality of taste, though, but rather a
process of distinction, opposing freedom to
necessity, and allocating those qualities to the
social classes. [The diagrams show] further
dimensions, with axes between the dominant and the
dominated, and the dominant fractions of the
dominant class according to their ownership of
types of capital.
There are of course problems. In attempting
to show how taste varies for music, Bourdieu did
not actually play any music to respondents, but
rather asked them questions about musical
types. It is an illusion ['"cultural
communism"'185], for Bourdieu, to imagine that the
lower orders might be able to appreciate elite
music, or to hope that they might. In fact
music can transcend class barriers. This is
not dissimulation [the reference is to a musician
in Kant's day who successfully pretended a Mozart
opera was mass entertainment]. There has
been much mixing of musical genres, so the
classical music appears as 'a disco hit tune, a
movie soundtrack, or in the background of a
commercial' (186), sufficient to make us question
the concept of allodoxia. What makes
cultural communism still promising is that it
seems self sufficient, requiring no commentary,
and thus can resist becoming banal [including
banal participation in class closure], refusing to
be confined to those possessing a suitable
habitus.
For Bourdieu, music in particular offers
'"denegation of the social world"'[citing Distinction],
pretending to be silent and neutral while helping
social ranks develop. Bourdieu is displaying
here and elsewhere 'a more fundamental annoyance
towards the common property of music and religion'
(186), based on its ability to apparently
disturb models of class appropriation.
One of his strategies is to agree that analyzing
all areas of music would be impossible, but there
is an assumption that musical tastes can still be
measured using particular examples, and without
anyone having to hear music. Representative
samples were given questionnaires ad asked to
react to questions like whether they thought
classical music was for them, or whether they know
14 musical works and can choose 3
favourites. 'No surprise, the workers answer
en masse that classical music is not for
people like them, show only limited
knowledge... whereas distinguished people
claim that "all music of quality" interests them,
know all of the titles'[more of this what everyone
knows stuff?] (187). A refutation of Kant cannot
be carried out with data like this. For
example, Kant says that there is a
difference between capacity and knowledge, but
this problem has not even been tackled with tests
like these. Of course university students
are going to get the best grades in tests like
this, including knowing that some musical works
are more high status. Bourdieu knows that
bourgeois respondents are able to manipulate
surveys [apparently in Distinction page
47], but does not acknowledge that the questions
themselves suggest a ranking. What the
questions really shows that some know the game and
can play a role, and others don't—ironically, this
actually shows a kind of cultural freedom [at
least for the game players] which is not supposed
to be happening [for anybody].
There is some attempt to research the minor arts
like photography differently. Kant is again
used to set up criteria which can be tested, for
example whether tastes focus on the form of the
object or its function. The photograph of
the old woman's hands should show the neutral
bourgeois gaze, and the involved popular
gaze. However, the researcher himself has to
intervene to explain some of the apparent
similarities [details on 188]. Again it
looks as if the image can have its own effects
so 'the sociologist will have to produce the
distance himself'. Some of the questions actually
referred to the intentions or functions of images,
as in the ones about whether images would make
beautiful photographs. There is a clear
difference here, but, as Bourdieu himself knows,
the interview can offer artificial choices
[apparently, one of his books on photography says
this applies particularly to to questions about
the aesthetics of photographs]. There seem
to be clear signs of the rejection of the
question, from those who do not accept that
photography is art, and cannot be judged as if it
were.
Overall, it is the interviewer that has supplied
the meanings, while claiming that 'he lacks the
disposition' to do so. The results only
confirm 'what the sociologist already "knew" in
elaborating the question'(189). The whole
point was merely to show the operation of
distinction in what was thought to be a universal
judgment. But the exercise itself widened
the difference, and brought about 'the suppression
of intermediaries, of points of meeting and
exchange'. Again, there is this underlying
view that there must be no mixing or imitation,
that opinions have to be sorted by some criterion
of rightness, and fraud excluded. There is
some maneuvering around particular works and their
relation to bourgeois distance, including a
supporting quote by Virginia Woolf about the need
not to invest too much passion. [Then an
extraordinary section about rebellious students in
the 1960s insisting that popular works had to be
included in university study, or a comment about
fanatical music lovers appreciating apparently
vulgar works—Rancière is saying that for Bourdieu,
all this must be seen only as a confirmation of
class tastes in students, who only wanted to take
revenge on their professors, or a confirmation of
the superior tastes of the most knowledgeable
bourgeois, who can manage vulgarity with
distance].
Art must be therefore domesticated by sociological
analysis locating it in fields and
struggles. The emphasis is placed not on the
artwork itself, but on commentary and social
rituals, of struggles between critics. There
can be no struggle to recuperate minor cultures or
desacralize higher ones. Only then could we
develop a science by expelling everything that
doesn't fit. Bourdieu's habits of including
popular materials and marginal notes only add to
this process [Rancière gets close to saying that
this just vulgarizes art]. This reduction
means that popular and bourgeois taste could never
encounter each other, not even by accident.
The same goes for sport. It is clear that
some sports like soccer or rugby did cross class
boundaries, but Bourdieu sees only qualities
guaranteed to repel the bourgeoisie, including the
display of strength, resistance to pain, violence,
submission to collective discipline and so
on. Are these qualities so alien to the
bourgeoisie though? Have they not served in
public schools, churches and armies? Sport
was also introduced deliberately by governments,
often after military failures [but to be imposed
on the lower orders?]. We can see again that
the argument about repulsion against the vulgar
simply must triumph again, and again this is done
through a backwards argument, explaining likes and
dislikes in sport instead of starting with them,
or exploring the ambiguous nature of sport
[Bourdieu's analysis of the class dimension of the
different positions in rugby is cited as a classic
exaggeration and imposition]. In all this,
the notion of leisure as an autonomous area,
unaffected by the reproduction of productive
relations, is sidestepped [sidestepped --geddit?
rugby? Oh please yourselves!].
Bourdieu criticizes those who have operated with
simple explanations of social relations., but in
his own work there is always a common theme on the
relation between leisure and class, and an
insistence that there can only be one kind of
conflict between incorporated leisure, and a more
active struggle for distinction and compensation
[where a social and cultural capital can
compensate for inadequate economic capital]. There
is conflict within the dominant class,though,
between inheritors and challengers. Leisure
structures the apparent disinterested culture of
school, gender differences like those in home
decorating, and even adolescent rebellion of the
inheritors, the latter only as a kind of token
distance. These examples actually
domesticate [I'm on form today!] such symbolic
conflict—any conflict is merely 'a quarrel
between generations… [a consequence of]
years of apprenticeship or popular rites of
bourgeois maturation' (193). Bourdieu
continues to settle scores with inheritors, who
monopolise school cultures, pretend, as rebellious
students, to attack the university, or are forced
to compromise with the new petty bourgeoisie in
'the great simile industry' of offering lifestyles
or symbolic services, using their cultural capital
in a profession, while only pretending to
compromise with the petty bourgeois.
The whole argument suggests that symbolic
practices are autonomous enough not to be grasped
by economics or philosophy, featuring not simple
rational actors, but effects of complex
interactions of social fields. However,
those engaged in calculating distinction still
look pretty much like calculating economic
men. The fields that look complex enough to
generate many types of social mobility are really
governed by a 'simple law of distinction' (193 -
4) that takes complex forms. There are only
inheritors and challengers, and inheritors always
win. Class struggle there gets reduced to a
matter of vanity. We are all just acting out
relations of power. Indeed there is a
suggestion that it is only this basic struggle in
culture that has produced classes in the first
place [supported by a quote from Language and
Symbolic Power, page 126] [so is Rancière
advocating instead some kind of Marxism? Not
Althusserian, presumably].
There is a kind of nonchalant and yet
anxiety-ridden tone to Bourdieu's acknowledgements
of the complexity, but this still preserves the
power of sociology. Bourdieu can appear as a
philosopher, noting how arbitrary the social game
is, before turning it into a necessity that can be
studied by science. He can also denounce
illusory utopias in thought. In this way,
'philosophy will be driven away twice'
(194). Ordinary participants are also ruled
out in advance as being able to contribute.
The distinguished elite sees symbolic struggle as
separate from anything economic. The popular
groups indulge in a love of fate, and even find
their only virility in reproduction [including the
reproduction of their way of life,
presumably]. Class struggle is unconscious,
and it works to keep the two classes unable to
meet culturally. Cultural struggle also
shows the disgust of the elite with the popular
body, which causes them to practice social
denegation.
Perhaps what sociology should do is to challenge
this unconscious disgust, by revealing what the
popular bodies are actually like, or force the
return of the repressed, overcome deniability?
Bourdieu also challenges revolutionary discourses
which are far too abstract, based neither on
adequate theory nor empirical study. What
both groups need is to be shown what people are
actually like [in Distinction].
However, the description of what working class
people are actually like is itself nostalgic—there
are no appropriated bourgeois items, no betting or
enjoyment of music, no ability to play or enjoy
symbolic games [no fighting either, I recall --
compare with Willis's
study ] A rugged working class
emerges, who cannot be bothered to play linguistic
games, or experiment with any food other than that
which immediately feeds them, and who disregard
bourgeois notions of tidiness, 'a working class
world more sunk in nature than the "primitive"
universe of the ethnologists' (196). All these are
allegedly paradigmatic qualities. There are
no 'rites of seduction, education or passage' in
their reproduction of their world, not even for
adolescents, and certainly not immigrants from
other ethnic origins [remedied to a great extent
by Bourdieu et al's The Weight of the World?].
Nothing challenges the power of this
habitus. There are no signs whatever of any
attempts to break out, nothing about the attempts
to borrow words, to find a voice, to work with
double meanings or deceptive images—all these get
ignored or dismissed as like the pretensions of
the challengers.
At the bottom of it all lies Bourdieu's
[personal?] quarrel with Kantian aesthetics.
He admits his critique is vulgar and ahistorical,
which immediately removes any historical evidence
about the origin of the Third Critique:
Rancièere locates it as appearing a year after the
beginning of the French Revolution, designed to
address the issue of managing freedom and equality
with the compulsion of duty. Intention was
to develop a new kind of 'equality of sentiment',
a real dimension for the abstract equality of
rights (198). Opponents of equality were
arguing that it had to be limited because people
did not possess equal competence and social
capacities, especially among the brutal working
classes. This is still the same view in
sociology, that people cannot properly use their
freedoms, that they must first of all learn
criteria or refine their senses, although that is
impossible. Kant never saw this gap as an
absolute one—the judgement of taste was formerly
universal, and it could transcend the cultural
divides between the dominant and the supposed
revolutionary alternative [which is what I assume
Rancière means by 'the culture of Rousseauist
nature']. [One immediate problem is that the Third
Critique is impossible to understand,even
for professional philosophers like Scruton, let
alone for any politicians or revolutionaries]
Of course it is possible to 'psychoanalyze' this
idea, and to see in it a matter of using
philosophical distinction to restrict vulgar
enjoyment, opposing taste to the pleasure of the
senses. In fact, it was Burke not Kant who
took this view, though, as an antirevolutionary
step. Kant did not endorse this fully,
nor did he endorse Rousseauist criticism of
luxury. However he insisted, for example
that we can still judge the form of a palace and
feel pleasure, without having to worry about the
sweat of those who built it [speak for your self
buddy]. This denies any eternal splits
between culture and nature, and avoids endorsing
revolutionary terror as the only route to
equality. It is a utopian concept, but he
offers 'the fragile promise of a freedom gained
beyond the opposition between working class
savagery and civilized barbarism' (198-9).
It is a denial of the three metals conception of
the social order. It is an illusion of
progress, but it offers the possibility of playing
the game, as in illusio. [OK but
what happened to these potentials and promises in
the actual world of class struggle --that is
Bourdieu's question surely?]
Cultural communism has the same role. It is
not a 'disincarnated reverie', but a collection of
game possibilities, made more likely now that
artists have become more autonomous, and elite
arts more accessible. This offers a
proletarian possibility of social denegation
[as in stripping art of its bourgeois aura?] , and
an autonomy for proletarian intellectuals [I
think, 199]. It can lead to 'an aesthetic
and militant passion for reappropriation'.
Proletarians interested in art and in the
aesthetic dimensions of their work have been noted
by other writers, including some who have admired
Kant's Third Critique. [A
carpenter's aesthetic pride in his work] is
nothing less than 'the claim of a human right to
happiness that exceeds the rhetoric of proletarian
recruiters, the battle of cottages and castles'
(199).
This is how heresy intrudes into the culture of
the dispossessed. It is not allodoxia.
It is a radical claim for aesthetic legitimacy,
'the right to speak freely', even if this is done
initially in euphemisms borrowed from the
bourgeoisie. There is proletarian speech
which is not just the repetitions of the love of
fate. Even allodoxia can lead to heterodoxia.
Great works can be misinterpreted, but this
misinterpretation can also extend to their
conservatism: 'the shoemakers' insurrection is a
vast misinterpretation of The Republic'(200).
Cultural communism develops an illusion that
encourages the dominated to play the game and gain
a voice. Even some bourgeois have always
attributed an aesthetic voice to the proletariat,
perhaps drawing upon shared notions of cultural
communism.
The apparent ahistoricity of philosophy just shows
it belongs to other times, but so does the
vulgarity of sociology, 'only the disenchanted
banality of the learned opinion of his time'(200),
which includes a taste for demystification, a doxa
in itself. [Then a strange commentary on
Flaubert and Madame Bovary, which is seen
as an attack on cultural communism, or rejection
of the idea that the work of art can be grasped
even by the petty bourgeois Madame Bovary].
Sociology helps to restore order here by sorting
out what belongs to each, attacking the notion of
pure [or universal] art, and offering not the art
itself but the commentary on it [plenty of that
above, including the stuff on the old horny-handed
carpenter] offering its hidden truth,
demystifying it. Scientific language and
rigorous critique is deployed in this sorting and
unveiling. Fashionable words are
accumulated, games of science are used to uncover
the repressed, and the result is a support for
divisions between the different fields and social
classes: 'Frédéric Moreau's Paris, he teaches us,
stops precisely where working class Paris begins'
(201). This conservatism appears as 'the
disenchanted knowledge of the eternity of division
between the possessors and the dispossessed'
(202), a last rebuke to marxist hopes of
revolution. This eternal division also
guarantees the scientific status of the
project. Working class life is shown to
various deniers, but only so they need never go to
visit themselves, which will 'thus... prove
eternally the necessity for science and the secret
of its object' (202).
[This is a formidable battery of critiques, much
better than those far more limited methodological
objections advanced by Bennett,
or the mystical denial of any attempt to grasp the
everyday by De Certeau.
However, I can still see some problems, in my
naive way:
- Surely it is not just
sociology that operates with the notion of
something hidden, but any academic
subject—English literature, history,
geography, or even philosophy. The
alternative seems to assume that things simply
are what they are, and every one can grasp
this—what I have called, rather pompously,
democratic nominalism. Apart from
anything else, it seems to contradict the admiration
for Jacotot's pedagogy, as a strongly
willed struggle to master something.
- The criticisms of the
methods are pretty acute, although Bourdieu
himself recognizes them throughout his work: I
am not sure that these later modifications
should be treated as contradictions. It
might be possible to see later work remedying
some of the problems addressed here,
especially The Weight of the World.
It is also still a bit ironic to find Rancière
engaging with empirical methods at this
level. Surely he has no time at all for
empirical work which assumes a quietist
configuration of the sensible? [see Pelletier's
article] As usual, he is forced
to make empirical statements himself, of
course, including statements about the
existence of cultural transgressors or
omnivores, what the respondents to Bourdieu's
questionnaires are really thinking and so on.
- Of course, he does refer
openly to empirical material himself in his
historical studies, but does he think he has
overcome the problems that he has identified
with Bourdieu? All empirical data have
to be interpreted and read. Is there not
the possibility that he has forced the
proletarians he has studied to adopt the role
of cultural transgressor, heterodox not
allodox? If he thinks he has avoided
this problem, what is the key method that will
help us all to do it?
- There seems to be a
similar ambivalence towards Marxism. He
seems to be wanting to preserve the Marxist
hope of revolutionary change, and that aspect
of Marxist method at least that analyses modes
of production as historical events, not
eternal ones. But this cannot be a
recommendation to go back to Marxism, surely,
not after that spiky rejection of
Althusser. Actually, it might be
improved a bit by rehabilitating
Althusser. At the moment we have an
uncomfortable attempt to argue both that art
is pure and universal, and that historical
circumstances can have an effect, on
philosophical thought at least, as in the
final discussions on Kant. The whole
thing cries out for some notion of relative
autonomy! If only he had not had some personal
and political quarrel with Althusser that
stopped him grasping his work more
sympathetically!
For those who want more
[This is got to be the densest and most allusive
yet, with all sorts of brief references, some of
them metonymic, to dead Germans and Greeks.
I have done my best, o reader]
Philosophy defines itself by defining its
other. Eventually, this was to lead to a
major division between those who had the right to
think and those who laboured with their
hands. This is sometimes justified by simply
confirming what artisans wanted for themselves,
and by assuming an unusual modesty or irrelevance
for philosophy, but the net result was to claim
for philosophy 'the privilege of thought',
originally presented as a fable about differences
in nature, the first of a series of attempts to
find a natural basis for hierarchy.
Sociology starts out by denouncing philosophical
aesthetics as based on exclusion of popular
enjoyment, and criticizing philosophers for
denying the social origins of their thought and
practice—denegation. Originally, this seemed
to be an analysis based on support for the
excluded, but sociology runs into difficulties
when it discusses demystification, and when it
develops its ethics [politics]. In the
course of demystifying Plato, sociology only
confirms and even radicalizes his divisions.
It rationalizes them as a part of a functional
division of labour. Even Plato developed his
notion of hierarchy with irony, and really
believed that the natural order was
arbitrary. Sociology, however places a
necessity at the heart of hierarchy, based on the
'the difference of ethos that makes the artisan
incapable of ever acquiring a taste for the
philosopher's goods—and even of understanding the
language in which their enjoyment is expounded'
(204) [because the need to reproduce capitalism
makes the arbitrary necessary, and because
habituses develop which deeply affect tastes and
understandings. There is no other 'natural'
reason such as a difference in intelligence, for
the artisans' disinterest and incapacity when it
comes to elite culture, although this is quite
likely to be the way in which Rancière's criticism
is read. This is really the basis for
emancipatory education to combat the strong social
forces involved. None of this is explained
by Rancière]. In these [social]
circumstances, universal freedom is an illusion,
and differences become 'inscribed on bodies' and
thus 'indisputable'[but not inevitable!]
These strong divisions are then supported by
social science, and again this is not accessible
to artisans. Sociologists then become the
privileged ones who alone can understand the
situation.
There is sociologism or reductionism to the
symbolic economy involved here, and the issue of
[independent] value is precisely that which is
omitted. The old philosophical question was
to ask 'what is best?', and how will the best ever
prevail over inferior values that often have a
competitive advantage—'a vertiginous question'
(205). Such questions enabled Greek
philosophers to question the values of existing
forms of life, and has led to an insistence that
the pursuit of the best, as an expression of the
human spirit, is in fact the foundation of the
material world. All this has to be
criticized by Sociology and replaced with 'the
cuisines of persuasion and medicines of habitus'
in order to pursue demystification.
Plato had to explain why the best was superior
compared to the issue of 'what works', and does
this by extending the distinction towards social
categories, philosophers on the one hand and
workers on the other. You have to love
philosophy before you can grasp what is best
philosophically, and mere artisanal technique is
insufficient. Other philosophers wanted to
democratize these routes to knowledge, with the
'popular cuisine of rhetoric', or from some
unconditional support for the opinions of the
masses. However, these too were led to
explain philosophy as an exception, this time as
'the fortune of a birth' [a gift we might
say]. This connects philosophy with
aristocracy, but it is still only a poor imitation
of the divine life—the best is really for gods,
and social order can only be seen as a poor
imitation of divine order. This divine order
also contained the possibility of redistribution,
for Plato [as souls were given different
characteristics according to merit before
reincarnation, as I recall]. This took a
later form as the notion of 'the equality of
chances' (206) [a genuinely valuable idea, for
Rancière, not to be dismissed 'merely as the
"dissimulation" of inequality']. However,
for Plato, there was a more conservative
implication in that it would be false nobility
that would be degraded next time around, leading
to a purification of the elite, not a meritocratic
reform of it. The argument is put forward in
the form of 'the childishness of the tale', and
this invites a childish or naive reading [belief
in the natural order of things, maybe]
[Then a strange interlude about an historical
example, poorly referenced in my edition, about
artisans hoping to learn from philosophers, not
realizing the barriers in their way, but imagining
that perseverance will succeed in the end {reads
like a kind of Jude the Obscure story}.
By contrast, Comte saw the only route forward for
emancipation through social sciences, which
required an acceptance of the superiority of
social scientific discourse in the first place,
and a skepticism about the good sense of
artisans. For Comte, the point was to follow
the requirements of science as it dominated
politics, not demand some naive political
equality. Apparently, some people also read
Descartes in this way, as offering a rational
basis for politics. These ideas have been
rejected not only by philosophers, but by
'autodidact shoemakers' (207). What all
these rationalised approaches to politics feature
is a notion that there is a separation between
those who just want to enjoy appearances, and
those who want to analyse competencies and
hierarchies].
There are rival principles in the formation of
democratic and inclusive political
formations. One offers a demystified world
free of superstition, with ranks based on
aptitudes and functions. Even Adam Smith
appears to have supported this view, seeing the
origin of differences of 'character' in social and
educational conditions. He also criticized
government by elites on the grounds that they did
not understand even the basic operations of
industry. However, even this fixes a
particular place for artisans in work and
skill. 'The social' will be based on these
functional distinctions, and matters of utility,
and the ability to philosophize in leisure will
still be reserved for the elite. Hegel was
one of those who criticized this utilitarian
modernity in favour of more universal notions than
those offered by political economy.
The rival approach focuses on 'the sublimities of
aesthetic heaven [rather] than the benefits of
labour' (208). Enjoyment or enthusiasm was
to be the basis, and it was available to
all. Kant develops this idea, and argues
that even 'the very coherence of the elite's
discourse' presupposes 'an aesthetic sensus
communis' that will transcend savagery: the
identification of the best will establish
equality. This idea immediately confronted
the residual understanding that there can only be
divine leisure and elite leisure as the leaders of
civilization. The tension between these
ideas lead to subsequent 'vertigo', and 'cross -
plays' between politics and work, the concrete
practices of demystification and the notion of
heavenly egalitarianism. Scientists opted
for the former, and see work and productivity as
breaking down divisions. Unfortunately, the
proletarians themselves took the latter view and
saw 'humanity in heaven of the poets and
philosophers' (209), ignoring the claims of those
who argued that they would only produce imitation,
and recognising in the praise of productivity,
condemnation of the idle among them.
[Massive generalization here of course].
The productivists still found it difficult to
decide what did involve the pursuit of the best
and whether it was compatible with 'brotherly
harmonies'.However, productivism dominated, even
artists' conceptions of themselves.
Educators believe in providing the minimum of
aesthetic education to secure compliance to the
state, but enabling the best students to be
detached.
The paradoxes affect Marx. He turns to
social practice in criticizing Feuerbach, but that
is just as paradoxical. It's not just that
practice opposes theory and speculation: the real
problem is practice as opposed to technique, free
practice, which actually resembles theory in that
'it neither applies nor verifies' (209) Marx was
equivocal about this, using terms such as '"man's
own labour"", without specifying what this 'own'
meant. He wants to see that it is not labour
itself but the product of labour 'that fulfils
reason'(210). It was material progress, such
as in transport, that would produce a genuine
universal community, ending the old artificial
philosophical notions of social relations and
representative politics.
It is mechanization and productive practice that
will lead to democracy as an end. Yet
philosophers like Schiller were already referring
to the 'barbarism of civilized elites'.
There is also the realization that advances in
productive technique would not lead to greater
leisure for intellectual work for the working
class [apparently noted by Adam Smith again], but
would increase the leisure time for the other
class. Marx's vision of communism was forced
to shift from inequality of leisure to 'the
aesthetic figure of the reintegrated man' (211).
Education is no longer sufficient to get there
because it is dominated by productivism, and
strengthens the tendency towards homogenized
practice and positivism, leaving out the
philosophical and political. What follows is
a focus instead on demystification, including the
demystification of democracy, a denial of the
effectiveness of education to lead to
emancipation, and the belief that what will be
produced is not hybrids but 'proletarians without
qualities'. The removal of their former
qualities still might bring about transformation,
Marx thought, with sensibility emerging only after
'social dehumanisation'. This tension was to
be solved by a separation between radical
philosophies of freedom, and merely skeptical
'sociologies of dispossession'. Of course in
Marx's hands, demystification does argue that
social relations underpin current ideas and
ideologies [seen as the difference between
philosophical onanism and productive sex,
212]. But this seemed unsatisfactory for
Marx who wants to preserve another set of values
or qualities beyond the social, as in his liking
for and advocacy of literary giants and Greek
philosophy. Demystification can lead to
defiance, but not itself to the production of
culture.
The critique [has a negative and the positive
dimension]—idealist philosophy is reduced to the
qualities of social subjects, but there is no way
to close the gap between existence and essence
[communism]. The more we develop social
knowledge, the more we suppress philosophy except
through ironic commentary. It is possible to
demystify the demystifiers, including those who
thought they would develop a fully adequate social
science to guide proletarian politics [including
poor old Proudhon again] : Marx wants to rescue
the notion of a higher nobility instead.
However, the implications of the social basis of
knowledge are powerful enough to suggest that
artisans themselves cannot perceive this nobility,
although the best ones can pursue demystification
as a kind of practical technique.
The needs of 'autodidact shoemakers' are simply
sidestepped [maybe ironically, a quotation
suggests, 213]. Marx never grasps the
potential of 'the thought of democratic
strangeness' [hybridity]. Marxism instead
supports the figures of the leader and the
scientist. The leader emerges where the
social is not strongly developed enough to press
towards democracy, requiring an external decision
about what is needed and what a proper revolution
is. The scientist attempts to complete
Marxism, to ground it in philosophy, to
incorporate sociology and economics—but this
becomes 'interminable'. And sociologists
develop their own stances— Veblen on the leisure
class, Weber on disenchantment and new rational
forms of hierarchy. These become popular and
banal, appealing even to the liberal elites, and
until industrialization fully developed, they seem
to offer a number of pluralist demystifications
without reduction to class. Now, sociology
turns on 'one or two simple axioms: the thing
cannot be valuable in itself but draws its
consistency from social concourses and its worth
from social distinctions. Nothing new can
happen that is not obtained through the
arrangement of the small number of properties of a
determined socius' (214). 'Electoral
sociology'epitomises the developments, with
technical interpretation bolstered by references
to various notions like instinct.
As a result, the notion of democracy is also
simulated. Genuine democracy is denied in
favour of [social reproduction], the ways in which
class ethos is united with symbolic
discrzmination. Such reproduction actually
is found at its best in areas where equality seems
to be claimed—in politics, education, and
aesthetics [clearly Bourdieu is the target here
specifically]. Faith in and hope for
equality is squashed by sociological
critique. Although well motivated, this can
never guide the path to democracy, nor is it
democratic itself. Instead, it serves to
critique philosophy to suit 'our liberal -
corporatist order: the liberal resignation to the
game of interests driving the world, and the
syndicalist reduction of egalitarian hopes'
(214-15). Sociological demystification suits
corporate interests and conformity, the need to
manage opinions, survey populations, develop
rational pedagogy. Instead of democracy we
get 'sociocracy' (215). [V good. It reminds me of
the point that gramscian critique of academic
elitism played nicely into the hands of
educational managers and rationalisers. So
will philosophical hope though -- the bastards
will add piety to their mission statements]
The critical distance of philosophy was
aristocratic. The demand of artisans to
enter the aesthetic heaven was obstinate.
However, sociology reduces both by demystifying
them and making them equivalent. Scientific
investigation takes all this as a socially
necessary development, at the same time as
denouncing the [culturally] arbitrary. The
analysis of the school shows this best. It
demystifies elite culture in an attempt to make it
closer to popular feeling and normal interaction,
but it also says that 'difference is irreducible
and the promise of instruction a lie' (215) [this
is surely bollox. Difference is irreducible
and instruction a lie all the time the mechanism
of social reproduction is not acknowledged.
This may disillusion trainee teachers who are
sustained by utopian hope and all that, but
dissolution will hit them eventually anyway once
they realize that 'making education fun', or
whatever, does fuck all]. Demystification is
more popular [really? When did sociology
ever become popular?]. However it leads to
the figures of the barbarian incapable of
understanding on the one hand, and the smart Alec
game player on the other. This is a kind of
consolation since it offers 'the lucid knowledge
that everyone can discover reasons for the
blindness of his or her neighbour'.
Pretensions to science destroy philosophical
illusion, including attempts to define the best
and the equal, and this operates by rubbing our
noses in working class conditions and culture, as
'unavoidable social positivities that heavenly
discourse denied', such as 'undershirts sticking
to bodies in working class cafes'[a trope in
Bourdieu]. Sociology does argue that these
divisions are only places in a symbolic field,
where beliefs and culture can be exchanged or
discarded. But this is a nihilist option,
echoing Marx's view on the bankruptcy of the
social in capitalism, and deployed only as 'the
form of professorial cunning' to debate with
students who deny the social on the one hand, or
who see it as 'consistent' or unavoidable on the
other. 'This equivalence of dogmatism and
skepticism is also the real knowledge of the
sociocracy' (216).
Can philosophy find a new place? We should
not develop nostalgia, or criticize simulacra with
some notion of Truth—'one cannot do without
imitation'. Can imitations be evaluated in some
independent sense, not just as symbolic or
economic? Can we restore notions of the best
or the equal? In particular, it might be
possible to draw on notions of freedom in the past
and see them as imitations of the future, despite
paradox. Even Adorno thought there was some
mileage in encouraging the poor to admire 'the
ostentatations of luxury' rather than demystifying
and rebuking the pretensions of arts and
institutions. The issue is whether
institutions images and discourses still imitate
democratic hope. Philosophy can be
implicated in these discussions, although it must
not give lessons, reawaken its traditional
requirements for supremacy and purity, or continue
to defend its borders. These led to the
dislike of autodidactic thought and 'bastardy,
whose modern name is ideology' (217). This
purity is not threatened by the occasional venture
into the 'erotic or mechanical, economic or
performatic'.
Overall, what of the artisan as a hybrid? Is
it possible to believe in 'the hierarchy of values
and the equality of mixture'? This has
interested philosophers since the Greeks, and is
central in Marx. It is important to develop
a philosophy that will pursue this reflection.
[Overall, it seems to me there are a number of
important criticisms to raise, to add to the ones
I have already made. The main one so far has
been the way in which academic work, even platonic
philosophy and especially sociology, has been
relentlessly criticised and suspected of ulterior
motives and ideological effects. Sometimes,
an ingenious reading is required to make this
point—the minor writings of Sartre, or the letters
of Marx and Engels. By contrast, the worker
artisans of the 1830s are exonerated and admired,
or forgiven at least in their attempts to gain
some self respect and some limited reforms in the
face of an onslaught by capitalism. It's
easy to see why this might be seen as the reverse
of what actually happened. Marxism for all
its flaws had a far greater political impact, for
good and ill, than did anarchosyndicalism, unless
we invoke the old consolation of the moral
victory.
The one sidedness of the critique can be seen
especially when applied to Bourdieu. Of all
the dominant academic disciplines that have
justified hierarchy as natural, surely it is
British empirical psychology that excels here,
with its attempt to pin down measure and gradate
'intelligence' using various ethnocentric tests
and measures, and having a role in developing a
tripartite education system. Those ideas
probably still underpin the massive assessment and
testing regime that we have the UK at the
moment. Bourdieu's sociology by comparison
is a massively critical resource. Ranciere
wants to dismiss the criticisms made of the
arbitrariness of the culture and values system of
education as tokenist, or as having the unrealised
consequence of solidifying the positivist
necessity of social reproduction, and there is
something in this criticism in helping to develop
a kind of technocratic critical neo-liberal
approach. But at least he makes the
criticism, quite unlike functionalist and
empiricist social science but simply takes the
social system as read as natural or
inevitable. The fixity of Bourdieu's
categories and the necessity of social
reproduction are clearly historically located in a
system that deserves root and branch criticism,
whereas the fixity of psychology is categories
claims to be based in a scientific understanding
of nature itself, even the ways in which brains
work.
When it comes to assessing critical potential, we
need to look at what readers make of it in any
case. Ranciere says that even bourgeois
idealist philosophies can inspire critique when
read by the struggling autodidacts and
artisans. Why Bourdieu's sociology, or
Sartre's Marxism, cannot be seen as having a
potential in this way is completely unclear.
Ranciere wants to argue that there is something
universal about idealism, but even positivism has
a universal appeal as well—once we know how to
demystify, we can go around demystifying whatever
it is that meets our eye.
His choice of enlightening bourgeois philosophy is
itself mystifying. He has a lot of time for
Kant and his notion of the universal community
based on aesthetic sensibility. Admiring the
third critique like this is surely ironic from the
man who wants to condemn sociology and Marxism for
being inaccessible and requiring experts to decode
and apply it. Kant is unreadable, even for
admirers like Scruton. Even the most patient
and persistent autodidact would not go very far
with it, certainly not compared with Marx or
Bourdieu. Rancière imagines that the impact
of struggling through Kant will be the same for
the shoemaker as it is for him, a simple
denegation of the role of cultural capital.
Come to that, Ranciere's own style is admirable
but inaccessible, a classic example of the elite
writing that Bourdieu condemns, raising questions
of the the audience for the work. We know
that Rancière sat alongside the occupiers of the
Lip, but Bourdieu was also politically active and
wrote in a far more accessible way. If
Rancière is writing to foster modern
anarchosyndicalism, he has overdone it to a
massive extent with such detailed, obsessively
paranoid critique of works that are themselves not
easy to access. The Philosopher and His
Poor and Althusser's Lesson both end
with a realisation that this is all likely to be
seen as scholasticism of little relevance, leaving
only a rather pathetic hope that it might have
some wider significance should have revolutionary
movement ever arise and should they be tempted to
turn to Marx or Bourdieu and be misled. It's
likely that the real beneficiaries will be
academics wanting to dismiss marxism and sociology
in their own research programmes (eg in
educational philosophy).
What were left with is an attempt to talk up the
potential of one approach, and to ruthlessly strip
away the potential of rivals. His choice of
rivals is presumably explicable in terms of the
old combats of the 1960s as well as an interest in
pursuing a programme of his own as an
intellectual. There are far more worthy
targets.]
Afterword to the English language edition
(2002).
The book was written in France in 1983, and to the
arguments need to be situated. Proletarian
Nights examine the French labour movements
and social conflicts against the notions of
historical materialism and avant gardism. It
focused on the intellectual revolution in working
class thought, but was careful not to overvalue
that thought as popular culture. That
thought indicated 'the strong symbolic rupture
with a culture of craft or popular sociability —in
short, with working class "identity"' (219).
It was not a positive affirmation of working class
values, but a challenge to the traditional social
division reserving thought to those who had
leisure. Activist French workers were
claiming to be fully human speaking beings.
They did not import thought from elsewhere, and
nor did they fully affirm their own culture.
Instead it was 'the transgressive will to
appropriate… The language and culture of the
other, to act as if intellectual equality were
indeed real and effectual'. This involved a
critique of Marxist orthodoxy and much social
science about the dominated classes and their
apparent cultures, and how their identities were
emerging through class struggle. All this
work preserved the same division of labour, and
the notion that each could only do what was
appropriate for their own business.
This book addressed this social division through
critiquing its theoretical core. It became
important to do so in the specific period of the
1970s in France, when the socialists came to
power, Marxism revived, and the social sciences
were seen as providing the basis for the
egalitarian social reforms. Education was
central to the notion of the reduction of
inequality, but it was important to know what
equality was. The sociology of Bourdieu
became an important source of answers for French
socialism after 1981, especially Reproduction
and Distinction. These books focused
on symbolic violence that kept the dominated
classes in their place, showing how the school
system itself excluded the dominated through the
development of a whole ethos.
Socialist reformers responded by attempting to
reduce the impact of high culture 'by making
school more convivial, more adapted to the social
abilities of the children of low income classes
who were then becoming more and more the children
of immigration' (221). Two versions of
symbolic violence were developing. One
argued that the dominated class were having high
cultural forms imposed on them, but the other
argued that it was the division between the elect
and their role on the one hand, and the dominated
and their '"autothchthonous" [native]'culture on
the other that was the real symbolic violence [a
far more abstract philosophical form].
A new political struggle emerged between this
modernist pedagogy supported by sociological
analyses, and 'the old republican pedagogy'
offering universal education delivered to everyone
in the same way. These two positions opposed
each other and alternated. A conflict of the
disciplines also broke out, with the social
sciences being opposed to the idea of the concepts
of political philosophy especially those relating
to the common good and the citizen Republic.
Rancière himself found it hard to take a
position. It was necessary to expose the
complicity between sociological demystification of
distinction and the old conservatism which saw
everyone is having to remain in their place [weak
I thought]. But this denunciation also
seemed to support the anti socialist
liberalism. The critique of sociology, the
reestablishment of political philosophy, and the
turn to republican universalism eventually
produced 'the great reactive current' that
denounced '68 and offered a return to 'proper'
democracy with a selection of republican
elites. It was necessary to separate from
this dominant trend as well.
What this led to was a broader programme looking
at social science and the ideas of a 'poetics of
knowledge', as in The Names of History
(1994), an examination of literary procedures
which produce social knowledge. Later work
also pursued 'linking the modern idea of
literature with democracy'. However, the
issue of equality was also important, and it
should not be exhausted by the possibilities on
offer. Democracy and egalitarianism could
mean something quite different. This was
pursued first through the research on Jacotot: it was not
the pedagogy so much as the radical reformulation
of egalitarianism that appealed. Equality
can not be posed as a goal to be pursued by
pedagogues, but must be seen instead as 'a
proposition, an initial axiom' (223). Such
an axiom is also implied in inegalitarianism
itself, since giving orders to an inferior must
assume that the order is understood, and so the
inferior 'must already be the equal of the
superior'[only in this very abstract way].
What follows is radical. Jacotot himself was
a pessimist, thinking there would be no political
effects, since intellectual emancipation would
always be individual. But this shows the
paradoxical nature of equality as something which
is an underlying principle of all order and yet
which cannot be seen to be functioning in normal
social relations. This makes it unattainable
by progressive pedagogues and liberals, and those
who saw it as a constitutional matter: it cannot
be a part of normal society. Jacotot argued
that 'equality is neither formal nor real', it
cannot be found in social routines, but is
'fundamental and absent, current and
untimely'. The only way that proletarians
can attain inequality is through 'the
transgressive appropriation of an intellectual
equality whose privilege others had reserved for
themselves'. These notions are outside the
conventional debates, whether they take the form
of universal law, or campaigns for equal rights
for different communities.
The end of the Cold War also prompted this sort of
reexamination. It made French revolutionary
thoughts look like 'a great funeral of two
centuries of egalitarian utopias' (224).
There was an intellectual reaction against
socialist illusions, and a new social realism on
behalf of socialist politicians. The
reaction reduced Marxism to the worst kind of
determinism. It also identified governments
firmly with international business. The
denouncing of class as archaic failed to stop even
more archaic conflicts emerging with racism and
xenophobia: there was no end of ideology, no
simple turn to the functional administration of
society.
In these circumstances, another idea in this book
seemed pertinent—'the link between the power of
equality and that of appearance'. Democracy
is not just limited to the legal forms of the
state and the way interests are represented.
Nor is it a matter of consultation and management
of different interests under universal law.
Demos is not a notion of an ideal people
nor the sum of the parties, nor even a particular
sector, but something which acts as 'a
supplement'[something like an assumed idea always
in excess of actual politics]. This led to a
subsequent notion of politics that is more than
just power and how it is legitimated: 'the forms
of the political were in the first place those of
a certain division of the sensible', the way in
which the perceptual world is divided into 'shares
and social parties'(225). The 'sensible
evidence' that is produced defines a notion of
proper roles and relations, the relations between
individuals and groups. In turn this affects
what may be seen or heard, what is legitimate
speech and what is mere noise.
It is this dividing line that is the real theme or
of all the efforts, including Proletarian
Nights, which can be seen as describing a
disruption of this division, between working days
and resting nights. The theme appears in
this book [P&P] in the idea that
the absence of time for thought is a classic
'symbolic division of times and spaces' (226):
spaces and times outside platonic formal divisions
were ignored, but were crucial to the notion of
the demos. This is a democratic activity
that underpins social parties and organizations.
The current work divides the political into
'police and politics', depending on whether the
official divisions of the sensible are upheld or
challenged, or whether empty hybrid spaces and
supplements are recognized or not, dramatized and
activated. Politics must therefore mean
dissensus but not just the conventional opposition
of interests, rather the production of a
heterogeneous sensible world. This can be
seen as the aesthetics of politics, since it is
activity that makes visible what had been earlier
'excluded from a perceptual field'. As an
example, proletarians and women might be separated
by official roles, but can participate in some
other kind of community, speaking beyond their
allocated scripts. 'Politics is completely
an affair of the antagonistic subjectivation of
the division of the sensible'.
This subjectivation takes individual and
collective forms, and they are represented in
different kinds of learned discourse. This
'is the vital thread tying together all of my
research' (227). There is not been a form or
plan, but a series of 'discovered necessities and
encountered contingencies'. It is not a
partisan speaking on behalf of those below, but
rather 'reflecting on the relation of division of
discourses', their borders and interplay, and how
the effects of speech can be detected. It is
not just a matter of moving from politics to
literature and aesthetics: 'the object itself of
my research demanded the line moved incessantly
across the borders'[classic bad faith,
acknowledged to be opportunism in the interview]
which constitute normal scholarly disciplines.
more social
theorists here
|