Notes on:
Rancière, J. (2011) Staging the People:
The Proletarian and his Double.
Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso
[Very brief notes only here. This text is a
collection of most of the articles published in
the journal Revoltes Logiques. These
almost exclusively address the French context in a
great deal of detail, and often consist of
disputes between various authors. This
volume has a social historical theme, and I have
focused on the main theme of stressing
heterogeneity against categories].
Chapter 1 The Proletarian and His Double, Or,
The Unknown Philosopher
This study is neither philosophy nor
history. It is based on a small sample of
workers in the 1830s, with the intent of finding
out what they might have thought, to oppose to
Marxist discourses about proletarian
consciousness. The study is not to be
grounded in factory struggles or the development
of working class communities. What results
might be seen as 'the agitation and chattering of
[worker] intellectuals' (21).
Hoping to discover a unitary class consciousness
nonetheless, what emerged was a split, a series of
particularistic discourses. There was a
unifying theme though, 'the denial of the
identity imposed by Others' (22), a rejection of
the labeling of themselves as barbarians, a
'strategic identity'. There was still the
routine sort of resistance, over factory
regulation or sundry 'illegal popular actions'
(23) [including poaching]. There was no
particular interest in utopias. There was a
sense of a systematic attempt to fragment labour,
deskill and raise productivity, and to organize
the whole of life, including leisure, and this did
lead to some attempts to set up worker production
after taking over factories.
The discourses used to express these views were
clearly vulnerable to colorization or
recuperation, however, and workers delegates were
happy to support the 1851 Republic, or to argue
that women should stay in the home [rescued a bit
in later chapters], to reduce the supply of
skilled labour, a 'corporative
Malthusianism' (24), and later to support
Vichy. However, all this could be rescued
[by Marxists] by recruiting these worker spokesmen
to the same side as revolutionary thinkers,
against more plebeian proletarians. However,
this was not sustained by examination of the
reports of Saint-Simonians, who took a rather
philanthropic gaze, and supported 'apostolic
devotion' [and some more material appear as when
discussing 'Icarian'movements -- there
is a good side to derision towards theorists, and
their habits of poaching at work could still be
seen as a kind of plea for autonomous production,
proper workmanship, mute resistance. The
generalized collectivism of political discourses
is undermined, and so is the 'lightness' (25) of
philosophy].
Encountering a collection assembled from Gauny was
the turning point. It offered a first person
experience, and philosophical commentary. It
showed the despair of having to be merely a
labourer, to work for others, to experience 'loss
of identity', but the solution lay not in radical
consciousness, but in insisting on proper
encounters with poetry and Saint-Simonians,
separating 'rebellious energy' from 'servile
labour'. There was no time for those
radicals who called for further sacrifice instead
of pleasure. It was about personal
emancipation but also 'the echo in one's self of
the pains of others' (26). These themes
appeared in the other work, a sense of exile,
skepticism towards bourgeois definitions of labour
including skilled labour, dis-connections from
conventional depictions of workers, and a desire
to see what happens 'on the other side of the
barrier'. Proletarians had little time for
utopians [an aside about Saint-Simonians says that
the working class apostles they recruited had only
joined because they were 'egoists', fed up with
proletarians]. Some sought utopia in
America.
So this discourse can be seen as not avant-garde
consciousness informed by Marxist science, nor a
systematization of experience developed by a
political group. Instead, individuals
somehow found themselves acting as spokespersons,
and they seemed to work in networks, 'taking
speech to the masses' (28). However,
attempts to collectivize were elusive for the same
reasons, since rebellion was a personal struggle
with egoism, impossible to universalize.
Organization restores workers to a subordinate
position. This is characteristic of the
discourse of the workers at the time, insightful,
but unable to establish identifications with
others.
This is why we cannot bring to bear either
philosophy or history. It is too unsystematic and
sectarian to qualify for philosophy, and no
specialists to extend or sanitize the
discourses. Artisans express their identity
in practice, in the production of useful objects
or in struggle. Some philosophers then
borrowed these practices to try and weave them
together, develop a science of production and
struggle. Meanwhile other 'false
philosophers and false workers' (29), tried to
denounce it all as simulation and illusion.
Quite understandably, proletarians tried to
develop their own forms of art and speculation,
especially those that 'do not upset too much the
academic existence of those who profess
[alternatives?]'. This can be seen as a
deterioration of philosophy, and it does present
many of the features of ideology. But it can
still be seen as an answer to the radical question
of 'what does it mean to think?'.
History [and social science] will not get very far
either if they treat these emergent discourses as
objects or cultural facts, and try to associate
them with the other factors such as technology or
lifestyles. But this will involve them in
assuming some cultural subject, and explaining its
detailed evolution, and this will always refer to
habitus, with conservative consequences [as with
Bourdieu], and which conceals precisely what is
singular. A concern with practices not
ideology is also a problem, and again we are
denying the right of those engaging in working
class practices to produce their own discourses
and ideologies. As a result, this sort of
discourse tended to disappear from history and
from philosophy, as something insignificant,
something that cannot fit categories. This
has consequences for R' s own account which must
appear 'labyrinthine and evanescent' (30).
We can verify it using historical procedures, but
applying historians' discourses would only make
them disappear.
Instead we have a kind of poetry [described almost
in terms of being an indirect free discourse,
31]. There is also an interesting allegory
by Canguilhem about paths leading from the
Sorbonne either upwards to the Pantheon or
downwards to the prefecture of police—ending in
philosophical idealism or in a dubious
sociological materialism. Instead, R
recommends that we pursue side roads, transversal
connections one might say, even rhizomes [steady
Dave]: perhaps he is even saying that we should
get lost like Lather.
He gets really arty here, and quotes a proletarian
in a poem by Rilke who encounters a woman of the
people and resists any sort of intervention,
assuming that they will be able to think out what
has happened for themselves—'Not disturbing the
reflections of poor people' (32). R says it
is OK to disturb these reflections, in order to
understand them and the paths that they actually
take.
We end with Diderot, and his story about how the
faces of children change into something much more
unpleasant as they start work. R's
interested in those who 'did not want to change
[their] face'(33), who did not want to
adjust to proletarian work by becoming sordid,
bold and angry. There is a 'hollowness'
here, but an important one to tell us who we are
and what we are doing.
Chapter 2 Heretical Knowledge and the
Emancipation of the Poor
[Inspiring stuff about the determination of the
French workers to educate themselves and thus to
free themselves up from state institutions,using
whatever intellectual resources came to
hand. This chapter puts Jacotot firmly in
his context, and we have a very nice summary of
his principles. The discussion also extends
to non professional medicine!]
We start with a lot of debates about what to call
the textile workers of Lyons, who were a pretty
radical bunch and who issued their own radical
newspaper. Apparently, they had to put up
with the 'insulting nickname' canut [which
Wikipedia tells me referred to a bare cane,
without any embellishments, a sign of
poverty]. Some alternatives were mentioned,
but they were all controversial. It was
evidently an important issue, and it engaged all
sorts of linguists as well as workers themselves,
and a radical journalist, who also happened to be
a promoter of '"magnetism… knowledge of the
vital spirit"' (36), to which we shall
return. The whole discussion shows the
interpenetration of scholarly and popular ideas,
'encounters between semi schooled proletarians and
semi proletarian scholars'(37), aiming at the
emancipation of the proletariat, pursuing a notion
of 'the plebeian "care of self"' that also
involved solidarity. R notes that the struggles
formed 'conflicts over recognition' after all (38)
[ Valentine
says he was apparently not interested in modern
forms of these which were not proper politics].
[Some of these popular ideas look a bit wacky --
see below for a defence that borders on an
apology]
[R tells us in footnotes that these terms also
have specific meanings in ancient Greece.
Proletarian originally meant a worker who was so
marginal to Greek society that they were not even
allowed to have family names, to marry or to
establish any sort of ancestry. Plebeians on
the other hand were those who are not allowed to
speak. It all turns on the idea that social
divisions were ultimately divine. This gives
a kind of background to the disputes about naming
or speaking, since Rancière tells us that these
'archaeological meaning(s) [were] quite
contemporary during the period I am
discussing'. It might even explain hidden
meanings behind recent controversies when a UK
politician called a policeman a pleb and denied
his right to comment on the MP's behaviour!].
Plebs thought that they had equal intelligence,
however, and that 'intellectual
rehabilitation...was the first of all a battle for
names' (38). This also fueled the demand for
popular education, which sometimes took the form
of demanding more instruction and less
[domesticating] education, and sometimes a demand
for useful knowledge.
Enter Jacotot, who specifically addressed
artisans. The main point here is that you
can start with anything and then relate it to
everything else, implying self emancipation, an
ability to write about anything, ultimately to
redepict 'the surrounding universe'(39). The
heroic carpenter Gauny, described in Proletarian
Nights, did just this, starting with the
bags used for packing lentils. Naming things
would involve taking possession of them and their
determinations. In the case of Gauny, there
was also a homegrown natural history project
starting with pebbles and shells, and leading to
speculation about the factors that have shaped
them. R sees this as an inheritance of
Enlightenment and also 'the illuminist tradition
of analogy'[and there seem to be hints of the
Victorian object lesson]. Writing helps this
process. Gauny went on to consider the linguistic
properties of language by discussing issues with
'a young soldier'. This is what is meant by
'translatability', between things and words, and
between everyday experience and the world of
science.
Translatability means an egalitarian relationship,
and 'intellectual apprenticeship', based on common
sense and a grasp of the analytic qualities of
language. This is what Jacotot meant by
equality of intelligence, and it required no
intermediate 'explaining schoolmaster' which would
imply inequality. A further implication was
that parents could not teach their own
children. There is no priority for oral
culture, however, because the apprenticeship was
to lead to a second stage, writing. Here the
learner might know a song or a prayer by heart,
and they were then invited to write down the
corresponding letters. In this way, learners
acquired their own 'dictionary and
encyclopedia'(41). Unlike Plato, Jacotot saw
writing as extending thought, and 'breaking the
monopoly of any school or explainer'. The
third stage involved addressing a material thing
as a third term, a bridge between minds.
Here, learned schoolmasters might be useful, 'but
only on the condition of being precisely treated
as a thing' (42), [talking textbook].
The underlying assumptions here are classic
Enlightenment ones. Apprenticeship is the
same as the logic of invention, and both depend on
rational analysis. We are to develop 'a
scholars' logic', taking small amounts of
fundamental data to develop a world of
knowledge. However, there is also a deeper
'experience and thought of symbolic
appropriation', which predates the
Enlightenment. Here, the universe itself
speaks, reason can be found everywhere [sounds
like a pre-philosophical version of the 17th
century notion of necessary reason?], words and
ideas develop from the resemblance between words
and things. This is what needs to be grasped
through apprenticeship: it leads to revelation.
This looks Christian or occult. The position
was apparently called illuminism. Socialist
equality was definitely linked to these 'archaic
visions of relationships between life, language
and history', combining logical analysis with 'a
super-rationalism of analogies'(43).
However, it was not simply a matter of holding
contradictory views, but trying to conjoin them,
sometimes in order to enable more people to
appropriate reason, at the cost of a 'rickety
philosophy' for socialism. But the excluded
could not enter 'the world of natural reason' in
any other way. Gauny shows how speculative
thinking about the origin of the characteristics
of pebbles expresses a crucial 'right to reason'.
However, there is a clear risk of seeming to take
sides against official sciences. The battle
also raged with medicine confronting alternative
therapies, including homoeopathy. Similar
struggles were also apparent in devising various
musical methods, [compare with the Victorian
Hullah method ] gymnastics or popular educational
movements [so it's not a response to the risks of
second modernity after all]. One impulse was
that science was seen to represent 'the management
of privilege', and popular science was intended to
break this monopoly.
To what extent did this depend on the occult,
however? [A material case already existed]
Apprenticeship privileged knowledge acquired by
the individual as opposed to that which is imposed
on them, including surgical intervention.
There is always a danger that social privilege
dominates over 'disinterested research and
humanitarian commitment'(44). The response
was a demand to take independent charge of
instruction and health. Jacotot generalized
exactly like this, aiming at general
emancipation, and wanted fathers to teach
their own children, for example, after they were
emancipated themselves.
A radical advocate of self treatment, Raspail,
also argued that the proletarian should learn to
read in order to 'become his own doctor' (45),
develop their own medicine cabinet, in an
'autonomous practice of health'.
Intellectual emancipation would therefore lead to
social emancipation, and was a model for it.
Each person was obliged to pursue this
emancipation.
The propagation of knowledge took place initially
in a 1 to 1 relationship. The teacher
encouraged emancipation and also gave object
lessons, for example providing a book. The
model was based on the common notion of
initiation, again an attempt to build a social
identity, found in widespread friendship
societies. The family was central, even to
Jacotot, rather than developing
institutions. The mother was also involved
in giving children knowledge even if they did not
possess it themselves, and that included knowledge
of keeping healthy. This is a departure from
other attempts to glorify families. Those
might have been driven by male power seeing
families as compensation, or from attempts to
imitate bourgeois families. Here, the family
is to emancipate. Initially, proletarians
were not expected to have families, so a demand
for legitimate families was an early claim to
possess 'a "sign of intelligence"' (48).
Rational beings lived in families. Jacotot
argued that if fathers could give children food,
they should also be able to give them the
knowledge. The father should 'serve as
"ignorant schoolmaster" for his son' (48).
The intention to expand care in the home was meant
to challenge expanding clinical knowledge which
tended to be concentrated in the medical
profession and the hospital. Hospitals were
unpopular places that separated people from
families and diminished their sense of self,
turning them into objects for
experimentation. Autopsy prevented the worst
example: a 'mass of flesh' was returned not a
body, and it cost people 27 francs. Visitors
were sometimes appalled to see patients surrounded
by medical students, and there was a lot of
anxiety about 'medical mutilation' (49).
There was a need to get back control over your own
body.
The expanded role for the family contradicted the
development of specialized institutions, including
schools. It modelled the classic education
of the artisan which extended to playing a
suitable role in the family. When achieved,
education lead to emancipation, the realization of
common intelligence and of interdependence,
including relations between parents and
children. The family offers an expanded
self, a 'different sociability' (50), based on
reason and solidarity. It opposed an
alternative vision of socialism, where new
public/State social organizations replaced egos
and families. The latter apparently arose
with an interpretation of a widely known theory of
Helvetius, that saw education as having a decisive
effect on intelligence. Benthamites and
Owenites saw this as arguing that
circumstances determined intelligence, and that
[public] education was needed to combat 'the
anarchy of family egoism and obscurantism'.
Others read Helvetius as advocating self
education, the struggle for individuals to become
rational beings, to attain equal intelligence
through emancipation, and an education system that
passed intelligence on to family members.
However, Jacotot himself was skeptical about
whether society would ever become rational, but
one of his disciples, Ratier, was more
optimistic. Other people subscribed to the
general view of transmitting intelligence,
including a freemason master dyer (51) and a
carriage manufacturer. All were devoted to
'helping their kind'.
There was a unity between a science for
emancipated individuals, and a science that made
them able to help, in a whole 'web of practical
socialism', which involved 'relief and charity',
unlike the distinctions [between these activities
and proper politics] introduced by both Proudhon
and Marx. The same distinctions are found in
the medical disputes as well, for example among
homoeopaths - some opposed more popular
versions. The same goes for the 'magnetists'
(52), who divided between spiritualists and
charlatans on the one hand, and those practicing
'sympathy between sentient beings' on the
other. The revolution of 1848 had
opposed magnetism, and the charlatan clairvoyants
had emerged afterwards. The underlying
notion of vitalism was strongly connected to
'belief in socialism' (53), however, and
eventually a more secular version developed,
claiming to offer both a science and particular
moral or philanthropic effects. The former
tended to be emphasized in order to fight off the
charlatans, but a lingering 'sentiment of
humanity'retained the moral values. A
particular meeting even appealed to women, and one
claimed to be interested in founding a 'new
humanitarian church'(53). Prominent members
were prosecuted, however. One development
involved 'a course in somnambulic education'
[!] (54), and 'rational magnetism' was seen
as conveying universal pleasures and insight.
There was a notion of people joining with their
fellow creatures in an investigation of the
unknown. The unknown was to be pursued from
a basis in what was known. Jacotot turned
this into a method as a way of harnessing
'sympathetic sentiment'(55), although for him
there could be no 'pantheistic or spiritualistic
excess'. Others, including Gauny, retained
some religious connotations. The movement
from known to unknown, in other words, could be
connected to a number of particular options and
types of rationality, with the notion of a
humanity as 'the middle term'- all agreed on 'an
idea of the ethical community' (56), as 'a
stylization of individual life'. A speaking
being, an autonomous subject was to belong to 'a
society of individuals in solidarity'.
Chapter 3 The Gold of Sacramento: Capital and
Labour's Californian Adventures
There was a move to set up a utopian community in
the USA, the Icarians, but many French workers
just left for California in the gold rush.
When they first arrived, they thought of it as a
workers' paradise. Not only was manual
labour extremely highly paid, even for women
providing domestic services - dressmakers did
particularly well since there were so few of them,
and men had to buy a new shirt each time instead
of getting the existing one repaired. There
also seemed to be a spirit of equality,
brotherhood, with the absence of crime.
There was initially no need for capital, since
machines existed but were not as reliable as
individuals working with pick and pan. Gold
mining itself required a certain solidarity in
order to succeed.
Of course there were problems including murder and
disputes over claims, and some other local
Americans resented the newcomers, and even
attacked them [this was Mormons!]. Regular work
seem to pay much better than gold mining.
Some commodities like housing were in ridiculously
short supply.
Eventually, trade proved to be more profitable
than gold mining so that the goods did the
travelling not the people. The French
economy was reviving Apparently, Icaria
encountered the same problems -'Things in America
that were either too easy or too hard'(63).
Conventional class relations soon restored
themselves.
[My own limited experience visiting gold mining
sites in Australia tell a slightly different
story. In the first phase, it was every man
for himself, with a genuine chance to strike it
rich, since gold literally lay in the streams in
large nuggets or on the surface,and, as with
Sacrament, people of all social classes found
themselves next to each other on the
goldfields. The Irish in Ballarat clearly
had socialist ambitions, and the famous incident
of the Eureka Stockade involved a clash with the
English authorities trying to regulate them,
charge for licences and collect land rents.
As those easy deposits were cleaned up, however,
there was a need to dig down into the reefs to
find the veins. This required capital, and
the independent miner was finished]
[I also have some limited experience with utopian
communities setting off for the USA. In the
1830s, a group of unemployed and dangerously
disaffected agricultural laborers in the Wiltshire
town of Downton were sponsored by the local parish
and a local philanthropist to set off for the USA
in a chartered ship. Some of them went to
utopian communities founded near Lake Ontario,
while others headed into Pennsylvania, seen as a
refuge for egalitarianism and Quakerism. The
emigration was driven by a series of extremely
poor harvests which lead to parish starvation and
also to outbursts of agricultural protest in the
form of rick burning, by groups calling themselves
Captain Swing. The emigrants included two of
my relatives, both named Bundy!]
Chapter 4 Off to the Exhibition: The Worker,
His Wife and the Machines.
This is an account of the real complexities of the
politics of the work and home. Of course it
is messy and sometimes contradictory, not guided
by theory, but R's account is very good at
demolishing many of the myths about industrial
workers in the 1830s. One was that they
opposed mechanization in some sort of irrational
manner, from conservatism. These accounts,
however show that there is a great deal of
admiration for machinery, and a realization of its
potential to remove the dull and unskilled parts
of labour, the basic repetitive tasks, permitting
more skilled inputs. There could also be a
moral and social implication of the use of
machinery. The right use of machinery would
free up time that could be devoted to education
and reduce the working day generally, perhaps even
develop 'workers intelligence' (74), that is the
intelligence needed to apply a craft, and
increasingly to understand scientific
inputs. Above all, mechanization would
reduce the divisive split between skilled and
unskilled. There is some utopian thinking
about a mechanized future [R 2004 also
discusses this in his critique of Marx and Engels
- they rejected the hopes of a delegation of
British workers who went to Scandinavia to see
what the new machines could do, and argued that
this would only prolong capitalist work {they were
quite right as it turned out of course}. As
for their own utopia, in The German Ideology,
it seemed not to include modern production at all,
but developed a kind of rural idyll with all that
pants about herding cattle in the morning and
philosophizing in the evening]. At the same time,
workers were not daft and could see that for the
employers, the introduction of machinery was yet
another strategy to reduce the importance of skill
in the job: they saw all the problems of
deskilling, rather before Bravermann did.
When it comes to women, again there are different
arguments from the usual propagandistic ones that
see working men as hostile to women, as
patriarchal. It was the capitalists who saw
women as weaker, less suited to work, lacking
discipline and the rest, and this enabled them to
pay them less, arguing that this made them less
skilled. Sometimes, this also led to
arguments that they should be excluded from the
work place altogether, which seems to have been
embraced by some disciples of Proudhon. Some
workers realized that their female colleagues were
actually more combative when it came to resisting
these restrictions. Others saw the issue of
women's labour as a part of a general struggle
with employers. In general, the demand was
that if women are to work then they should be paid
an equal wage. In terms of increasing
opportunities for women, it was noted that lots of
men are also doing women's work in retail and
fashion, for example, but should not be doing
so. This does involves seeing some
occupations as male and others as female, but R
argues this is not just an arbitrary judgment made
by men—when it came to woodturners, for example an
all female commission was consulted on what would
be suitable female situations to guide
apprentices. The justification was that this
would harmonise the complementary qualities of men
and women
There was also a view that women should work if
they have 'neither father nor spouse'.
However, for the others, there was a view that the
proper place for women was in the home, but again
this took on a moral dimension. This was
sometimes put rather aggressively, 'with no
beating about the bush' (79): the tailors argued
that '" nothing can justify the use of women as
agents or production"'. Basically, the home was
seen as a necessary refuge from the relations of
capitalism. If women entered factory worker,
they would be physically and morally degraded—they
would have to become men. If men were paid
enough, women would be able to stay at home, and
this was seen as emancipating them. In
particular, it would help everyone escape
capitalist institutions like creches and
hospitals, in 'a space closed off from the
intrusion of the employers and the
state'(81). It would help male workers avoid
'the depravation of his [boozer] bar'(82).
It was a blow against the hypocrisy of bourgeois
preaching about the sanctity of women, while
exploiting them in factories.
Again bourgeois conceptions of the family had to
be resisted, something that disciplined children,
often combined with a rather negative view of
working class families as unhygienic.
Workers' conceptions of the family were different:
they did not see themselves as head of house
'analogous to the head of a business' (83), but as
guarding and providing a refuge [lots of feminist
in leisure studies would want to question this
conception, of course]. If both parents
worked, they would both become commodified, and so
would their kids in the creche. Families had
to preserve 'anything that can escape the order of
the employers'(84, including health (hospitals
were seen as factories or prisons, creches as
places to discipline children). Again,
home and work would complement each other [reads
like early Parsons]. The home was a source
of resistance to attempts to totalize the lives of
workers, a 'cell of autonomy' (87). Philanthropic
efforts to provide housing were opposed on these
grounds: workers also resented being expelled to
the outskirts of towns, denying them shared
political spaces.
There was resistance even in those days of
accepting this view of male as provider and
protector. Resistance was seen as the result
of women's 'defective education', but there was
hope that women could eventually calculate the
benefits. R notes that Lenin had a similar
line with respect to the peasants.
Finally, there was at least one 'bookbinder' (88)
who fully asserted the right of women to
emancipate themselves by their own means [and gave
a women a prominent position in his own
cooperative bank]. This was Eugène Varlin, who was
unfortunately executed at the fall of the Commune
before his ideas could gain further influence
Chapter five A Troublesome Woman
This is R disputing an earlier account of an
organization formed by women attached to Saint-
Simon, and the stories of particular individuals
and their views. The earlier accounts had
been written by doughty feminists, including
Fraisse, in response to an even earlier account
written by a male historian. The feminist
account argued that this male history had imposed
male categories, in the familiar way of mastering
feminist accounts. R was to challenge the
feminist account itself, however, for reimposing
its own version of master discourse, reading the
stories of the women in a simple and dogmatic way,
and, in particular, ignoring those bits where the
women enjoyed heterosexual contact, and even saw
some comfort in family life:
'To investigate [these matters by avoiding] the
jouissance of servitude… risks ending up
reintroducing a male point of view… [It]
leads to a vision of women's autonomy that
reproduces an old male point of view: the
valorization of "women among women" as a bird cage
of fleeting fantasies, complicit words, the
unpredictable trajectories of bewitched bodies: an
autonomy of women cosy among themselves, talking,
dancing, imagining in the reclusion of a private
space that is suddenly revealed to the voyeur's
gaze' (98).
The feminist hero is rendered as some Leninist,
opposing sex and debauchery. Here, it is
this feminist account that makes an 'assertion of
difference lost in an undifferentiated dissident
mode'(99). There is also an historical
point, in that we must undermine 'the edifying
discourse of recognition' and 'the dialectic of
identifications and misunderstanding that
characterizes today's genealogies as much as it
did the Marxist classics'. We should read
such histories 'less by what brings them close to
us than by what renders them foreign, far indeed
from the frameworks of thought in which we move
with either satisfaction or unease'. We
should not try to impose our own morality on them,
or reduce their projects to our own interests in
'whether they started off as socialists or
feminists', or whether we can classify them as '
either victims or accomplices'. Their
singularity 'can never be enclosed in a single
identification'.
[Fraisse has critiqued Rancière in turn ( in
Davis), accusing him of the reciprocal offence --
so interested in the universal issue of
heterogeneity that he can't grasp the specificity
of feminist work]
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