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For a politics we have yet to imagineMark Purcellaa Department
of Urban Design & Planning, University ofWashington, Seattle,
WA, USAPublished online: 25 Jun 2014.
To cite this article: Mark Purcell (2014) For a politics we have
yet to imagine, Space and Polity,18:2, 117-121, DOI:
10.1080/13562576.2014.927960
To link to this article:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2014.927960
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INTRODUCTION
For a politics we have yet to imagine
Mark Purcell*
Department of Urban Design & Planning, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
This special issue assembles a group of articles that explore
the political thought of JacquesRancire. The idea was not only to
understand and critique Rancires thought on its ownterms, but also
to discover how Rancire can be of use, politically, today. We
wanted to under-stand how he might inform contemporary political
struggles for justice, democracy andfreedom, and also how he might
need to be rethought or pushed farther in light of those
struggles.
A too brief precis of Rancires thought
Rancire is part of a generation of radical thinkers people such
as Agamben, Castoriadis,Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lacan,
Negri, Foucault, Benjamin, Vaneigem who were search-ing creatively
(and more than a little anxiously) for another model of politics.
Though in differentways, each was seeking a political way forward
that abandoned the old model of revolution inwhich a workers party
wins the state, nationalizes property, abolishes class and withers
away.For his part, Rancire proceeds by seeking to chart and
understand the very ground of politics.He wants to do more than
merely stand the current balance of power on its head, to
reversethe current relations of domination and hierarchy while
leaving their structures mostly in place.Rather Rancire wants to
understand the deeper workings of power, and he wants to
discoverways to challenge and destabilize that power at its root.
For Rancire, politics is not merely aquestion of who holds power
within a given set of political relations, it is a struggle over
the char-acter of political relations themselves. Politics for
Rancire is not a struggle among already-established parties over a
given pool of resources. It is instead a struggle over who in fact
is aparty to politics, over who can speak and be heard in political
debate, over what the stakes of poli-tics are, and over who denes
those stakes.
For Rancire, one of the most archetypical political events was
when the plebs of Rome spokefor the rst time. In the time of the
Roman Empire, the poor inhabitants of Rome came increas-ingly to
see themselves as plebs, as a dened political group. On the
Aventine Hill, they began toenact this new idea, by participating
in politics as though they were a legitimate party in the
pol-itical arena. The Roman nobles responded by rejecting the very
idea that the plebs existed asplebs at all. And so the struggle of
the plebs was not a struggle for more rights or resourcesas against
the nobles. Rather it was a struggle to exist as plebs, a struggle
to take part in thepolity as the newly imagined political subject
plebs, a subject with an idea of itself as asubject, as a political
body with a voice, and with a part to play in politics. For
Rancire, theplebs embody his signature idea of the part of those
with no part. The political order, or
2014 Taylor & Francis
*Email: [email protected]
Space and Polity, 2014Vol. 18, No. 2, 117121,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2014.927960
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what Rancire calls the police, will always claim to have taken
account of all parts of the polity,to have arranged those parts
into a just set of relations, and therefore to have established an
orderthat is legitimate. Drawing heavily even obsessively on
Aristotle, Rancire insists that on thecontrary the polices
accounting can never be complete, that there must always be a part
of thepolity that has not been counted, that has not been given a
part to play in the existing politicalorder, but which nevertheless
exists, inchoate, waiting to emerge as a part. For Rancire,
poli-tics proper occurs when this part of those with no part comes
to see itself as a part, as a legit-imate party with a role to play
in the political order, and begins to act as if it is in fact a
legitimateparty to politics. Rancire calls this process of emerging
awareness subjectication. Of course,the prevailing order, which has
staked its legitimacy on the claim that it has taken full account
ofall the parts of the polity, must deny that this new part exists
as a legitimate party. What is at stakein political struggle, then,
is whether this new part will be able to actually take up the part
theyhave claimed, whether they will be able to actually partake in
the political order.
In addition to this central element of subjectication, but along
the same lines, politics forRancire can also a be struggle over
what kind of political relations exist among the parts andwhat kind
of new political relations are possible. The struggle over which
parts exist determineswho has a voice and who can speak, but
politics can also be a struggle over what kinds of speechcount as
political speech, what places are appropriate for that speech to
take place, what respon-sibilities others have to consider that
speech seriously, and what political options are
consideredreasonable and possible. It is the last struggle that
manifests most often in the articles for thisspecial issue. Very
often, the police claim that only a certain number of very limited
politicaloptions count as possible ways forward for the community,
and politics thus often emerges asa struggle to imagine and pursue
other options, other forms of political life that are not
sanctionedas reasonable by the current police order.
The papers in the special issue
The papers in this special issue explore Rancires thought in a
variety of stimulating ways.I group them here into two main camps.
The rst camp, consisting of Swyngedouw, Davidson& Iveson and
Hanson, is relatively more sanguine about Rancire. This camp argues
that thevalue of Rancire is that he helps us see things about a
political situation that would remainopaque without him. The
articles by Swyngedouw and Davidson & Iveson apply this
enhancedpolitical vision to the uprisings of 2011. Hanson applies
it to a historical case, the riots inCleveland in 1966, but his
analysis has clear implications for politics in the present day
aswell. The second camp, consisting of articles by Purcell and
Booth & Williams, generallyaccept the strengths of Rancire
identied by the rst camp, but they also raise some doubtsabout
Rancire. In different ways, they worry that Rancire does not go far
enough politically,that if we want to put him to use today, we need
to push his thought in more radical directions.
The rst camp (1): Swyngedouw
Swyngedouw argues that we nd ourselves in a period of ossied
consensus where the structureof common sense poses only two
options: austerity or economic collapse. We can either continueon
resolutely with new and more austere forms of neoliberalism, or we
can return to the horrors ofstate socialism. The right choice is
obvious, according to the dominant common sense, and theonly real
questions are technical: how do we best structure austerity so that
the capitalisteconomy can get working again? This is precisely what
Rancire calls consensus: a broadsocial agreement on the big issues
that has brought us to the purported end of history. It is anidea
that the terms such as postpolitical, postdemocratic and the end of
politics are also
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trying to capture, although perhaps in slightly different ways.
Rancire (in league with a host ofother thinkers whom Swyngedouw I
think rightly groups with Rancire, e.g. Badiou,Rosanvallon, Zizek,
Agamben, Mouffe and Negri) wants to trouble this dominant
consensus,to introduce a measure of dissensus and disagreement that
breaks consensus apart and allowsspace for something else to
emerge. Swyndegouw urges us to see the uprisings that swept
theworld in 2011 as an instantiation of this dissensus. He suggests
that the movements in 2011, ingeneral, manifested a clear, even if
incipient, reassertion of the political (or what Rancirecalls
politics) that disrupted the prevailing consensus and opened up the
possibility ofanother world beyond the stiing austerity of
neoliberal capitalism.
I think we should give Swyngedouw room to make his point here
without engaging in adebate about what these movements as a whole
were really about. I think it is hard todispute that one thread or
desire or spirit present in at least many (if not all) of the
movementsof 2011, was a rejection of the austerity dilemma, a
rejection of the argument that we must dowhat the global nancial
interests say we must do. This act of interrupting the
dominantcommon sense functions as a kind of ground clearing, an
unsettling of the dominant politicallogic. The interruption is not
itself an alternative politics. But positive alternatives were
alsopresent in 2011. Indeed pregurative experiments in other ways
of being together politicallywere also a commonly expressed desire
in (at least) Spain, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, theUSA and the
UK. Swyngedouw suggests that Rancire mostly helps us see the
interruption func-tion of the movements, but it is easy to see
(particularly in 2011) how that interruption can walkhand in hand
with a positive creation of new political worlds.
The rst camp (2): Davidson and Iveson
Davidson and Iveson agree with Swyngedouw that Rancire helps us
understand 2011, andespecially, for them, the Arab Spring and
Occupy, as the introduction of dissensus into a consen-sus. In
Egypt, the movements rejected and exposed the common sense that
Egypt would crumblewithout Mubaraks strong hand. In the USA, they
challenged the idea that austerity is the onlypossible economic
policy, and that liberal democracy is the only possible form of
government.In Spain, similarly, they rejected the idea that when
citizens are unhappy with the economicpolicy of the current
government, the only possible behaviour open to them is to elect a
differentparty to lead the government. Que se vayan todos, they
shouted instead. Git rid of them all.
But Davidson and Iveson also want to emphasize another aspect of
2011 that Rancire helpsus to see: the introduction of new
subjectivities into the existing political eld. They suggest
thatfor many in 2011, it was not so much a question of making
demands on the existing powers, ofasking established
representatives to alter economic policy to direct more resources
towardsalready existing groups. They argue it was more a question
of proposing new groups with newsensibilities the indignados, the
99%, an active and capable Egyptian people new subjectiv-ities that
the prevailing order did not recognize, and to whom it had not
assigned a legitimate partto play in politics.
While they certainly sing Rancires praises, Davidson and Iveson
also want to extend him inan important direction, by spatializing
him. That is, they want to help his thought take moreseriously the
geographical dimensions of politics. Specically, they suggest we
should see theoccupation of space, especially urban space, as a
political act in Rancires sense because it dis-rupts what we might
call the geographical police, the geographical order that denes who
can bewhere and what activities are appropriate for those people in
those places.
I would second Davison and Ivesons argument here: Rancire needs
to be spatialized. Hispolitics, following the Greeks he is so
obsessed with, are primarily a politics that concernslogos, or
speech-and-reason. The police order primarily is concerned with
dening who can
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speak-and-reason, and what counts as good
speaking-and-reasoning. The police, as Rancireimagines it, do not
so much determine the proper place for actors and things. Although
Ranciresmetaphorical language does seem at times to be talking
about geography, his analysis mostlyforces any concern with the
appropriate place of politics through the conceptual core of
logos,and so I nd Davidson and Ivesons call to spatialize Rancire
is an important one.
The rst camp (3): Hanson
Unlike Swyngedouw and Davidson & Iveson, Hanson uses Rancire
to read an event from thepast, the Cleveland riots of 1966.
Similarly, however, Hanson nds Rancire useful because heallows us
to see past the conventional readings of the events, to see a
politics we would missif we continue to think of politics merely as
organized actions by existing groups to demand con-crete gains from
the current structures of power. For Hanson, the riots were not
only a disorga-nized lashing out by a frustrated groups of victims.
Hanson argues that we can see much moreagency and intentionality in
participants actions if we know how to look for it, and he evengoes
so far as to suggest we might read the riots, in the spirit of
Rancire, as an instance of theappearance of the demos, or people,
who were seeking to present themselves in public andverify their
equality as speaking beings. This appearance is what Rancire
understands by theterm democracy, but of course it is very
different from liberal democracy, democracy as thepolice order
would have us understand it. And so Hanson argues that Rancire is
usefulbecause he helps us redene our understanding of political
agency, and he thus allows us tosee agency where we thought there
was none. Of course, we can take inspiration from the
insightsHanson generates here to read anew any number of cases,
among which the UK riots of 2011perhaps spring most immediately to
mind.
The second camp (1): Purcell
In broad outline, my article agrees that Rancire is useful for
thinking about the novelty of 2011,that it is valuable to read 2011
as a disruption of consensus and a forcing open of the possibility
ofthinking politics differently. But I am worried about just how
far we can to go with Ranciresvision. It may be, I suggest, that he
catches us in a sad cycle whereby the police order is disruptedby
politics, but then it quickly reforms. My piece questions whether
there is any possibility ofrevolution in Rancire. Of course I do
not mean the old revolution; I share his rejection ofthat. I mean
revolution that aims in some way for a world in which there is not
a prevailingpolice order. Or rather, a world in which the police
order still exists, but where it is not operative,where it is
somehow held at bay, prevented from dominating the terms of
political discourse. Itmay be a logical contradiction, a police
that exists but does not hold sway, that does not determinewho can
speak, what counts as speech, etc. But I argue that we must aim at
something more thanmerely repeated disruptions-and-reformulations
of the police order, and I suggest that we mightfruitfully turn to
Deleuze and Guattari for a revolutionary political vision that is
not at all theold model of revolution, but that nevertheless pushes
out beyond Rancires disruptions-and-reformulations model of
politics, into what Deleuze and Guattari call a new land.
The second camp (2): Booth and Williams
As with my article, Booth and Williams draw strength from
Rancire, and they seek to push himto radically expand his
conception of politics. Rancires intellectual spirit relentlessly
refuses toaccept limits placed on politics by the police, and Booth
and Williams nd great strength in thatspirit. They draw on it to
argue that we must explore how it would be possible to expand
our
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current assumption that political communities are made up only
of humans. They ask whether andhow nonhuman entities can speak,
whether they can participate meaningfully in a political
com-munity. We have long known that we are dependent for our
survival on a complex assemblage ofhuman and nonhuman species, and
so perhaps imagining something like nonhuman citizens isreally not
such a bold leap. But such thinking certainly troubles our longheld
and deeplyembedded assumptions about politics. And these
assumptions are very much present inRancires thought too. As I have
said, Rancire is focused intently on Aristotles denition ofthe
polity as citizens who engage each other in rational dialogue about
the nature of the goodlife. This logos imagination assumes that
speech and reason are a sine qua non of political par-ticipation
and membership. While Rancire probes and questions Aristotle
relentlessly, I donot think Rancire ever gets beyond this
conception of politics as logos. And so if we are toexpand the
political community to include nonhumans, we would either need to
unseat logosfrom its privileged position in our conception of
politics, or, perhaps more in line with Boothand Williams, we would
need to expand our notion of logos so that it encompasses the
waysof speaking and reasoning that nonhumans practice.
Again, I think the second camp shares the positive assessment of
Rancires thought, even ifthey think Rancire does not yet go far
enough. Nevertheless all ve articles agree that Rancire isan
essential inspiration for thinking politics and radical politics in
particular in the presentmoment.
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A too brief precis of Rancires thoughtThe papers in the special
issueThe first camp (1): SwyngedouwThe first camp (2): Davidson and
IvesonThe first camp (3): HansonThe second camp (1): PurcellThe
second camp (2): Booth and Williams
