1

THE COMMUNITY THAT COUNTS: Parts & Places, Maturity & Emancipation, and Scenes/Stages in Jacques Rancière’s Account of Art, Pedagogy, and Politics

Le plus simple serait de ne pas commencer. Mais je suis obligé de commencer. C’est à dire que je suis obligé de continuer.

Samuel Beckett, L’innommable

Where to begin? At the beginning, it goes without saying—or so the saying goes. The

injunction to begin at the beginning is a recurrent trope in Western political thought, from

Plato’s Republic (“let us begin again at the beginning” (348a); “the first step, as you

know, is always what matters most” (377a)) and Aristotle’s Politics (“In this field, as in

other fields, we shall be able to study our subject best if we begin at the beginning”

(1252a24); “as the proverb goes, ‘The beginning is half the job’” (1303b17))—these two

texts being commonly held as marking something like the beginning of political

philosophy—to the writings of someone like Jacques Rancière (“Commençons par le

commencement” (1995, 19; 2003, 9)), for instance, who uses it more playfully.

Interestingly, and although—or rather, because—they are usually presented as necessary,

the beginnings in question often appear puzzling (at least in the beginning, that is until

what follows starts to make sense) and in need of further justification. Where one begins

does not quite go without saying, then, for it is only determined by a singular decision

that makes a given beginning something that is precisely not given.

In this paper, I attempt to delineate some of the stakes involved in the decisions

about where and how to begin to think and write about the relations between art,

2

pedagogy, and politics. This means that I am attempting—this is literally un essai—to

make beginnings into a question and a problem, rather than into a given (for arguably,

“givens” are also made). In that sense, this essay can be contextualized within an array of

scholarly works where the questioning and problematization of beginnings and related

notions of origins, founding, novelty, and emergence, to name but a few, have already

been engaged by many and in a variety of ways (more rigorously and with much more

amplitude than I can master), in political philosophy (e.g. Arendt 1998; Walker 2010) as

well as in other more or less disciplined disciplinary fields (e.g. Derrida 1974; Said

1975)—not to mention the importance that beginnings are given in the “founding” texts

of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, etc. If such critical inquiries constitute a

marginal fraction of what is published in the social sciences and humanities, they

nevertheless partake in making the givenness of beginnings into a “proper” question, or at

least in making the unquestioning of beginnings into a slightly more uncomfortable

posture in contemporary academe. Responding to this uncomfortableness, I am

principally interested, here, in questioning beginnings in relation to a series of concerns

about the interrelations taking place between the practices of art, pedagogy, and politics

in “the present moment” (putting aside for now the problematic character of this very

expression). More precisely, I am trying to think these interrelations as a field of

problems by investigating the very uses of the notions of art, pedagogy, and politics as

qualifications, especially when they take place at sites where associations operate

between the three and where, in return, something of the limits—of the beginnings and

ends—of each notion might be expressed. I thus assume that thinking through what is at

3

stake in the decisions about where and how to begin engaging this field of problems is an

interesting point of departure for actually engaging it.

A beginning implies an end, and now I ought to begin by the end for it is that

which can justify in advance the present work. In the end, my objective is twofold: on the

one hand, I want to understand how specific notions of art, pedagogy, and politics are

mobilized together in contemporary claims about the possible and plausible effects of

practices of cultural research dealing with biotechnologies. This is the general research

orientation within which this intervention is situated; it responds to the observation that,

in the discourses intertwined with the practices at stake, their effects are recurrently

qualified as more or less political through the use of the analogical trope: art as pedagogy

as politics, the implications and effects of which are worth unfolding, I argue, if only

because what it puts into play are aspects of “our” political imagination. On the other

hand, I want to “test” the usefulness of Jacques Rancière’s work on the logics of art,

pedagogy, and politics for starting to build this understanding. In effect, I read Rancière

as one of the most stimulating and rigorous thinkers to have written about the logics of

these manifold practices and their interrelations in recent years, in both francophone and

anglophone academe. It is this second (yet preliminary) objective that I explore below

with a “critical intent”, for critique is called for “even more against what seduces us that

against what repels us” (Musil 1990, 267). I proceed by way of two main gestures. First, I

address where and how, according to Rancière, one can and ought to begin, namely by

considering a certain “given” on the ultimately ungrounded ground of what he calls the

presupposition of equality. I address this claim by engaging the (now famous) distinction

that he makes between a logic of the “police” that presupposes and reproduces inequality,

4

and a logic of “politics” that verifies equality as both the condition of possibility of

inequality and as what possibly undermines it. What is at stake in these reflections is a

sensibility to what different beginnings enable and disable. Second, I thus try to delineate

what the mode of thought that sustains the distinction between police and politics cab

itself enable and disable for thinking the “beginnings” of art, pedagogy and politics. I

insist that these “beginnings” are best thought formally, that is in terms of practical

operations, and that engaging them calls for an account of how artistic, pedagogical, and

political practices have been and remain linked with the notion of emancipation in

Western thought. This brings me to critically address the Rancière’s work as a thought of

emancipation that both displaces canonical understandings of this processual notion as a

passage to a “maturity” or an “adulthood” of sorts, but that nonetheless maintains a place,

in the last analysis, for a certain figure of “maturity”. Finally, I bring this exploration to

an end by briefly reassessing the critical role played by the notion of scènes (meaning

both scenes and stages) in Rancière’s account, and I insist on its usefulness for thinking

about beginnings as a problem when art, pedagogy, and politics are at stake.

To Start With: The Distribution of Parts & Places and the Question of Equality

La fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continue.

Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie

In order to understand where and how one can and even ought to begin, according to

Jacques Rancière, when thinking and writing about the interrelations between artistic,

pedagogical, and political practices, let’s begin by considering where and how he himself

begins in his practices of writing. If Rancière does not explicitly incite his readers to

5

follow his example, to begin just where and as he begins, it is nonetheless useful to ask if

and how his mode of writing is in line with the implications of his claims, to question

how his own beginnings relate to his insistence on the importance of the decisions about

where and how one begins for what can possibly and plausibly follow, and to assess

whether where and how he begins constitutes an interesting example to take into account

(unsurprisingly, I already presuppose that it is indeed an interesting example). The

philosopher’s starting point is most often the description of a polemical configuration that

characterizes academic conversations and/or broader “commonsense” discourses: an

alleged return of a “restored” political philosophy (Rancière 1995, 9); a broad

displacement of claims about emancipation from the political to the aesthetic terrain

(2000, 8); a profusion of assertions about a disappearance of reality behind images and

images behind reality (2003, 9); recurring diagnostics of an end of politics mixed with

celebrations of its return (2004a, 9); denunciations of democracy as the reign of the

unlimited desires of individuals in modern mass society (2005, 7); reiterated dismissals of

spectatorship as the opposite of both knowledge and action (2008, 8); etc. Starting from

such “diagnostics” enables Rancière to construct and present his texts as situated

interventions, as a series of contingent analyses that do not add up to a system or a theory

but that nevertheless have wider implications in that they reconstruct the conditions that

made these configurations thinkable in the first place. More specifically, what the

philosopher first and foremost questions in his polemical interventions is “how idealities

are produced”, or in other words, how configurations of concepts and claims, perceptions

and interpretations, diagnostics and solutions—that is, configurations of sense—such as

those evoked above are rendered possible, plausible and operative, his premise being that

6

“[i]deas always are material realities, taking over bodies, giving them a map of the visible

and orientations for moving” (Rancière 2009a, 114)1. This is where Rancière begins: this

question constitutes a starting point that enables him to critically engage a plurality of

singular configurations of “idealities” (those of art, pedagogy, or politics, for instance) by

describing, mapping and “formalizing” the operations by way of which they are effected

and through which they function so as to enable possible senses and disable others.

As far as beginnings are concerned, it is noteworthy that the question “how

idealities are produced” relies on at least one premise (the materiality of “ideas at work”),

that is, on a proposition that, by definition, comes before the beginning. This observation

is hardly new but it nonetheless expresses a difficulty that is rapidly encountered when

one tries (or at least, when I try) to circumscribe beginnings: there is no, or at least there

appears to be no absolute beginning, no ultimate and neutral ground, if only because it is

always possible to go back a little further; it always seems possible to identify one more

unacknowledged premise in a given argument, for example2. Ex nihilo nihil fit: one

necessarily starts from some where and some when, from something and not from

nothing, from a singular situation and trajectory, a contingent ground and a given

background, a multiplicity of prejudices, presuppositions and preliminaries. There is thus

a “before” to any beginning, an ante- or a precedence that enables a particular beginning

to take place as such and that, at the same time, makes “the very beginning” infinitely out

of reach. But “[t]o identify a point as a beginning is to classify it after the fact” (Said

1975, 29), and despite the principial inaccessibility of any “pure” commencement, lines

of discrimination that enable certain classifications and disable others, that produce the

identification of certain beginnings as facts—authorizing their facticity, as it were—while

7

effacing other possible ones are effectively drawn and redrawn through a complex

multiplicity of “authorizing practices” (Walker 2010, 215-6), so that it becomes possible,

among other things, to “clearly see”, in retrospect and if one is serious enough, where this

or that argument begins and ends in both the literal and figurative senses, although some

would (rightly) insist that discerning sharply where literality begins and figuration ends

can become quite difficult3. For my part, I argue that thinking beginnings as complex

sites of authorizing practices requires taking into account not only where one begins but

also how, insofar as the two can be satisfyingly distinguished. Thinking how beginnings

take (and make) place calls for the delineation and mapping of the multiple gestures

enacted “around” supposedly dimensionless points of departure in order to pose and fix

them as such, to de facto evince all other possible debuts, and to enable what follows to

make sense. This delineating and mapping gesture is similar to how Rancière writes

about “how idealities are produced”. More to the point, here, I argue that addressing

Rancière’s important distinction between police and politics in a delineating and mapping

(yet hopefully not too sketchy) mode can allow to address this concern for “the how” of

beginnings and to start engaging the question of how the problem of beginnings might be

related to that of thinking through the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics.

Beginning with “the Given”, “Naturally”

In his work on each of the multifaceted practices of art, pedagogy, and politics

and on their historical-logical intertwinements as “produced idealities” in Western

cultural, social, and political thought, Jacques Rancière frequently takes as a starting

point not only a situated polemical configuration, but also a specific distribution: a

8

distribution of parts (in both senses of shares and roles) and places that stands as a

“given” in the polemical configurations at stake and the givenness of which he then puts

into question. This situated distribution of parts and places is most often presented as a

binary, as a dual relation formulated according to a certain “commonsense”—that is,

according to a particular definition of “what can be seen, said and done” that is informed

by a broader configuration of sense (Rancière 2009a, 120)—that one encounters

apparently inevitably, if not automatically, when one thinks about practices like art,

pedagogy, and politics. This type of distribution constitutes “the given” with which one

ought to begin, if only because polemical configurations are polemical precisely because

they involve disagreements about the “givenness” of particular “givens”, about who has

the authority to decide on such “givenness”, and about how its constitution further

enables and disable an array of (il)legitimate claims. One ought to start this way, in the

reiterating mode of a ventriloquist, but merely re-inscribing the “given” distributions of

parts and places as such is also how one risks to stop thinking critically, if not altogether.

What stands as a distribution of parts and places? Arguably, when one thinks of

art or aesthetics, one commonly thinks of a distinction between artist and spectator; when

one thinks of pedagogy, one thinks of a distinction between schoolmaster and student;

and when one thinks of politics, one thinks almost automatically of a distinction between

ruler and ruled, or leader and follower. These three “given” distinctions frame what can

be “seen” and “said” about art, pedagogy, and politics, and within this framework, what

can be “done” is to address the particular instances, the actualizations of these relations.

After all, these distributed roles and positions designate legitimized and apparently

objective parts and places in “our” societies: there are artists, schoolmasters, rulers,

9

spectators, students, followers, etc., meaning that there are titles and qualifications that

enable the identification and differentiation of individuals and groups, of what people are

given what they do, and inversely but also more problematically, of what they (can) do,

given what they “are”. In principle, the titles and qualifications are not mutually

exclusive, either “vertically” or “horizontally”—although there seems to be more chances

that a same person will simultaneously or alternatively “be”/bear the last three titles listed

above than the first three—, nor do they exhaust the possible titles to be found in a

community “in general”, or even in the specific “spheres” of art, pedagogy, and politics

(these distinctions leave space, in particular, for mediating roles between the two terms of

each binary)4. What matters, however, is that in principle every-one is effectively

assigned a (or many) part(s) and place(s) of this sort, the “nature” of the parts and places

depending on the singular “idealities” produced in the situated “community” at stake.

The three distributions of parts and places presented above impose themselves as

“givens” in Western cultural, social, and political thought. At least in contemporary

social sciences, not starting from them or even overlooking them completely when

speaking and writing about art, pedagogy, and politics is to expose oneself to the

criticisms of not considering “concrete” practices, of indulging in metaphysics and

speculation, of being blind to how art, pedagogy, and politics are “truly” experienced in

something like a “real world”, a “lived reality”, and to how they have been thought

historically. In that sense, the suggestion to begin with these distinctions, to begin there,

is not Rancière’s most original claim. But starting from there, many different types of

claims can be made, in many different ways. In a manner that legitimizes the assignment

of “proper”, orderly and ordered identities, it can be argued, for instance, that the types of

10

practices that define the three “spheres” as distinct “spheres” operate as active attributes

of the first three titles or occupations: art is what the artist makes; pedagogy is what the

schoolmaster performs; and politics/ruling is what the politician/ruler does. This appears

to be “mere commonsense”, although it could be argued that each relation is far more

complex and that the property of those qualifications remains debatable. Mobilizing a

more teleological mode of thought, each type of practice can further be understood as

what each one of the first three title-bearers succeeds to “really” practice if and when s/he

does his or her “job” well, and each practice can moreover be ordered in relation to the

others: to put it negatively, if a non-artistic artist is merely a bad artist (something which

is not so worrying for many), a non-pedagogical schoolmaster is ineffective at best

(which is regrettable), and a non-political ruler is tyrannical at worst (which is seemingly

more problematic)—although it could also be claimed, inversely, that a bad artist is one

that is too artistic, that an ineffective schoolmaster is one that is too pedagogical, and that

a tyrannical politician is one that is too political. In both arguments, however, the

“acquisition” and the “loss”—the beginning and the end—of the titles and qualifications

are at stake. What these and similar considerations show, most importantly, is that the

distributions of parts and places are articulated to and further articulate normative claims

from the start and that both the distribution(s) within each “sphere” and the distribution of

the “spheres” themselves can be hierarchicalized, apparently without much difficulty, on

the ground of their respective share in the determination of the form of life of a particular

common. In effect, the logic of parts and places at work is such claims posits less an

incommensurability than a (in principle debatable) difference in degrees of “importance”

for “the community as a whole” between what is at stake in the practice of a good or bad

11

artist and in that of a good or bad ruler, this distinction overlapping with the (polemical)

differentiation of the “banal” from the “vital” for the “community”. Or at least, this is one

possible and plausible way to go about thinking the interrelations between art, pedagogy,

and politics when starting from the distributions of parts and places that allegedly

characterize each “sphere” of practice as such, as separate and ordered spaces.

Jacques Rancière asserts, for his part, that these distributions of parts and places

(and the related array of possible and plausible claims that they enable) with which one

can and does “habitually” begin to think and write about art, pedagogy, and politics,

belong to what he calls the consensual logic of the “police”. What is common to all three

relations is that they operate as more or less legitimate relations of inequality from which

“proper identities” are deduced; it is this logic of police that thus puts these relations on a

same plane. These “evident” distinctions operate not only a hierarchicalization but also a

naturalization of the assigned parts and places: each role is taken not only to require

particular abilities and qualifications that can in principle be acquired and that define

specific superiorities and inferiorities in each “sphere”, but these abilities and

qualifications are further understood to “naturally” belong to, or be possessed by some

individuals or groups “in general” and not others, therefore determining—or legitimizing

the assignment of—unequal shares in the “functions” they are supposed to enable one to

perform regarding the “common” of the “community”5. In that sense, for Rancière “[t]he

essence of the police is to be a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible)

characterized by the absence of void and supplement: society therein consists in groups

dedicated to specific modes of doing, in places where these occupations are exercised, in

modes of being corresponding to these occupations and places” (Rancière 2004a, 241;

12

my translation and italics). These groups, these positions and these modes of being are

enabled as interrelated “givens” on the “ground” of a distribution (which is also a

sharing, un partage) of the sensible, that is according to a singular and delineable “way in

which the symbolic forms that govern the life of a community offer themselves under the

form of sensible data and, even more so, of the very conditions of the exercise of the

senses: the relation between speech and action, visible and speakable, visible and

invisible, etc. The distribution of the sensible is what separates the sensible as an

experienced common world from the sensory as a system of responses to stimulations”

(Rancière 2009b, 549; my translation)6. A distribution of the sensible, or what above I

called a configuration of sense, can thus be understood as a singular regime of inclusions

and exclusions, of evidence and rationalizations about what is common that “fixes at the

same time common and exclusive parts (un commun partagé et des parts exclusives)”

(Rancière 2000, 12; my translation). Policed distributions of parts and places are not only

enabled by, but they also sustain specific distributions of the sensible, if only because the

precondition for one to “have” a part and a place is that one or one’s practice be first

visible, audible, and countable in the count of the “experienced common world” (e.g.

there can be no artist without art, that is without a first visibility of “art” as a

differentiated practice—one that implies specific ways of linking words, images, sounds,

etc.—, without a singular concept of art that is itself produced through multiple

practices). That in order to be counted, one or one’s practice first has to be visible,

audible, and countable means that it has to be differentiated from what is perceived and

constituted as the private, particular, “incommunicable” (less idiomatic than literally

idiotic) and quasi-animal world of the sensory to which, it must be remarked, many

13

individuals and practices are thus relegated and confined in many ways. This realm of

“the sensory” is the constitutive outside of “the sensible” and of the count of parts and

places that its distribution further enables as a “given” whose givenness is normalized,

naturalized, effaced through practices of authorization and legitimation. Outside of this

count, there is nothing that properly is for the police: if not any-one is counted in the

specific distributions mentioned above (except, one could argue, in the “political”

distribution of ruler(s) and ruled), in principle every-one can be counted within the

general distribution of parts and places that makes the “whole” of the policed

“community”, or more precisely, that makes “the community” as a whole of countable

parts (without remainder) that actively counts, organizes, and polices its parts7.

As an abundant contemporary literature suggests, the problem of “politics” and of

political thought then becomes that of exclusion (or of inclusion), namely the problem of

being part of a community, of belonging, of recognition, of becoming visible and audible

for obtaining and maintaining a part and a place for oneself and others within, and of

eventually “adjusting” and displacing its share, its role and its position in relation to the

others. This, however, is not quite Rancière’s problem. For one, it is arguably

overdetermined by the identitarian logic of the police order, and if the philosopher begins

with the police, this is not where he ends. In effect, what Rancière attempts to

problematize can be situated “upstream”, as it were, from the “internal” organization of

the distribution of parts and places: he is first and foremost concerned with delineating

and mapping the multiple operations through which this policing account of

“community” as the finite space within which politics has to take place in the form of

antagonisms and struggles between identifiable parts (between individuals and groups

14

identical to themselves) under the headings of interest and recognition is itself produced

as a finite field of problems, as a material assemblage of signs that “produces” the

individuals and groups at stake and its own, ingrained set of possible and plausible

questions and answers. Following Jean-Luc Nancy, it should then be asked: “why [is] the

“fiction” of the “natural” [in general, and of the naturalness of the order of police in

particular] not one of the possible and acceptable mode of this assemblage (and,

ultimately, of the ‘distribution of the sensible’)” (Nancy 2009, 86; my italics)? Rancière’s

answer, as Nancy rightly points out in his own vocabulary, is somewhere along those

lines: “the designation of a natural destination of man [aligns] itself with a nonpolitical

operation, somehow prior to or exterior to ‘political animality’, thus prepolitical or

archaic”. More precisely, the operations correlating “functions, places and ways of being”

(Rancière 2004a, 241), both “inaugurally” and repeatedly in Western cultural, social, and

political thought, presuppose and reiterate “the opinion of inequality” (161) and it is as

such that they are policing and not political operations; for Rancière, the heterologic of

politics is, in contrast to the homologic of the police, a logic of difference and equality: it

starts—and it might thus end up—with the opinion of equality. It is at this point, where

equality comes into play, that the importance of where and how one decides to begin

becomes graspable and starts to bear on the conditions of possibility of what can possibly

and plausibly be seen, said and done when thinking and writing about artistic,

pedagogical, and political practices. But before addressing more directly what Rancière

places under this name of politics, and in fact in order to get at this question in a way that

will enable a more precise delineation of how the problem of beginnings can be brought

to bear on that of the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics, it is useful to

15

reconsider more precisely how Rancière operates in concreto when he starts from the

policed distribution of parts and places as a “given”.

More specifically, I deem it important to address the somewhat puzzling status

that this distribution receives in the philosopher’s work as a singular multiplicity of

“produced idealities”. In effect, the general distribution of parts and places is recurrently,

and somewhat surprisingly, qualified as “natural”—the quotation marks being

Rancière’s, in many (though not in all) cases. What is at stake in this “naturalization”?

How, if at all, does it differ from the naturalizations operated by the logic of police? One

way to answer this last question is to argue that the naturalization of the distributions of

parts and places operating under the logic of the police is circular: it begins with the

claim that the hierarchicalized assignment of unequal shares in “the common” is

dependent upon and in line with an “evident” and indisputably natural inequality of

qualifications, capacities and position (it is its premise) that is further solidified by the

“necessarily finite amount of time” available to every individual8, and it simply ends with

this tightly knit claim9. However, this same “naturalization”, as it is re-presented and re-

described by Rancière—and here, what is at stake is in effect the construction of different

fictions that make any “same” never quite exactly the same—, stands explicitly as a

“produced ideality” that is not self-sufficient insofar as its very efficacy and effectiveness

are refigured as logically enabled by principles that are “outside” the circular claim to

inequality and on which its operations rely, and materially enabled by virtue of reiterated

operations and (discursive and extra-discursive) practices10. In other terms, in the

policing account of the givenness of the general distribution of parts and places, the force

of the appeal to nature lies in its presentation as a (maybe ultimately groundless but

16

arguably grounding) ground, as a powerful starting point that enables claims to proceed

on the assumption of that ground, as one would do from an axiom in mathematics,

without worrying too much about what takes place beyond, around, before or beside that

point. How Rancière operates with the appeal to nature, on the other hand, consists in two

distinct yet interrelated gestures. First, to continue the analogy, it consists in the

acknowledgement of the “axiom” as an “axiom”, of the opinion of inequality as a

produced “given” to which the philosopher appeals only in a “suspensive” mode

(expressed by the use of quotation marks, for instance). However, this tentatively

suspensive reiteration risks merely re-inscribing the opinion of inequality as a natural

“given”. Rancière’s second move thus consists in the proposition of another ultimately

groundless ground, of an alternative point of departure—the opinion of equality—that is

arguably more forceful than that of the opinion of inequality because it can account for

both the functioning of that first ground and supplementary occurrences—it covers more

ground, as it were. In my reading, this is the sense of Rancière’s recurrent claim that

inequality is dependent upon a presumed equality (e.g. Rancière 1995, 37; 2004a, 235;

2004b, 160; 2005, 55). The presupposition of equality, the challenge or “injunction” to

try and start from equality instead of inequality, is a “new axiom” asserted not only on

the ground of its explicative force, on what it covers, but also in reason of how it can

allow one to think and of who it authorizes, in the last instance, as a “thinking being” (for

Rancière, anyone at all). Engaging this alternative presupposition will allow to address

more directly what Rancière means by politics, to further discuss the singularity of his

claims about where and how to begin thinking and writing about art, pedagogy, and

17

politics, and to map a first link between the three types of practices on the basis of their

plausible relation with the verification of equality.

The Interruptive Character of Politics as the Verification of Equality

Among the authorizing practices through which beginnings are asserted as points

of departure that enable one to proceed without further ado, the posing of definitions

might be one of the most efficient, forceful and, at least in the critical reading that I am

attempting to unfold here, problematic way to begin. The possible efficiency and

forcefulness of the gesture of defining as a first gesture is most easily grasped in the

exemplary starting point of Euclid’s Elements, which begins by the positing of 23

“Definitions”, the first four of which are precisely: “1. A point is that of which there is no

part; 2. And a line is a length without breadth 3; And the extremities of a line are points;

4. A straight-line is (any) one which lies evenly with points on itself” (Euclid 2008, 6).

These definitions are prerequisites for what follows to be understandable at all, for what

follows to follow “naturally” in a straight-line of reasoning, as it were; they enable what

comes afterward to make sense, though outside the (in principle finite) field of

possibilities they open, outside the realm of applicability of the definitions in the

delimitation of which the definitions themselves play a defining role (in Euclid’s case, the

geometry of flat space), it becomes problematic to assess whether or not they can pretend

to make any sense. It is noteworthy, however, that the appeal of the Euclidian mode of

definition has largely exceeded the field of geometry and has been held to this day as an

exemplary procedure to follow in the production of scholarly work, if not of knowledge;

isn’t it important that one clearly defines one’s terms and that one’s argument, if not

18

one’s thought, runs smoothly in a straight-line? In line with some of the preoccupations

expressed by R.B.J. Walker (2010) on these points, I consider it an important gesture to

remark how (in particular, but far from exclusively), in the field of political philosophy,

the authorizing practices of definition have operated and operate as practices of

legitimation and de-legitimation that both enable and disable a multiplicity of

possibilities and “plausibilities”, allowing the production of forceful claims and effacing

among other things the complex work done at the sites of borders, boundaries and limits

by normalizing them into frictionless Euclidian lines and points11.

More to the point, so to speak, and yet in line with the attempt to take seriously

the working of authorizing practices in the context of the reading of Jacques Rancière’s

account of the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics that I am engaging

through Rancière’s own claims about where and how one can and ought to begin thinking

through those practices, I argue that the philosopher interestingly displaces the

authorizing practices of definition by an overbidding of sorts, by holding definitions as

inherently polemical sites that his work partakes in multiplying. In effect, his writings are

notably filled with claims about what politics is and what it is not, about what conditions

enable and disable it to happen, about what it does and how it does it, about when and

where it is “properly” at work, etc., while at the same time he recurrently insists that what

is at stake is not a matter of “re-giving to words their ‘true’ meaning or to attack a

‘fraudulent’ usage of words. It is not a matter of dissimulation; it is a war on the meaning

of the notions. There is a war about (sur [literally: on]) the word democracy that is

already within the word itself [since it was first coined by its opponents as an insult],

there is a war about the word republic; these are wars of principle” (Rancière 2009c, 573;

19

my translation; italics in the text). In that sense, there is also an open “war” or a “fight”

about the meaning of the word politics that is always already an utterly political matter

that no Euclidian definition can pin down and settle once and for all12. If the identitarian

operations of the logic of police strive to ascribe the proper words to the proper things,

the proper names to the proper individuals and groups without remainder (Rancière 1995,

173), politics, for Rancière, begins with the acknowledgement of the constitutive distance

of every identity to itself, of every name to what or who it names. Politics stands in a

relation of reciprocal implication with the police, since it happens as an interruption of

the “definitionnist” police order by its cleaving from “within”, when the equality of

anyone at all with anyone at all upon which the functioning of inequality depends is

verified through its putting to work, its mise en oeuvre through singular scenes of

dissensus. This is the singularity of politics, but considering its polemical functioning is

also a way to construct a route towards the investigation of the polemical uses of the two

other words and practices that interest me here: art and pedagogy.

These dense claims should be unpacked so that what it might mean to begin with

the presupposition of equality becomes clearer. First things first, what does it imply to

speak of equality as a presupposition? Rancière is worth quoting at length on this point:

that equality is a presupposition means, first and foremost, that

[…] it is not a founding ontological principle, but [a] condition that only functions when it is put to work (mise en oeuvre). In consequence, politics is not founded on equality in the sense that others want to found it on this or that general human disposition, like language or fear. Equality is effectively the necessary condition for us to be able to think politics. But, first, equality is not political in itself. It has effects (fait effet) in a variety of circumstances that have nothing political about them (by the simple fact that two individuals speaking to one another can understand one another, for example). Second, it only creates politics when it is put to work under the specific form of this or that case of dissensus (Rancière 2009d, 503-4; my translation).

20

The claim that equality is “the necessary condition for us to be able to think politics” is

grounded on the assertion that inequality is dependent on a presumed equality. In effect,

if politics is unthinkable outside the order of police from which it constitutes a rerouting

or deviation, an interruption (Rancière 2009a, 118), the efficacy of the logic of inequality

that sustains the functioning of that order is itself unthinkable outside the premise of a

prior equality. This provoking assertion, which I briefly addressed above, can now be

engaged more directly. Let’s start with “the given”, as one can only do: consider a

relation of inequality par excellence, that between an alleged superior giving an order to

an alleged inferior—the relation between a commanding officer and a soldier, or between

a parent and a child, if you wish13. Now, by giving an order, the superior seemingly

ascertains his or her superiority within the distribution of parts and places insofar as the

inferior obeys that order, a process that can happen with more or less friction but that

generally happens nonetheless. What Rancière claims, however, is that what is effectively

expressed through this process and what can be gathered from it is actually quite different

from the confirmation of the effective legitimacy of the relation of inequality in question.

In effect, by positing that, and by acting as if the inferior will understand his or her own

subordination and the order given as an order that needs to be obeyed (Rancière 1995,

37), that is by taking for granted that the inferior understands in just the same way as the

superior does, the latter demonstrates that s/he effectively presupposes that both of them

are equals at least in that they share a common ability to understand, and even a common

share in reason14. It is in this sense that the functioning of inequality is dependent on a

presumed equality and that the presupposition of equality can be said to account for the

occurrences that follow from the opinion of inequality.

21

To put it differently, and to get at what this presupposition might entail for art and

pedagogy, by saying to someone or to some group of people “you are only making noise

(phônè), you have no voice (logos), therefore you must obey”, at least two things (that

are not mutually exclusive) can take place. Under the identitarian logic of the police, one

might thus grant the addressees a certain consistency as an identifiable individual, group

or party that has a part and a place in the hierarchical distribution of parts and places even

by way of its very exclusion from the conversations that determine the parts that count

and those that do not, or less—this might legitimize the assignment of that party to a state

of tutelage on the ground of “immaturity”, for instance. But at the same time, beyond or

beside the question of inclusion and exclusion (which, again, is not an irrelevant question

but one that does not account, given its very formulation, for different planes and

occurrences that are arguably relevant politically), this situation can also be perceived

and refigured as the construction of a polemical scene from which the people partaking in

the speech situation can gather that they too have a (uncounted) capacity to hear and

understand the language of reason(s) they are said to lack. Thus, the very construction of

such an explanatory scene ruins in advance the explanation that is formulated as to the

legitimacy of the unequal order at stake and as to the unquestionable “necessity” to

accept it as a “given”; it ruins it in principle, even if the “material inequality” remains.

The performative demonstration of the equality that underlies inequality can perforate the

tightly knit thread of legitimizing claims to inequality by exposing its sheer contingency,

its absence of reason “in the last instance”, and as such it can constitute a ground for

political engagement. This line of argument can also be brought to bear on the

understanding of the pedagogical and artistic relations. In effect, the understanding of the

22

pedagogical practice of teaching as the linear transmission of the schoolmaster’s

knowledge to the ignorant student describes what apparently happens in every efficient

classroom, but it obliterates the presupposed equality that enables the schoolmaster to

expect to be understood by his or her student in the first place when the former has to

repeatedly explain to the latter that what s/he ignores first and foremost is his or her own

ignorance. This ignorance is understood as a distance that only the schoolmaster knows

and that he can allegedly bridge by his or her explanations, but this distance is effectively

recreated with every explanation (Rancière 2004b). What the student can effectively

gather from the words of the schoolmaster, however, is utterly unpredictable—as anyone

involved in teaching might acknowledge—, and in that sense the possibility of

understanding the sheer contingency of the pedagogical relation as a relation of inequality

from the very attempt to explain it pedagogically stands as an exemplary instance of the

irreducible “adventures” that constitute the practices of language and the making of

sense. Similarly, the understanding of the spectator’s practice as the passive perception

and understanding of just what the artist has put in his or her work or action seemingly

describes how the knowledgeable creator can instruct the ignorant observer about his or

her unacknowledged situation in the world, but it thus effaces how the work or action

stands just in-between the two as something that belongs to neither, as a third term in the

relation, a common object the sense of which is possessed by none but can be equally

interpreted and constructed by anyone (Rancière 2008, 20-1). Hence, it appears that a

first relation between art, pedagogy, and politics can be traced to their shared reliance on

a prior equality that is presumed by the logic of inequality operating in the hierarchical

distribution of parts and places and that can be made manifest, or expressed, through the

23

practical construction of polemical scenes of dissensus, although the effects of such

scenes are in the last analysis also unpredictable.

What can possibly be verified through those scenes, those speech situations is an

equality that enables inequality to function and that always already undermines the

frictionlessness of this functioning by demonstrating the ultimate absence of reason of the

unequal distributions of parts and places, by expressing its oblivious reliance on the

ungrounded ground that is the equality of anyone at all (n’importe qui, literally: no-matter

who) with anyone at all that complicates any sharp distinction between voice and noise.

What is at stake in every case is not any equality, however, but what 19th-century French

“emancipator” Joseph Jacotot named “the opinion of equality” formulated in terms of “an

equality of intelligences”. This means two things:

first, that any said or written sentence only has sense (prend sens) in posing a subject capable, by a corresponding adventure, to guess (deviner) its sense, the truth of which is assured by no code or primary dictionary; second, that there are not two ways to be intelligent, that any intellectual operation follows the same route—the route of the materiality that is traversed by form or sense—, that its home (foyer) is always the presupposed equality of a will to speak (vouloir dire) and a will to hear (vouloir entendre) (Rancière 2004a, 159; my translation).

In that sense, the arbitrariness of language—the fact that “no reason is immanent in

language, that there is neither a divine language nor a universal language but only a mass

of sound (masse sonore) that each one, each time, has to make significant (faire

signifier)” (158; my translation)—operates from the start under an inherently egalitarian

logic within which unequal distributions of abilities and qualifications can then take

place. In its own way, this (radical and uneasily acknowledged) equality of intelligences

“defines, draws a community, but to the condition that it is understood as a community

that has no consistency. It is each time borne by someone for any other, a virtual infinity

of others. It happens without having a place (elle a lieu sans avoir place)” (160; my

24

translation). A “community of equals”, or equality “in general” is thus not a goal to reach,

but a presupposition to ceaselessly reactivate and reactualize in concrete polemical

scenes. However, this arbitrary of language supposes another arbitrary, “the social

arbitrary” defined by the fact “that the social order is without any immanent reason, that

it is simply because it is, without any intention that sets it” (my translation). What

differentiates it from the arbitrary of language is that “this material arbitrary of the social

weight of things, no subject can pass through it for another subject (aucun sujet ne peut le

traverser à l’intention d’un autre). There is no reasonable collective subject. Only

individuals can have reason. A collectivity does not want to say anything to anyone.

Society orders itself as bodies fall. What it asks from us is simply to incline with it, it is

our consent” (160-1; my translation). Starting from the presupposition of equality implies

to distinguish these two separate logics, while starting from inequality, even in order to

“reduce” it, is to confound them. But while Jacotot maintained that the process of

equality (or what he called “intellectual emancipation”) and the process of inequality

(“the aggregation of social bodies”) must remain absolutely estranged from one another

lest equality turns into its opposite, Rancière claims, for his part, that the process of

equality is not political in and of itself, neither is it “a transcendental of sorts that would

govern all spheres of activity” (Rancière 2009d, 504; my translation). This is why he

asserts that there can be many equalities at stake and that “the literary equality is not the

same as the democratic equality or the universal exchangeability of commodities” (505).

Insofar as politics is concerned, Rancière argues that something (an action, a

claim, a posture, etc.) can only become political if it becomes the site of, or if it gives rise

to (si elle donne lieu à), the encounter of the two logics or processes, the outcome of

25

which can never be known in advance: “For there to be politics, it is necessary that the

logic of police and the logic of equality have a point of encounter. […] for there to be

politics, it is necessary that the apolitical emptiness of the equality of anyone at all with

anyone at all produces the emptiness of a political property like the liberty of the

Athenian demos” (Rancière 1995, 57-8; my translation)15. This emptiness of the political

property of the demos (liberty) constitutes itself as the part of those who have no part (la

part des sans-part), meaning that those who have no proper, exclusive part in the

“community” universalize this singular part that is not one into “the figure of a specific

subject, supernumerary in relation to the count of groups, places and functions of a

society” (Rancière 2009d, 502-3; my translation). Acknowledging a part of those who

have no part does not quite mean to give a part “within” the distribution of parts and

places to those who have none; it means to acknowledge that politics takes place beside

this count, because this is necessarily a miscount, and it operates as a polemical

engagement with what it means to count in the first place16. Thus, the egalitarian process

of emancipation that takes place as the verification of the equality of anyone at all with

anyone at all turns into politics only if and when it operates a “universalization of the

capacity of anyone at all”, a multiplication of the demonstration that political action is a

capacity of anyone at all (Rancière 2009e, 495). This implies the action of hitherto

uncounted capacities that emerge as an interruption of and as a supplement to—as a

supplement that interrupts—the arithmetical and geometrical count of parts, places, and

capacities that is allegedly without remainder, the action of improper names/misnomers

are put to work to displace and provoke a torsion in the distribution of proper names17.

What can this type of polemical scene look like? Consider an event that happened in

26

France in 1968, during what has been called les Événements de mai. After the publication

of newspaper articles in which anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was condemned by both the

extreme-right and the Secretary of the Communist Party through dubious mentions his

origins, French students began to declare en masse “We are all German Jews!”; “taking

to its word the stigmatizing sentence of the adversary, attached to track down the intruder

on the stage (sur la scène) where the classes and their parties were counted, they turned it

on its head to make it into an open subjectivation of the uncounted, a name that could not

possibly be confused with any real social group, before any identity statement (relevé

d’identité)” (Rancière 1995, 173; my translation; italics in the text). Anyone at all can

have the capacity/ability to demonstrate that s/he is not completely circumscribed by his

or her “social” identities—although enacting this demonstration can be far more difficult

for some—, and it is something akin to this constitutive distance of any identity to itself

that has been multiplied by a plurality of voices on the stage thus constructed. According

to Rancière, events of this kind are rare—and thus politics itself is rare—but they occupy

a central place in his analyses of the moments of politics as limit-moments: they embody

what it might mean to speak of processes of political subjectivation as “the action of

uncounted capacities (capacités) that come to cleave the unity of the given and the

evidence of the visible to draw a new topography of the possible” (Rancière 2008, 55; my

translation), as processes of de-identification that poses political subjects as misnomers

and in-betweens whose presence can never be fully present(ed) or produced (as one could

be asked by a court to produce evidences). These processes constitute the supplementary

occurrences that can be accounted for by the presupposition of equality and that remain

invisible, inaudible, indifferent or irrelevant for the opinion of inequality. What this

27

definition raises, in return, are the difficult questions of who decides what constitutes the

action of hitherto uncounted capacities?; what constitutes a cleaving and a redrawing, a

rerouting and a deviation and not merely a reiteration of the “given” topography of the

possible pertaining to the police order?; and just what is part of this “unity of the given

and [this] evidence of the visible”, and what transforms it? Answering these questions,

however, is what is always already at stake in processes of political subjectivation18.

Rancière’s accounts of how the presupposition of equality can function and of

politics itself as the interruption of the order of the police by way of the verification of

equality constitute, in my reading, the singularity of his work on what is at stake in where

and how one can and ought to begin thinking and writing about the interrelations between

the practices of art, pedagogy, and politics. It remains problematic, however, in that on

the one hand, there seems to be a fundamental and similar equality at work in the very

enablement of the inegalitarian distributions of parts and places that characterize art,

pedagogy, and politics, while on the other hand, Rancière carefully poses strict conditions

for the process of equality—interchangeably called “process of emancipation”—to be

plausibly qualified as political. Addressing this difficulty calls for a more direct

engagement with the question of the interrelations between art, pedagogy and politics,

with where and how each type of practice “begins”, “ends”, and overlaps with the others,

with their respective and mutual relations with the notion of equality and, most

importantly, with this notion that “crept in”, as it were, when the presupposition of

equality was duly considered: emancipation.

28

Debuts and Departures: (Re)Commencing to Displace Emancipation as Maturity

on les croise dans la rue et on se dit d’abord ce sont des jeunes

les vieux, pareil, avant quoi que ce soit on se dit en pensée voilà un vieux mais un adulte, c’est tout sauf évident

ils ne sont jamais tout nus si vous voyez ce que je veux dire il leur faut une histoire

[…] un adulte, ça n’existe pas

Jean-Luc Godard, Éloge de l’amour

There is an idiomatic expression in French, l’enfance de l’art, which is usually applied to

something deemed easy and simple, if not simplistic, much like the English “child’s

play”. Interestingly, the association of art and childhood opens in at least two directions

that imply pedagogical concerns. First, it points to the (dis)qualification of easiness, if not

of facility and triviality, as being caused by a lack of education, instruction, or

qualification and as something to be looked upon with a more or less condescending, if

not paternalistic smile, and cast aside as non-serious, as infantile; “a child could’ve done

this”, “anyone could’ve done that”, as some utter in front of contemporary art. Second,

however, it also points to a “creativity” loosely associated with youth and often idealized,

if not celebrated, either in the retrospective tone of nostalgia—although some would

insist that nostalgia is itself immature, something entertained especially by the old on the

verge of “reverting into childhood”—or in the notion of a “purity” that it might well take

a lifetime to reach (back) by overcoming one’s education or instruction; “It took me 80

years to paint like a child”, Picasso is reputed to have replied. Now, childhood is a very

delicate matter to deal with in a few lines. For one, the distribution of entitlements to

speak about it is highly debatable, to say the least, if only because anyone at all can in

29

principle claim to have some experiential authority on the matter, be it in the form of

negation. If I nonetheless begin by evoking this notion, here, it is not only because it

relates to beginnings in a rather literal way—each singular life being divisible into a (and

many) beginning(s), middle(s) and end(s)—, but also because I think it can raise useful

complexities as to what emancipation can mean, complexities that are effaced in what I

consider to be the canonical understandings of emancipation as a straightforward passage

to an adulthood of sorts. Picasso’s alleged reply, the positing of “the child” as the last and

most affirmative of the three transformations of the spirit with which Nietzsche begins

the presentation of the discourses of his Zarathustra19, and even the claim that “anyone

could’ve done that” all suggest the possibility that emancipation—in Nietzsche’s words,

willing one’s will and attaining one’s world, yet without falling prey to nihilism; or in

Arendtian terms, becoming not the author but the actor of one’s deeds while acting/

beginning-in-common (Arendt 1998, 184-5)—might be thought otherwise than as a linear

progression towards the overcoming of a lack of wisdom, knowledge, and mastery, as a

jump from here to there, from an initial “immaturity” to a final “maturity” that can

allegedly be the fact of both individuals and “communities”.

I argue that this possibility to think emancipation differently is most interestingly

developed in Rancière’s critical accounts of the logics of art, pedagogy, and politics,

especially in the context of what he calls “the pedagogization of the world” operating

through the extension of a specific understanding of the pedagogical relation from an

inter-individual plane to a world-historical one. The force of Rancière’s accounts resides

in how they displace the canonical understandings of the “produced ideality” of

emancipation while nonetheless maintaining the notion itself by refiguring its importance

30

for cultural, social, and political practices in terms of equality and of re(con)figurations of

the possible. Engaging Rancière’s account of the “beginnings” of art and pedagogy in a

delineating mode, in line with how I already engaged the “beginning” of politics as an

interruption of the order of the police, might allow to think how artistic, pedagogical and

political practices can be related both to one another and to the presupposition of

equality. Investigating these practices “out of [their] limits”, that is “out of the situations

in which [their] birth or [their] disappearance are staged” (Rancière 2009a, 117), can be

the occasion to put into play a notion of emancipation that stands less a definite and

definitive end than as a point of departure. It can also constitute, most crucially, a way to

begin reading Rancière himself more critically.

“L’enfance de l’art” and the Delineation of Operative Regimes of Identification

Jacques Rancière recurrently insists that there is no necessary relation between art

and politics, or more precisely, between what happens “within” and as art and what

happens “within” and as politics. The philosopher’s central claim is that the possibly

political effects of artistic practices are utterly indeterminate, fundamentally incalculable

(Rancière 2008, 73)—which does not mean that they are inexistent and unimportant,

however. The most precise relation that can be delineated between art and politics is first

and foremost a relation of analogy: art is analogous to politics and politics is analogous to

art in that both concern the possibilities of re(con)figuring specific distributions of the

sensible; both consists in the production of interruptions of the allegedly “normal” course

of “ the given” that sharply discerns between the visible and the invisible, the audible and

the inaudible, the speakable and the unspeakable, etc., and in that sense, engaging artistic

31

practices can offer an interesting way to address the tensions that characterize the relation

between the police and politics, between the given and its re(con)figuration20. But if art

and politics can be determined as analogous, that is if they can be qualified as similar

(semblables) under certain aspects and if this similarity can in principle be delineated

with a minimum of precision, it is only because they differ from the very beginning; they

can be alike precisely because they are not, in fact as in principle, the same. A problem

then arises when this primary difference has to be unfolded with some clarity: the

difficulty, in effect, is to discern the specificity of both art and politics when each notion

is arguably not identical to itself and cannot be addressed “in general”: “art and politics

are contingent notions. The fact that there always are forms of power does not mean that

there always is politics and the fact that there is music or sculpture in a society does not

mean that art is constituted as an independent category” (Rancière 2009d, 502; my

translation; italics in the text). Engaging Rancière’s singular account of politics has

shown some of his grounds for the claim according to which this practice is most usefully

thought not in terms of relations of power but in terms of relations between worlds that

operate as a verification of equality through a universalization of the capacity of anyone

at all. As for art, it can mean many things not only because there are many arts and

tekhnai, but because the very notion of art in the singular has a particular history. In

effect, the identification of art in the singular “began” at the end of the 18th century, in

Europe, and it is intimately intertwined with what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of

art; no history of “Art” as an essence or a substance is thus plausible, or rather,

essentialist forms of History of Art constitute a problem to engage more than an assured

“given”. More broadly, the philosopher claims that what can be delineated in relation to

32

“art” are many regimes of identification of the arts. Addressing the ones he formalizes

can allow a better grip on the relations between art and both politics and pedagogy, and

on how emancipation has been and can be brought to bear on these interrelations.

Rancière defines a particular regime of the arts as a “specific type of link between

modes of production of works (oeuvres) or practices, forms of visibility of these practices

and modes of conceptualization of the ones and the others” (Rancière 2000, 27; my

translation). In that sense, this operative (if not formalist) notion is akin to what was

designated above, in a more general sense, as configurations of sense or distributions of

the sensible. Within “the Western tradition”, Rancière distinguishes “three great regimes

of identification” of the arts. Each one can be related to the problem of beginnings in that

it poses a singular point of departure and draws lines of demarcation from which the

artistic qualification becomes thinkable as such; it enables claim like “this is art” and

“this is not”21. Moreover, each regime also enables a singular delineation of the possible

“politicity” of art, and it is this politicity that is generally the specific object of Rancière’s

investigations, for the philosopher first and foremost starts with political concerns,

including in his work on art and on pedagogy. Although they are historically produced

configurations of sense, it is crucial to reiterate that the regimes of the arts do not stand as

distinct stages on a linear, teleological history of “Art”. Rather, each one persists

“horizontally”, as it were, and they often comingle, even in a single work, practice, or

interpretation. The three regimes identified by Rancière are the following:

1. The ethical regime of images, within which “‘art’ is not identified as such but finds

itself subsumed under the question of images” as a “type of beings” that are the objects of

a double question: “that of their origins and, in consequence, of their truth-value; and that

33

of their destination: of the uses they serve and of the effects they induce”. What is at

stake is thus “to know how the manner of being of images concerns the ethos, the manner

of being of individuals and collectivities. And this question prevents ‘art’ from

individualizing itself as such” (27-8), meaning that under this regime, art never quite

begins. This ethical (and thus, not properly political in Rancière’s sense) regime is

exemplified by Plato’s account of images as either authentic imitations of models for

definite ends or simulacrums of mere appearances, the make-believe or allegorical aspect

of which cannot yet be distinguished by children (Republic 378d-e), and by his account of

the possible effects of images (and of stories as images) on the “supreme good” that is the

“unity of feelings” of the community (462b). This regime is also at stake in discussions

like the Iconoclasts’ debates, in the polemics about the “nature” of images taken in and

from Auschwitz (Didi-Huberman 2004) and, more generally, whenever what is in

question are the ways in which images “give to the children and the spectators-citizens” a

certain “education [and] inscribe themselves in the distribution of the occupations of the

city” (Rancière 2000, 28) in function of their determinate “nature”;

2. The poetic or representative regime of the arts, which identifies not the being but the

fact of the arts “in the couple poiesis/mimesis […] within a classification of the manners

of doing (manières de faire)”, seeing and judging. This classification is organized by the

notion of representation and “defines in consequence manners of doing well, and of

appreciating imitations”. This logic of representation “enters into a relation of global

analogy with a global hierarchy of political and social occupations” (29-31), as in

Aristotle’s archetypical account of the cathartic and educational role of different genres

of music in the Greek polis (Politics, 1339a11ff.). Under this regime, different arts

34

“begin” at different and clearly identifiable points. The question is not only that of

representing and imitating, but of doing it in accordance with a hierarchical distribution

of correlated subjects and genres that defines, for instance, a specific genre of painting or

of writing for the representation of monarchs, another for the representation of the life of

the working class, etc. This regime enables the politicization of certain art forms on the

ground of their specific characteristics as distinct forms and techniques, and in relation to

political objectives and concerns that are “proper” to different “groups” and that are all

allegedly best served by a specific form. It is thus at stake in claims about a communal

immediacy associated with theater but not with cinema and that puts theatre “above” as

more “directly” political, in the cases of Brecht and Artaud for example; in claims about

an absence of signification associated with music but not with painting and that puts

music at the top of the hierarchy of the arts, either severing any link with political

concerns or displacing the question of political affects on a vitalist plane, in the case of

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for instance; or in contemporary claims according to which

documentary film is suited for oppressed, exploited and dominated groups while fiction is

only possible, relevant and responsible for “mature” and autonomous people (this last

claim already shows how the ethical question of the “nature” of images can readily be

articulated to representative and hierarchical distributions of parts and places); etc.;

3. The aesthetic regime of art “which properly identifies art in the singular and unties this

art from any specific rule, any hierarchy of subjects, genres and arts”. This identification

is not “anymore [made] through a distinction [of art] among the manners of doing [as in

the representative regime], but through the distinction of a sensible mode of being (mode

d’être sensible) proper to the products of art”. As such, the aesthetic regime “begins”

35

with reinterpretations of historical works of art that make them effective in novel ways: it

begins with Lessing’s Laocoon in 1766, with Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic

Education of Man, Kant’s third critique, Hegel’s (re)interpretation of early-modern Dutch

painting, etc. However, if this regime “asserts the absolute singularity of art”, it “destroys

at the same time any pragmatic criterion of this singularity. It founds at the same time the

autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with those through which life forms itself”

(31-3). Under this last regime, differentiating rigorously between an artistic and a non-

artistic practice, art and non-art (say, between a performance art event and someone that

sleeps on a park bench) thus becomes increasingly difficult, if not in principle impossible,

and this difficulty is itself at the core of the practices of many artists (think not only of

Marcel Duchamp’s iconic urinal, but already of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”

and of the virulent condemnations of the novel as “democratic”). This does mean “that art

is everywhere but that it can be everywhere. Anyone at all is subject to seize it (n’importe

qui est susceptible de s’en emparer), but also anyone at all and anything at all can give

rise to art (donner lieu à l’art) (Rancière 2009b; my translation).

The boundaries of art as such, and even of who is an artists and who is a spectator,

are thus drawn and blurred at the same time. Yet, the possible politicity of art also

becomes most interesting, for it is refigured in terms of distances from, and suspensions

and interruptions of, the “normal” perceptual and experiential order of the representative

regime of the arts from which it departs most immediately—the latter and the ethical

regime of images are thus continuously (re)constituted as “the given”, in a way that is

akin to how the order of police is framed as “natural” by Rancière. It is this aesthetic

regime that renders plausible the crucial (and characteristically “Rancierian”) claim that:

36

Art is not political first and foremost by virtue of the messages and sentiments it transmits on the order of the world. Neither is it political by the way in which it represents the structures of society, the conflicts or the identities of social groups. It is political by the very distance (l’écart même) that it takes from these functions, by the type of time and the type of space it institutes, by the manner in which it divides (découpe) this time and populates (peuple) this space (Rancière 2004c, 36-7; my translation)22.

This implies that the allegedly “pedagogico-political” effects attributed to many

contemporary artworks and artistic practices cannot properly be foreseen. What will be

gathered from the distances that those works and practices introduce in relation to what

they are expected to accomplish cannot be predicted, if only because “what is expected”

is itself a situated contingency that depends on a multiplicity of “produced idealities”. As

such, one cannot plausibly build a general “theory” of the orientation of the relations

between what happens in art, in pedagogy, and in politics. More generally, however, and

most importantly for the present paper, it is important to acknowledge that this aesthetic

regime of the arts (which goes hand in hand with an “aesthetic regime of thought”23)

nonetheless constitutes the distribution of the sensible that enables Rancière’s own

accounts not only of the possible politicity of art, but also of politics itself as an

interruption that cleaves “the given” from “within”, and of the analogical character of the

relations that can thus be formalized between art and politics as practices of

re(con)figuration of the possible.

In the last analysis, the name given by Rancière to any re(con)figuration of the

possible is emancipation. To re(con)figure what and how one perceives what one can

possibly do and, more broadly, how one perceives and thinks one’s world is to possibly

“escape” the assignment of oneself to one’s “proper” place(s), position(s), and count(s) of

capacities; as such, it is emancipating oneself in a manner that cannot be definitive.

Rancière thus displaces the understanding of emancipation from the Marxist framework

37

of ideology and the Bourdieusian framework of misrecognition (méconnaissance) that are

grounded in the opinion of inequality, towards an acknowledgement that emancipation is

neither “the passage from an ignorance to a knowledge, nor the expression of a proper

culture and identity” that could be fostered by “science” and by specific aesthetic

practices on the ground of a sharp distinction between reason and affects, “but rather a

manner to cross the borders that define identities” (Rancière 2009c, 572-3; my

translation)24. Emancipation is thus re(con)figured less as a passage to an adulthood or a

maturity than as a practice that is itself rendered possible by a positive “lack of

knowledge” of one’s supposedly proper place, an “ignorance” that effectively enables an

array of movements beside and beyond this assigned position (in more figurative terms,

emancipation would be akin to a “childish” question in return or a “stubborn ignorance”

when faced with the patronizing injunction to “act your age!”). Through this gesture, the

philosopher links the notion of emancipation to the tropes of suspension and interruption

enabled and fostered by the aesthetic regime of art as a regime that operates of the

groundless ground of a presupposition of equality. In effect, the aesthetic suspension of

the hierarchies of genres and subjects, of parts and places, of positions and possibilities,

of modes of being and necessary effects borne by the ethical and the representative

regimes is itself rendered operative by the prior introduction of a notion of equality

“within” the configurations that make sense of art and of related practices, an

introduction that is reiterated through a multiplicity of practices25. What happens “within”

aesthetics (the politics of aesthetics, the politics of this or that artwork or artistic practice)

thus overlaps with what happens “within” politics (the aesthetic of politics that enables it

to take place as polemical interventions in the relations between perceptible worlds), but

38

the politics of aesthetics do not operate the universalizing gestures that are the “proper-

improper” of politics “itself” as the construction of collective forms of enunciation; if

they partake in the formation of “this dissensual fabric where are cut out the forms of

construction of objects and the possibilities of subjective enunciation proper to the action

of political collectives” (Rancière 2008, 73; my translation), the precise weight of their

effects on politics “proper” cannot be calculated and fixed in any determinate way insofar

as they take place, precisely, through an aesthetic interruption, a contingent

re(con)figuration of the sensible. This renders problematic the assessment of how artistic

practices appropriate political concerns and projects, but in the last instance, Rancière

argues that “[o]ne must reverse how the problem is generally posed. It is for politics to

appropriate, for their own use, the modes of presentation of things or of segues of reasons

(d’enchaînements de raisons) produced by artistic practices rather than the contrary”

(Rancière 2009d, 515; my translation). This, in return, renders problematic the

assessment of the extent to which such an appropriation can be said to have taken place.

Rancière ultimately starts from political concerns. In that sense, in most of his

writings on the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics it appears that while

aesthetics is implicated in every refiguration of the sensible and of the possible (artistic

practices being counted, among others but with no privilege (Rancière 2000, 73) in the

horizontal distribution of practices that partake in the production of novel configurations

of sense), politics retains a principial priority as a terrain of reconfiguration. Mobilizing

an “etymological” mode of thought, there is effectively a sense in which the con of

reconfiguration points to a “togetherness” of sorts that is virtually absent from the notion

of refiguration. This apparently trivial remark constitutes an interesting way to start

39

engaging what could be named the problem of the dichotomy between the individual and

the collective in Rancière’s work, in a manner that attempts to put into play the problem

of beginnings when art, pedagogy, and politics are at stake. This engagement is best

achieved, in my view, through a closer consideration of the practices of pedagogy.

Instructing Ignorance, Ignoring Instructions

Among the three main types of practices considered in this paper in relation with

the problem of beginnings, pedagogy arguably appears to have been cast aside; it

certainly remains to be considered in and for itself. Pedagogy seemingly stands as the

parent pauvre, the poor relation of the triad. In fact, it is also of a marginal importance,

quantitatively, in Rancière’s own work. This statement, however, overlooks its qualitative

importance for the philosopher’s understanding of the notion of emancipation, and the

general importance of the chance discovery of the work of Joseph Jacotot in the

construction of this understanding. The pedagogical work of Jacotot on and around the

notion of intellectual emancipation enabled Rancière to argue that if one is looking for

equality, be it in art, pedagogy, or politics, one first has to start from the opinion of

equality, since beginning with the opinion of inequality is bound to only enable and

strengthen the circular logic of inequality. As I showed above, this is a crucial point for

Rancière regarding where and how one can and ought to begin thinking about art,

pedagogy, and politics. Jacotot’s work further enables Rancière to construct a critical

account of the “pedagogization of the world” as a process that extends the inter-

individual pedagogical relation into a societal, if not a world-historical one. Most

importantly, it is on the basis of the pedagogical relation that the displacement of the

40

understanding of emancipation from an exceptional passage to a “maturity” or to an

“adulthood” of sorts towards a much more mundane and far less exclusive work of

re(con)figuration of the possible becomes plausible. These concerns can usefully be

addressed, in my view, through an engagement with the practices of Rancière himself as

a professor-researcher, the premise being that there is a possible coherence to be found

between his claims and the ways in which they are presented (or “professed”) in writing.

The “pedagogization of the world” implies a particular extension of what Jacotot

named the “stultifying” conception of pedagogy to “the community” as a “whole”, and

even to “world-history”. This understanding was first described above as a positional

logic within which what the schoolmaster first teaches to the student is that s/he (the

latter) is ignorant, and that this ignorance is a difference of position between knowledge

and non-knowledge, a distance that only the schoolmaster can measure and bridge but

that s/he in fact has to reinstate with each explication (Rancière 2004b). While this logic

of inequality presupposes an equality of intelligences that enables it to work in the first

place, this equality is arguably effaced by the multiple practices of authority and

authorization that make pedagogical institutions into the sites of inegalitarian relations

between individuals that bear either the title of schoolmaster or that of student (putting

aside those involved in the administration of the institution). The “pedagogization of the

world”, however, begins from the moment that the institution itself is considered unequal

or inegalitarian, even if it is in order to better “reform” it, to turn it into an “egalitarian”

institution—a contradiction in terms, according to Jacotot. The idea that institutions, and

furthermore, “the community” or “society” itself can be instructed and educated, is

prevalent in Western cultural, social, and political thought, from Plato’s Republic (see

41

note 7 above) to Kant’s understanding of Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his

self-incurred immaturity”, which is further specified by the claim that since “only a few,

by cultivating their own minds, have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity

and in continuing boldly on their way”, “[t]here is more chance of an entire public

enlightening itself” (Kant 2008, 55; italics in the text). For Rancière-Jacotot, any idea of

world-historical Progress is akin to the generalization of the understanding of ignorance

as lateness, and the great “social project” of helping “society” (or any institution) to

transform itself into an egalitarian one runs up against “a point of departure”, against

this first principle that can be summarized into a very simple and very old metaphysical axiom: the nature of the whole cannot be the same than that of its parts. What we give to society in terms of rationality, we take it from the individuals that form it. And what it refuses to individuals, society could well take it for itself, but it would never be able to give it back to them. The same goes for reason as for equality, which is its synonym. One must choose to attribute it to real individuals or to their fictitious reunion. One must choose to make an unequal society with equal men or an equal society with unequal men. […] It would suffice to learn being equal men in an unequal society. This is what to emancipate oneself means (Rancière 2004b, 220-1; my translation and italics).

This argument asks the question who decides of the emancipation of others, who decides

who has effectively learned to be equal in an unequal society, and it expresses what one

could call the “methodological individualism” that runs through Rancière’s work, for it is

not without reminding the infamous claim that “There is no such thing as society!” How

is Rancière’s “individualism” different from that of the neoliberal vulgate and from the

economicist “paradigm” of the rational agent that occupies a central place in the

curriculum of most faculties of social sciences nowadays, especially in departments of

political science? And does the philosopher places himself in the position of he who can

legitimately decide who is emancipated?

42

Rancière claims that he attempts to think “not in terms of surface and depth, but in

terms of horizontal distributions, of combinations between systems of possibilities

(possibles). There where we search for the hidden under the apparent, we instigate a

position of mastery. I try to think a topography that does not imply this position of

mastery” (Rancière 2009d, 501; my translation). His commitment to a mode of thinking

that formulates “horizontal topographies” is expressed most visibly in his general

mapping of the relations between art, pedagogy, and politics as practices that take place

on planes that are in principle not hierarchicalized and that communicate with one

another in a multiplicity of ways, although as I have indicated above, the plane of politics

often appear to remain the most important one for Rancière. Furthermore, Rancière

asserts that there is no single space-time where emancipation has to take place and no

ultimate determination to escape definitively; rather, the refiguration of the possible can

happen—and does always already happen in a multiplicity of ways—“within” any

“sphere” of practice for it implies to put into play the very boundaries that are drawn

between supposedly finite “spheres”, including the ones that assign their “proper” objects

and methods to different academic disciplines. The development of this understanding of

emancipation is closely related to the philosopher’s work on the archives of the 19th-

century workers’ movements in France. Faced with the limitations of the Althusserian

framework, Rancière came to the conclusion that addressing the question of emancipation

required acknowledging that the very separation between “the world of thought” and “a

social world that would only be its object”, between theory and practice, is “the first

philosophical and political question”, for it puts into place a distribution of parts and

places, a particular distribution of who is considered apt to think and who is considered

43

inapt. “If emancipation [has] a sense”, Rancière writes, “this sense [is] precisely a

claiming of thought (une revendication de la pensée) as belonging to everyone, which has

for correlate that there is no natural division of the objects of thought and that a discipline

is always a provisory gathering, a provisory territorialization of objects and questions that

do not have by themselves a proper localization or domain” (Rancière 2009f, 477-8; my

translation). What I called Rancière’s “methodological individualism” differs from the

theory of the agent of rational-choice on this key point, on the non-division of the

world(s) into an objectified “social” and an objectifying “science of the social”. In a

similar sense, there is not “description” on one side and “prescription” on the other, the

first being the fact of the (mature or immature) scientist and the second the fact of the

(mature or immature) militant (the militant and the scientist accusing each other of

immaturity, of submitting him- or herself to dubious imperatives). Rather, “s/he who

describes reconfigures the possibilities of a world, s/he who prescribes presupposes a

specific state of the world that is itself made of sedimented prescriptions” (477). What

both gestures compose are “landscapes of the possible”, and this composition is always

an expression of the common resources of thought. If this composition is a refiguration of

the possible—if it starts with the opinion of equality or verifies the equality of anyone at

all with anyone at all instead of reiterating the opinion of inequality—, it can be qualified

as emancipation; and if this composition can give rise to collective forms of enunciation

that universalize the capacity of anyone at all, it turns into politics, into a reconfiguration

of the collective perceptions of the possible; but emancipation itself cannot be the fact of

a collective as such, only of the individual that partake in it, and “the collective” does not

perceives as such either. Individuals do.

44

Most importantly, the judgment on emancipation and reconfiguration is itself a

polemical site. It is utterly debatable and it partakes in the constitution and

reinterpretation of “givens”. The action of a given artist or group of student, for instance,

can be judged political at this moment and place, but not, or differently political at that

other moment in that other place. Moreover, this judgment is inherently dissensual; no

consensus is to be found on the qualification of “politicity” and “emancipatedness”. In all

cases, the prerequisite for being able to question, to critique, and maybe to interrupt and

displace the division of disciplines, or any other configuration of sense, is a sense of how

these “givens” operate, that is a relative mastery of their language. This mastery will

necessarily be judged differently given the configuration(s) of sense “within” which the

questioning, critique, interruption or displacement takes place; but in the last analysis, the

very “givenness” of these configurations is a possibility to assess, not a historical

necessity to accept. There is thus no general recipe for developing a sense of how a

singular configuration of sense works, although it seemingly happens just as every

process of learning happens—learning is precisely to engage a specific configuration of

sense—, that is by operations of comparison, imitation, trial and error, tentative gestures

and hasty decisions, perseverance and abandonment, late beginnings and early endings,

etc. In Rancière’s account, this involves a particular form of “maturity” that he associates

with that of “the democratic man”: for the philosopher, as speaking beings human beings

are “poetic beings” and the “maturity” that this poetic character requires is the capacity to

assume that the “distance between words and things” is “not letdown or deception but

humanity”, to assume the “unreality of representation” (Rancière 2004a, 95; my

translation). This poetic “virtue” is a “virtue of confidence”, one that takes responsibility

45

for starting with the presupposition of equality, for asserting it and working with it all

along to test what it can give.

In Guise of a Conclusion: Building Stages, Making Scenes

On serait tenté de croire que nous avons à chaque minute le commencement en main, et que nous devrions tirer des plans pour l’humanité.

Robert Musil, L’homme sans qualités

Directed Reading courses have won the reputation of being interminable. Not only do

they begin before they actually begin, but they mobilize materials that can remain useful

long after their official ending, unless the exercise end up in the “negative finding” that

what was first intuited as useful is now judged inversely after a reasonable engagement.

Now that the beginning of the end of this essay has arguably begun, I can assert that its

writing has proven useful for “testing” Rancière’s thought on the interrelations between

art, pedagogy, and politics. I will now put an end to my exploration of the stakes involved

in the decisions about where and how one can and ought to begin thinking and writing

about these practices by presenting a brief recapitulation of the route traveled thus far

through the writings of Jacques Rancière. I will mainly insist of the usefulness of his

notion of scènes, which has recurrently appeared in this essay. In the last analysis, I

consider that this might be his most useful notion for engaging any given practice,

including Rancière’s own practices of writing.

Questioning where to begin thinking and writing about the interrelations of art,

pedagogy, and politics has led me to engage Rancière’s account of these interrelations

from a singular starting point of departure constituted by the attempt to problematize

46

beginnings themselves. I have shown that Rancière has something interesting to say on

beginnings in that he claims that one can and ought to start about anywhere, but that it

will necessarily be with “the given”. This implies to take a polemical stance in regard to

what is done in the academe and to adopt a polemical views of what “ideas at work” do,

of how they partake in the construction and reconstruction of configurations of sense, of

distributions of the sensible that constitute “the given” as such and that enable one to put

its very “givenness” into play. Engaging art, pedagogy, and politics is to engage such

configurations and distributions of “givens”. Most importantly, I have insisted on the

complication that Rancière adds to his injunction to “start at the beginning”: if you can

begin anywhere, the “how” of this beginning is crucial for what can possibly and

plausibly follow, and in order to “find” equality—without which politics is arguably not

thinkable, lest it is reduced to power relations—you ought to start with the presupposition

of equality. In effect, equality is both what enables relations of inequality and practices of

authorization and legitimation to function in the first place, and what can also account for

the occurrence of processes of political subjectivation that are deemed irrelevant and

trivial when starting from the opinion of inequality. What these processes put into play,

be it in art, in pedagogy, or in politics, is a particular understanding of emancipation that

is not formulated as a passage to “maturity” but as a reconfiguration of the possible.

Within this framework, the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics are assessed

“horizontally”, as it were, and this constitutes an interesting way to displace the prevalent

understandings of the pedagogical aesthetic of politics, the political pedagogy of

aesthetics, and the aesthetic politics of pedagogy. Addressing more directly the operative

regimes of the arts that Rancière delineates has allowed to assess how his own thought

47

relies on the aesthetic tropes of interruption and suspension of “the given” in order to

think emancipation and politics. Further addressing his own pedagogy has shown the

importance of the “emancipating” understanding of pedagogy in the development of

Rancière’s thought on the presupposition of equality as the place where one ought to

begin; pedagogy is the keystone of the “Rancierian” edifice, if there is one.

Rancière writes: “it is possible, from an indifferent point, to try and reconstitute

the conceptual network that makes a statement thinkable, a painting or a music effective,

or reality perceived as transformable or not transformable. It is somewhat the red thread

of my research. I do not mean that it is a principle or a starting point. I, too, started from

the stereotypical vision of science as the research of what is hidden” (Rancière 2009d,

501; my translation). Now, I think it is interesting to ask what can happen when one starts

not from inequality but from Rancière’s allegedly “egalitarian or anarchist theoretical

position that does not suppose [a] vertical rapport of an above to a below (d’un haut à un

bas)”. One answer to this question is that by enacting such a gesture, one will find oneself

without a “proper” ground, especially within the framework of a political philosophy that

proceeds in the manner of a “history of ideas” that requires to relate the writings of any

given writer, the more or less hidden questions or problems on and with which s/he

works, to an array of overdetermined questions and problems. I think, however, that this

answer overlooks how any beginning implies the construction of a singular site, the

building of a stage and the making of a scene that opens a terrain on which it becomes

possible to make sense, no matter the ground (it might not make much sense, but still it

makes some sense). In that sense, the notion of scènes that Rancière uses and that I

reiterated many times, most often “through” his ventriloquized voice, is probably the

48

most useful one for further engagements with the interrelations between art, pedagogy,

and politics in my research work. It is interesting to read the present in this light, for my

appreciation for the “Rancierian” notion of site/scene/stage began before this project, and

in fact it even held back a direct and broad engagement with “Rancière’s thought” as

such. In effect, in all preceding instances I preferred to engage particular practices—

especially “cases” of practices of cultural research dealing with biotechnologies, here—

and to think them through with only an eye on Rancière’s writings, for they assuredly

helped me to make some sense of the practices in question, but addressing these practices

responsibly and rigorously required a great amount of precision in their description,

which did not leave much space for engaging thoroughly Rancière’s ideas “themselves”.

Each engagement creates a scene through which other scenes are given a voice—thus the

relevance, in my reading, of the figure of the ventriloquist to describe the work of those

who assert that their work is to think—, and engaging practices that already create a

multiplicity of scenes rapidly produce a spiraling effect and affect. Thus, engaging

Rancière’s own insistence on scenes and concrete sites of polemical engagement,

especially in regard to the spiraling problem of beginnings—of how to begin to make

beginnings into a problem in relations with practices whose beginnings and ends are quite

blurry but that clearly claim to begin, to instigate novel reconfigurations one way or

another—does not lend itself easily to a rapid treatment. Nonetheless, it constitutes an

interesting point of departure for reading Rancière’s texts themselves in a polemical way

and to make them into polemical sites. It is not mine to judge the polemical quality—and

the quality—of such a work of ventriloquism, but it is what I will have attempted to make

from the beginning to the end.

49

Notes 1 (In order to minimize a certain interruptive violence that is necessarily implied in the use of explicatory notes, especially given their length in the present paper, I decided to place them at the end. The text should stand on its own without the notes, which mainly offer clarifications, illustrations by examples and citations, and openings through the construction of parallels with the work of others.)

In a text that offers a remarkable overview of “the method of Jacques Rancière”, Rancière writes, in the third person: “[…] his books are always forms of interventions in specific contexts. He never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature, cinema or anything else. He thinks that there is already a good deal of them and he loves trees enough to avoid destroying them to add one more theory to all those available on the market. His interventions have always been provoked by situations in which the question ‘where am I now?’ appeared to him to overlap with a wider question ‘where are we now?’. ‘Where are we?’ means two things at once: ‘how can we characterize the situation in which we live, think and act to-day?’, but also, by the same token: ‘how does the perception of this situation oblige us to reconsider the framework we use to “see” things and map situations, to move within this framework or get away from it?’; or, in other words, ‘how does it urge us to change our very way of determining the coordinates of the “here and now”?’” (Rancière 2009 a, 114-5; italics in the text). It is interesting to remark that Rancière articulates the (spatial) question of where he begins to the apparent necessities of a singular (temporal) moment: he intervenes when the questioning of his own situatedness “overlaps” with the questioning of a situated “we”. In that sense, I consider that Rancière’s work is, or at least attempts to be, truly “responsive to the worlds we live in” (Shaw and Walker 2006, 158; my italics), that is to what is perceived and said to happen and to the conditions of possibility for this to be thinkable at all.

Moreover, this sensibility to the interrelations between what one might call “theory”—what is thought—and “practice”—what takes place—in fact involves a refusal of this very distinction: “This is the main intuition underpinning Rancière’s ‘method’: there is not, on the one hand, ‘theory’ which explains things and, on the other hand, practice educated by the lessons of theory. There are configurations of sense [effective forms of linkage between perceptions, discourses and decisions that create a specific commonsense which defines what can be seen, said and done], knots tying together possible perceptions, interpretations, orientations and movements” (120). These operations produce “idealities” whose meanings are polemical sites. Critically engaging a given problem in a “Rancierian way” thus means to take into account the operative configurations that enable it to work as a problem and that enable at least some of its aspects to be held as “significant givens”. 2 This is in fact widely considered a legitimate gesture of scholarly critique, a “normal” way to intervene in polemical conversations that, in return, fosters the at times obsessive attention given by (some) scholars to the (necessarily incomplete yet hardly avoidable) reflexive acknowledgement of one’s own premises in the writing of a scholarly work for it to qualify as scholarly. 3 This example is exemplary in that the discussions about the possibility to discern sharply between the literal and the figurative and between the serious and the non-serious, which points to the broader question of language “in general”, took a great amount of space (and time) in scholarly works, “within” the field of political philosophy as well as in the Anglo-American humanities more generally, from the end of the 1950s’ onward. Discussions about language have shaped for a large part what could now be considered the contemporary commonsense of the disciplines, and many threads within these discussions concerned the authorizing practices implied in the drawing of lines and in the beginnings and ends of meaning, signification, intention, sense, etc. This literature is far too abundant to be engaged here in any other way than through the mention of evocative names (and even as names go, almost any contemporary writer could be mentioned one way or another, and the list of “ancients” and “classics” that have been dragged into these discussions is virtually endless). Complex lines of descent can be traced, for instance, from the now emblematic argument between John Searle and Jacques Derrida about J.L. Austin’s iconic How to do things with words to Judith Butler’s reworking of the notion of performativity, in both Gender Trouble and Excitable speech, through readings of

50

Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu; or from Austin again, and the “second” Wittgenstein, to the works of Quentin Skinner, Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor and James Tully, passing by the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Nietzsche and Heidegger, etc. What has been called, in a necessarily reductive manner, the “linguistic” or the “interpretative turn” of the social sciences and humanities—the “turning” quality of which is not for me to judge here—shaped a large part of the landscape in relation to which Rancière’s work was produced. Thinking through how speech is distinguished from noise, how different fictions are assigned different legitimacies, and how, more generally, speech (la parole) can be considered “the paradigm of political action” (Giroux 2008, 559) all constitute crucial aspects of Rancière’s account of art, pedagogy, and politics, that I will start to unfold in what follows. 4 Note that throughout this paper, no operative distinction will be made between the concepts of community and society (the first term will be preferred). For one, both terms are now quite often used interchangeably, and most importantly, they are both understood in terms of “levels” where multiple practices of counting parts and places operate. My premise is that although these “levels” are considered distinct in many ways, not least because they effectively frame the distinctiveness of different academic disciplines (in a tentative order for the “social” sciences, from the “bottom” up: psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations), the logic of counting itself arguably operates in a similar manner “within” all of them. I think that the versatility of Rancière’s concepts, their uncertain “level” of application should thus be preserved precisely because they might then partake in displacing or cleaving from “within” the distributive logic of counting. 5 It is the easiness of this last deduction, the easiness with which this “therefore” is employed that is at stake in the “automaticity” with which particular abilities and qualifications are associated with legitimate parts in “the common”. A sign of the commonsensical character of the naturalizations at play here might be found in the ordinary use of expressions such as “a born artist” or “a person born to lead”—two examples given in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language under born. (One could also speak of a born student or a born follower, which indicates that the naturalizations operate on both “sides” of the binaries questioned here.) In the field of political philosophy, claims about the recognizability of “natural” abilities and qualifications that make one fit or unfit for a certain “function” in a given polis play a crucial role in the allegedly inaugural arguments of the discipline, i.e. in both Plato’s Republic, where justice is defined as the requirement “that in our state one man [is] to do one job, the job he [is] naturally most suited for” (433a)—hence, those who can be Guardians shall be rigorously bred, trained, tested, and selected for their fitness to do just and only that, and the same principle shall apply for craftsmen, slaves, etc.—, and Aristotle’s Politics, where slavery is exemplarily legitimized on the ground that wherever there is a “compound”, “a ruling element and a ruled can always be traced” (1254a17), and that it follows that some are “by nature” born to be slaves and others to be free (1254b16-39)—hence, only free men, who by definition have a “proper” access to reason, shall partake in politics-as-rule. 6 It is because of this fundamentally sensible distribution of an “experienced common world” that Rancière claims that there is a primary aesthetic dimension to practices like politics and pedagogy (not to mention, of course, art). The concept of the distribution of the sensible is not without evoking the treatment of the transcendental aesthetic of space and time with which Kant begins the first Critique (Kant 2008a [1781/1787], 53-75), although Kant’s account can itself be understood as inscribed in and as inscribing a singular distribution of the sensible that sustains a very specific account of what Reason is and can do, of how it relates to “intuition” and to the senses, of what can be said, seen, and done about the world as such. (Of course, Rancière’s own account also pertains to a specific distribution of the sensible; this concept allows for no proper “outside”.) In that sense, Rancière writes: “If one whishes to draw the analogy, we can hear [this primary aesthetic dimension of politics] in a Kantian sense—eventually revisited by Foucault—, as the system of a priori forms determining what lends itself to experience (ce qui se donne à ressentir). It is a delimitation (découpage) of times and spaces, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise that define at the same time the place (lieu) and the stake (enjeu) of politics as a form of experience. Politics concerns (porte sur) what we

51

(on) see and what we can say about it, on who has the competence to see and the quality to say, on the proprieties of spaces and the possibles of time” (Rancière 2000, 13-4; my translation).

In my reading, the concept of the distribution of the sensible—although it could be deemed more “fundamental” or “primary”—largely corresponds to what I have designated until now as configurations of sense (see in particular note 1 above). When trying to delimit and order Rancière’s concepts, one should remember that the philosopher thinks his own work as the construction of “a moving map of a moving landscape, a map that is ceaselessly modified by the movement itself. This is why, indeed, his ‘concepts’ are instable: police and politics, distribution of the sensible, aesthetics, literature, etc. don’t mean the same thing from the beginning of the travel to the end; firstly because the travel is a fight, too, a multi-waged fight where the emphasis can be put on different aspects; secondly because the travel—or the fight—continuously discovers new landscapes, paths or obstacles which oblige to reframe the conceptual net to think where we are” (Rancière 2009a, 120). This renders problematic any “general” account of Rancière’s thought, and this is why working with a specific problem (what is at stake in the decisions about where and how one begins to think and write about art, pedagogy, and politics, for instance) appears not only preferable, but rigorously necessary. 7 How the logic of the police functions in concreto can be usefully illustrated by further considering what the police—in the more usual sense of the term, designating agents of the state—actually does: “policing in public space does not consist first and foremost in the interpellation of demonstrators but in the dispersion of demonstrations. The police is not the law that hails (interpelle) the individual (Althusser’s “hey! you there”), except to confuse it with religious subjection. It is first and foremost the recall to the evidence (le rappel à l’évidence) of what there is, or rather of what there is not: “Move along! Nothing to see here.” The police says that there is nothing to see on the pavement, nothing to do except to move (circuler). It says that the space of traffic (circulation) is nothing but the space of traffic” (Rancière 2004a, 242; my translation). By contrast, politics for Rancière consists in something like the refiguration of a policed space, of what there is to do, to see, and to name therein; it is an intervention on a “given” distribution of the sensible and on the distribution or the count of parts and places it further grounds.

Note that the conception of a “community” as a whole made of countable and organized, manageable parts echoes first and foremost the metaphor of the body politic that is central to Western political thought, both “ancient” and “modern”, as well as the conception of the body itself as a regulated organism—be it hierarchically regulated by “the head” or, more horizontally, by the immanent “feedback loops” described by contemporary biology. The analogy between individual and community inscribed in the metaphor of the body is still prevalent, most importantly in the idea, already found in Plato, that both an individual and a polis can possess the quality of justice (or of equality, or liberty, or health and sickness, etc.). In relation to the practices authorizing beginnings, I think it is important to underline the remarkably efficacious way in which, in the Republic, Plato poses the analogy between individual and community in just one line (or more precisely, in two, that is in one question by Socrates and a simple acknowledgement by Adeimanus), and then deduces possibilities from it that give the general orientation that the dialogue will follow from that point: “[Socrates:]‘Justice can be a characteristic of an individual or of a community [polis], can it not?’/ [Adeimanus:]‘Yes.’/ ‘And a community is larger than an individual?’/ ‘It is.’/ ‘We may therefore find justice on a larger scale in the larger entity, and so easier to recognize. I accordingly propose that we start our inquiry with the community, and then proceed to the individual and see if we can find in the conformation of the smaller entity anything similar to what we have found in the larger’” (368e-369a). I will come back to this analogy below, for it is a decisive target of Rancière’s critique of pedagogy and, more broadly, of the idea that equality can characterize a “community” or a “society” as such. 8 This constraint is exemplarily expressed in Plato’s Republic under the idea that “one man can only do one job well”, and it is reiterated in Aristotle’s Politics under the positing of the availability of leisure time, of freedom from economic necessities as the necessary condition for taking part in politics.

52

9 This logic is at work, for instance, in the “argument” that workers are workers, scholars are scholars, bosses are bosses, and even though they might misapprehend or ignore the objectivity of their position in this factual order of the world, social-scientific inquiry shows that they are truly overdetermined by it down to their tastes—an “argument” put forward (in an arguably more nuanced form) by Pierre Bourdieu in his “social critique of the judgment of taste” (Bourdieu 1979). 10 Another way to put it would be to assert that Rancière’s “nature” is a constructed one, while the nature of the order of police is perceived and affirmed as “truly” natural. This simplified formulation would, however, miss the complexity of the practices of police and that of the notion of nature itself in Western thought. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “One must not forget that in philosophy or metaphysics, “nature” never has the natural—without quotation marks—status that an exceedingly summary representation of metaphysics, accredited by the post-Nietzschean and post-Heideggerian vulgate, would like to impose upon it. Metaphysics, according to this vision, is considered a totalizing system of thought in its organicness—whether transcendental, sublime, or ecstatic—of the real and men within it. However, beginning with Aristotle’s first reflections on phusis, nature is insufficient for arriving at man’s ends; these must be pursued through tekhnè. It follows that the zoon politikon can exist only insofar as political life “denatures” the animal in man” (Nancy 2009, 87; italics in the text). What is at stake in the difference between Rancière’s appeal to a certain “naturalness” and the policing naturalizations of the distributions of parts and places might, in that sense, best be understood as a functional and operational difference between two modes of fictionning, rather than as a difference of... nature. 11 Exemplary instances mentioned by Walker include, most significantly: Thomas Hobbes’ claim that the “cause of absurd conclusions” to which (especially) “philosophers” arrive is “that they no not begin their ratiocination from definitions; that is, from settled significations of their words: as if they could cast account, without knowing the value of the numeral words, one, two, and three” (Hobbes 1996, Ch. V; italics in the text), and the way he accordingly began Leviathan by a defining gesture: “Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world)…”; Max Weber’s typical beginnings through the strict definition of the terms he employs in the context of sociology understood as a proper science, before pointing to the wider implications of the plausible claims that the terms enable (e.g. Weber 1978, 7); and Carl Schmitt’s iconic first line in Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 2005, 5). Note, also, that a definition can also be the end of a work, an end to be reached on the ground of other definitions; definition can a work’s point, as it were. Here again, Plato’s Republic is exemplary in that it arguably revolves around the search for a true definition of justice. In my view, these observations all point, either directly or indirectly, to a rather large field of problems that concern, among other question, the (im)possibility for language to ever be satisfyingly formalized into a set of calculable rules and procedures on the model of mathematical reasoning, and, ultimately, to what can be designated as the problem of “language and world”, of the relation between human beings as speaking beings and “the world”; I deem, however, that these crucial problems are far too complex to be treated here, even if I had the competence to do it satisfyingly (which I do not pretend to hold), in any other way than through this general evocation. This is why the consideration of the presupposition of equality as an “axiom”, in this text, should be understood only in a figurative, metaphorical sense that nonetheless points to the important sites of questioning mentioned above. 12 On this point, Rancière seems to reiterate the Schmittian idea that the determination of “whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced” (Schmitt 2005 [1922/1934], 2; italics in the text). In both cases, the question is effectively one of discernment, of limits: “The point for [Rancière] is: how do we determine what is political in a situation, a gathering, a statement, an action? How can we determine to what extent a ‘political organization’ does politics” (Rancière 2009e, 118)? This determination is the subject of scenes of dissensus that are informed by, and might partake in the reconfiguration of, distributions of the sensible. The question then becomes: what counts as a re(con)figuration, and moreover, who

53

decides what counts as a re(con)figuration and what counts as a mere repetition or even as a reinforcement of the police order? Knowing Rancière’s repeated critiques of the “hierarchical”, “stultifying” approaches of Althusser, “under” whom he studied, and of Bourdieu’s sociology, which he explicitly rejects time and again as an instance of the police order, one can at least gather that the answer to this last question cannot in principle, for Rancière, be that such a decision is the privilege of social scientists, philosophers (including himself) or political leaders as such, that is as “qualified experts”; expertise as the monopolization of legitimate voice on a given matter is inherently policing. Rather, the scenes of dissensus in which (and on which, since in French scène means both scene and stage) the “decision” about what is political and what is not puts into play the capacity (to discern) of anyone at all. It is in that sense that Rancière explicitly distances himself from Schmitt, stating that “[i]f ‘division’ is at the heart of his [Rancière’s] texts on politics, this has nothing to do with any vision of politics based on the distinction between friends and enemies. ‘Disagreement’ and ‘dissensus’ do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as: ‘where are we?’, ‘who are we?’. ‘What makes us a we?’, ‘what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we, having a world in common?’. Those paradoxical, unthinkable objects of thinking mark for him the places where the question: ‘How is this thinkable at all?’ points to the question: ‘who is qualified for thinking at all?’ This question, he thinks, is ultimately what is at stake in the war of discourses which is the field of ‘theoretical’ practice” (Rancière 2009a, 116).

Nonetheless, it remains tempting to interpret the privilege that Rancière gives to limit-moments as the sites at which politics becomes visible and thinkable as a reprise of what I would call Carl Schmitt’s juridico-epistemological exceptionalism, according to which “The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception” (Schmitt 2005 [1922/1934], 15). Interpreting police as the rule and politics as the exception would be one (admittedly fashionable) way of understanding what Rancière means by the “rarity” of politics and of assessing the principial limits put to its generalizatibility. However, because I am not fully convinced of the necessity and relevance of referring more extensively to Schmitt, here, the incomplete consideration of a certain parallelism between the two thinkers will remain confined to this very note. 13 These two examples are exemplary precisely in that they suppose institutions that are in principle closed and traditionally hierarchical by virtue of their “nature”, or more precisely, of their alleged continuity with “nature”, just like the police understanding of the political relation in terms of power relations—and not in terms of relations between worlds, as Rancière insists it should be understood (Rancière 1995, 67)—and that of “community” as a whole made of countable parts.

In a manner that generalizes the implications of the preceding note, above, it should be remarked that if Rancière’s thought can be situated within the “tradition” of political philosophy for which conflict is the constitutive and irreducible core of politics—a “tradition” that could include almost any figure of the Western canon of political thought, but especially Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Schmitt, and Foucault, to name but a few—, the singularity of his account can be said to consist in the claim that conflict in politics pertains first and foremost to the very constitution of the “groups” and “camps” in conflict, to the mapping of the very terrain on which confrontations can take place, and to the delineating of what qualifies as a conflict. Once these “givens” are constituted and left unquestioned, what happens no longer “belongs” to politics but to the order of the police; they can, however, be reconstituted, questioned again, disrupted, displaced, etc. 14 Rancière points to an important difference between the “classics” and the “moderns” (again, the quotation marks are his) regarding this last specification. If the “classics” circumscribe this claim about equality in understanding, they evade deducing political consequences from it by virtue of their conception of liberty, which is strictly defined in relation to a specific contrary, slavery—an institution Aristotle legitimizes on a “natural” ground, as I mentioned above. Now, “The slave is precisely the one who has the capacity to understand a logos without having the capacity of the logos. It is that specific transition between animality and humanity which Aristotle defines exactly thus: the slave is

54

the one who participates in the community of language only under the form of understanding (aiesthesis), not of possession (hexis)” (Rancière 1995, 38; my translation). (Barker and Stalley’s translation of the relevant passage of Aristotle’s Politics reads: “Someone is thus a slave by nature if he is capable of becoming the property of another (and for this reason does actually become another’s property) and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself” (1254b22; my italics).) “Moderns”, on the other hand, have a hard time arguing that one can “understand” logos (either as a language or as reason) without “possessing” it at least to some degree. However, Rancière further indicates that what the “classics” have nonetheless the merit to define “in a way that will remain incomprehensible to the modern thinkers of the contract and the state of nature, is the torsion that this principle that is not one produces when it has effects (lorsqu’il fait effet) as the “liberty” of people of nothing (gens de rien)” (Rancière 1995, 38; my translation). This torsion will be treated below as “the universalization of the capacity of anyone at all”. 15 On the demos as the “scandalous” bearer of an empty property-that-is-not-one (liberty), a property that was de facto “possessed” by all other “classes” of citizens and thus the exclusive property of none, and on how the demos thus introduced a “suspension”, a torsion between the arithmetical and the geometrical order of the polis that counted parts and places without any remainder, see the first chapter of Disagreement (Rancière 1995), “The beginning of politics”. This suspensive meeting of the two opposite logics of the order of things and of the equality of anyone at all is effectively where politics begins, for Rancière. Most importantly, this claim must be understood more as a formal statement that as a historical one: this is always, so to speak, where, when, and how politics begins—when it does begin, for it is not a necessary occurrence. 16 The notion of the part of those who have no part has often been associated with the actions of the “French” sans-papiers (e.g. Panagia 2006, 119-24)—and their “Frenchness” is precisely what is at stake in their actions, in terms of citizenship. Acknowledging a part of the sans-papiers understood as those who have no part does not quite mean to give them the papiers in question, the identity documents that are required since the Pasqua laws. Davide Panagia thus writes: “It would be a noble gesture of a beautiful soul to respond to the plight of the sans papiers by giving them papers, by baptizing them with new names and inducting them into the rule of mimesis. Indeed, such a gesture would address one dimension of the sans papiers’ claim: repapering would admit inclusion. But there is a secondary problematic at work that insists on the simultaneous importance and inadequacy of mimesis. The paradoxical status of the sans papiers and no vox requires us to rethink our understanding of democratic equality. The emergence of this new form of political subjectivity begs us to question the established partitions that bind the borders not simply of nation-states but of equality itself” (122). Although I agree with Panagia, I would add that acknowledging a part of those who have no part might imply to question the very bordering of equality within national-statist spaces. Furthermore, obtaining papers can be considered as pertaining to the order of police in Rancière’s terms, which does not mean that it is futile or irrelevant, far from it; it means that politics is not quite “there” but beside, “within” the very processes through which these claims reconfigure the audible, the speakable, and the thinkable, and “within” the supplementary questioning of what it means from the start to require identity papers for being able to work, to have a roof over one’s head, etc. 17 The sense of what universality means here should be unfolded: “Universality is not the principle of the community to which one would oppose particular situations. It is an operator of demonstrations. The mode of efficacy of universality in politics is the discursive and practical construction of a polemical verification, a case, a demonstration. The place of truth therein is not that of the foundation or the ideal. It is always a topos, the place (lieu) of a subjectivation in a procedure of argumentation. Its language is always idiomatic. But the idiomatic is not the tribal. It is its contrary. When groups that are victims of an injustice enter into the treatment of a wrong (tort), they generally refer to humanity and to its rights. But universality does not reside in the concepts thus invoked. It reside in the argumentative process that demonstrates these consequences, that says what results from the fact that the worker (ouvrier) is a citizen, the Black a human being, etc. The logical schema of social protest in general can be summarized thus: do we belong (appartenons) or not in this category—citizens, men,

55

etc.—and what results from it (qu’est-ce qui en résulte)? Political universality is not in man or in citizen. It is in the ‘what results from it?’, in its discursive and practical implementation (mise en oeuvre)” (Rancière 2004a, 116-7; my translation; italics in the text). It is in that sense that the question of belonging (of inclusion/exclusion) is not a “general” problem that can be treated in a quasi-ontological framework; it is a problem insofar as the consequences of a specific inclusion or exclusion are expressed and addressed, formulated and questioned in a way that puts into play the very constitution of the matter at hand into a political problem, into a problem that concerns the very commonality of the experienced common world and of its possibilities. 18 Rancière understands the fact that “We are all German Jews!” would today be condemned as inexact and obscene as a sign that the police order of proper names has somewhat been reinforced in the meantime. What this renewed order first fails to see is that this claim was inexact, absurd and provoking from the start; in Paris and Strasburg, in 1968, French students were arguably well aware of the inexactitude of their identity statement and of what was mobilized by the evocation of the “identity” German-Jew. The contemporary “renewal” or “reinforcement” of the consensual police does not mean, however, that similar events of political subjectivation cannot and do not take place nowadays and that politics has somewhat come to its end; rather, such events are by definition unpredictable and momentary, and in order to have any chance to “find” something similar (yet necessarily different) happening where one stands, one ought to start from the presupposition of equality; otherwise, all that is to be found is the inegalitarian order of the police, for it is surely there, at work. 19 In Zarathustra’s first discourse, the first transformation is into the camel, the reverent beast of burden, which then transforms into the predatory lion, which then becomes the child: “To create new values—that even the lion cannot yet do: but to create for itself freedom for new creation—that is within the power of the lion. To create freedom for oneself and a sacred Nay even to duty: for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. […] But say, my brothers, what can the child yet do that even the lion could not do? Why must the predatory lion yet become a child? Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying. Yes, for the play of creating, my brothers, a sacred Yea-Saying is needed: the spirit now wills its own will, the one who had lost the world attains its own world” (Nietzsche 2005, I-1; italics in the text). 20 This claim is reiterated in many texts in many different phrasings. In my view, its most compelling formulation might be the following: “It is that politics is similar (semblable) to art on an essential point. It, too, consists in slicing through (trancher) the great metaphor that endlessly makes words and images slide on one another to produce the sensible evidence of an order of the world. It, too, consists in constructing novel (inédits) montages of words and actions, in rendering visible (faire voir) words that are borne by bodies in movement to render audible (faire entendre) what they say and produce another articulation of the visible and the speakable” (Rancière 2001, 197; my translation). 21 What this count of three regimes asks in return is the open question of whether other ones than those identified (apparently quite easily) by Rancière could be outlined, even “within” the “Western tradition”. I do not pretend to answer this question here, but I deem it important to underline that the apparently exhaustive character of the philosopher’s account can itself be thought as a complex practice of authorization that enables an array of claims to follow but that also renders other possible frameworks quite difficult to formulate, since they can easily be accounted for by either one or a contingent combination of the three regimes. 22 In a joint questions and answers session with Peter Sloterdijk held in 2008 at the University of Warwick, Rancière gives a contemporary example of what it can mean to speak of a reconfiguration of “the given” through artistic practices. This is especially interesting given his broad critique of the work of many artists and critics who anticipate the political effects of contemporary art within a framework that most often pertains to the representative regime of the arts, especially in the guise of Marxist-oriented conceptions of critical art as a pedagogical unveiling of a truth behind appearances that is supposed to lead to consciousness-raising and political mobilization (Rancière 2008). Rancière

56

mentions the case of many “politically inclined” Lebanese artists who are expected, within the Lebanese context and according to the understanding of the Lebanese context that marks the “international world of art”, to produce works that bear witness to the horror and suffering caused by the wars that marked the history of the country from the end of the 1970s onward. This demand for witnessing is most often articulated to the idea that the documentary form is the most suited—and even the only ethically responsible—form of art for artists in such situations. But “precisely, many Lebanese artists choose an entirely opposite way, you know: Walid Rahad chose to deal with this history by producing fictional archives […]. Those artists decided precisely that their political role was not to be witnesses of the horror, but to play, in a certain sense to play with it, or to substitute a kind of metaphorical construction for that reality. For me this is an example [not of what art has to do, but] of what artists can try to do now, and I would say that the minimal efficacy that we can expect from art today is to change, as slightly as it may be, one point or one overpoint of the topography of the territory, of the count of populations or distribution of places, the consensual framing of a situation, etc., etc., but there is no general formula for this…” (Rancière and Sloterdijk 2008, 1:47:43ff.). The (partly) fictional archive produced by Walid Rahad and The Atlast Group can be consulted at http://www.theatlasgroup.org/ (Accessed August 27, 2010). 23 On the relation between the aesthetic regime of art, Rancière writes: “It is a regime of thought of art (un régime de pensée de l’art) that also expresses an idea of thought [itself]. The latter is not anymore the faculty to imprint one’s will (volonté) within objects. It is the faculty to equate one- or itself with one’s or its’ contrary (la faculté de s’égaler à son contraire). This equality of contraries was, in Hegel’s time, the Apollonian power (puissance) of the idea that comes out of itself to make itself into (qui sort d’elle-même pour se faire) the light of the painting or the smile of the stone god. From Nietzsche to Deleuze, it became, inversely, the Dionysian power through which thought abdicates the attributes of the will, loses itself within the stone, the color or the language, and equates its active manifestation to the chaos of things” (Rancière 2001, 157; my translation). This passage indicates quite clearly that the aesthetic regime is not unitary, be it as a regime of art or a regime of thought, and how it can enable and disable different configurations of sense through the interruption or suspension of the representative regime; this interruption or suspension is never complete(d) but always partial, reiterated and re-instigated through a multiplicity of practices that can be delineated and mapped. 24 To put it more succinctly: “The question has never been for the dominated to become aware (prendre conscience) of the mechanisms of domination, but to make for oneself a body (se faire un corps) that is dedicated to something else than domination” (Rancière 2008, 69; my translation). 25 Although he insists that he is “not proposing equality as a thought-category of art (catégorie de pensée de l’art)”, Rancière indicates that “the notion of aesthetic equality allows to rethink some confuse categories of what we call artistic ‘modernity’”, like that of intransitivity for instance, “which is supposed to mean that from now on the writer cares for (s’occupe du) language [itself] instead of telling a story or that the painter distributes colored planes instead of painting warhorses or naked women. Now, this supposed revocation of the subject first supposes the institution of a regime of equality between subjects”. In literature as in painting, but also in music, theatre, cinema, etc., “the equality of subjects and the indifference of the modes of expression are prior to the possibility of not having a subject” (Rancière 2009d, 504-5; my translation; my italics).

57

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition [1958], 2nd edition with an introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Aristotle. 1995. Politics [c. 330 BC], tr. Ernest Barker, revised with an introduction and notes by R.F. Stalley. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics).

Beckett, Samuel. 1953. L’innommable. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. _____. 1957. Fin de partie, suivi de Acte sans paroles. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement de gout. Paris:

Éditions de Minuit (Le sens commun). Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Introduction [1962] (2e edition revue). In Edmund Husserl,

L’origine de la géométrie, tr. Jacques Derrida, 3-171. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Frances (Épiméthée).

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2004. Images malgré tout. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Euclid. 2008. Euclid’s Elements of Geometry [c. 300 BC], Greek text J.L. Heiberg (1883-

1885), ed. and modern English tr. Richard Fitzpatrick, revised and corrected edition. http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/euclid.html (Accessed August 19, 2010).

Giroux, Dalie. 2008. L’espace, le temps et l’émancipation. Essai sur la parole. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique (41 :3, September), 549-67.

Godard, Jean-Luc. 2001. Éloge de l’amour. Phrases. Paris: Éditions P.O.L. Hobbes, Thomas. 1996. Leviathan [1651], ed. with an introduction and notes by J.C.A.

Gaskin. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (World’s Classics) Kant, Emmanuel. 2008a. Critique de la raison pure [1781/1787], tr. and notes A.

Tremesaygues & B. Pacaud, preface Ch. Serrus. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Quadrige).

_____. 2008b. An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ [1784]. In Political Writings, second, enlarged edition, ed. H. S. Reiss and tr. H. B. Nisbet, 54-60. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Musil, Robert. 1990. [Lecture. Paris] [1935]. In Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, eds. and tr. Burton Pike and David S. Luft, 264-7. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.

_____. 1995. L’homme sans qualités, tome 1 [1930], tr. Philippe Jaccottet. Paris: Éditions du Seuil (Points).

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2009. Jacques Rancière and Metaphysics [2006], tr. John Hulsey. In Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts, 83-92. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody [1885], tr. with an introduction and notes by Graham Parkes. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics).

Panagia, Davide. 2006. The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

58

Plato. 2007. The Republic [c. 375 BC], tr. Desmond Lee, with an introduction by Melissa Lane, 2nd edition. London; New York: Penguin Books (Penguin Classics).

Rancière, Jacques. 1995. La mésentente. Politique et philosophie. Paris: Éditions Galilée. _____. 2001. La fable cinématographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. _____. 2003. Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique éditions. _____. 2004a. Aux bords du politique [1998], augmented and revised edition. Paris:

Gallimard (Coll. Folio essais). _____. 2004b. Le maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle [1987].

Paris: Fayard-10/18 (Coll. Fait et cause). _____. 2004c. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Éditions Galilée. _____. 2005. La haine de la démocratie. Paris: La Fabrique éditions. _____. 2008. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique éditions. _____. 2009a. A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax 15 :3, 114-23. _____. 2009b. Il n’y a pas d’avenir en attente (avec Jean-Baptiste Farkas) [2006]. In Et

tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens, 549-60. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. _____. 2009c. Les territoires de la pensée partagée (avec Jacques Lévy, Juliette Rennes et

David Zerbib) [2007]. In Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens, 572-86. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.

_____. 2009d. Le coup double de l’art politisé (avec Gabriel Rockhill) [2004/2006]. In Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens, 500-16. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.

_____. 2009e. Universaliser la capacité de n’importe qui (avec Marina Garcés, Raul Sanchez Cedillo et Amador Fernandez-Savater) [2006]. In Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens, 490-9. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.

_____. 2009f. Jacques Rancière et l’a-disciplinarité (avec Mireille Rossello et Marie-Aude Baronian) [2007]. In In Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens, 474-89. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.

Rancière, Jacques and Peter Sloterdijk. 2008. [Debate on Aesthetics and Modernity]. University of Warwick, May 20. Recording available online at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/research/phillit/ranciere/ (Accessed August 27, 2010).

Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books. Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

[1922/1934], tr. and introduced by George Schwab, with a foreword by Tracy B. Strong. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.

Shaw, Karena and R.B.J. Walker. 2006. Situating Academic Practice: Pedagogy, Critique and Responsibility. Millenium: Journal of International Studies (35 :1), 155-65.

Walker, R.B.J. 2010. After the Globe, Before the World. New York: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1978. The Nature of Social Action [1922]. In Selections in Translation, ed.

W.G. Runciman, tr. Eric Matthews, 7-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.