Errant Letters: Jacques Rancière and the Philosophy of Literature

How to deconstruct the logic of mastery/mastership (maître/maîtrise) that is maintained by demystification? Rancière replies: one must weaken the vertical relationship (surface/depth) and refine thinking in terms of horizontal distributions (POA 465). One must reject the dialectics of truth and semblance and focus on analyzing the distribution of the sensible. One must discover how the sensible configures itself in encounters of police and politics.

Patricide

In 1961, twenty-one-year-old Jacques Rancière enrolled in Louis Althusser’s seminar. Four years later, Rancière was listed as co-author (with Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, and Pierre Macherey) of Reading Capital, the most famous attempt to reformulate Marxist political theory in the spirit of structuralism. The year 1974 saw the publication of Rancière’s La Leçon d’Althusser, a frontal critique of the master’s formalist method, doctrinairism, and anointed priesthood. Thus, we may perceive the 1960s as a period of “struggle against the influence,” liberation from intellectual dependence culminating in an act of ritual patricide.⁷

How was Althusser attractive to a whole generation of leftist intellectuals? First, his rigorous method brought the promise of a break with the humanist and Sartrean interpretation of Marx. Following the spirit of the times, Althusser’s method transformed Marxism into a theory of form⁸ under the banner of neo-scientism. Second, this maneuver gave hope to regain Marx. It was all about returning to the source and establishing the foundation for a new political battle. By the 1960s, it had become clear that the Soviet Union was a repressive police state. Khrushchev’s denunciation of the ideological and political errors of the “cult of personality” period could not be accepted in good faith as a declaration of a new beginning. After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – and recent events such as the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the Algier War in 1954–1962, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Vietnam War developments of 1965, and the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 – all those who believed in the revolutionary potential of communism had to face a double crisis of legitimation. First, it had to be made clear that the deviating superstructure corresponded to a “correct base.”⁹ Second, there was a need to return to Marx’s writings to find explanations for these aberrations and salvage the emancipatory potential of materialist dialectics.¹⁰ Althusser’s ambition was “to think Marx in his historical context to allow us to implement Marxism in ours” (AL 111).

Rancière’s analysis in Reading Capital is orthodoxly Althusserian in its character. It begins with a diagnosis of an epistemological break in Marx work that separates the early, humanistic stage from the subsequent, scientific one,¹¹ and then develops an analysis of commodity fetishism. Rancière demonstrates that there is no such thing as the real value of the commodity, inherent in the object and abstracted from the context of social production, since all value is inscribed in the economic and social structure, and as such remains a “metonimical manifestation of structure.”¹² Finally, Rancière postulates that the usual fetishistic perception, which reduces the complex whole to the feature of an object, should be contrasted with a strictly scientistic method of studying social and economic phenomena. Published a decade later, Althusser’s Lesson targets the method’s scientistic profile. The explicit goal of Althusserianism was to free Marxism from the authority of the Communist Party, while the implicit goal (which does not mean it was assumed in bad faith but simply implied by a particular conceptual game) was to reassure intellectuals of their crucial role in history seen as an emancipatory process. For Rancière, Althusserianism remained the model “discourse of order” (AL 113), all the more dangerous for its use of subversive vocabulary.

Graduating from the school of formalist thinking was Rancière’s basic formative experience. One could say that Rancière abandoned his maître savant and headed out in search of the maître ignorant, only to find him in the emblematic figures of Jacotot or Gauny. However, despite repeated gestures of negation, Althusser’s legacy became a permanent part of Rancière’s work. Its presence could be narrowed down to four points: (1) opposition to Marxism as a technique of economic reductionism, the tendency to marginalize market factors and focus on the contradictions of the superstructure, in other words, the conviction that the economic dialectic never occurs in a pure state and “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes;”¹³ (2) paradoxical promise of “theoretical practice,” the concept of philosophizing as an engagement in battle; (3) indisciplinarity understood as attempts to “displace philosophy;” (4) the declarative style of philosophizing, consisting in “presenting theses.”¹⁴ The consequences of radical opposition and above all the rejection of the thesis that historical illusions require philosophical intervention seem equally important (AL 23). Young Rancière grew in opposition to the insistent maintenance of the leading role of intellectuals and the denial of all value to labor thought:

Without the efforts of intellectual workers there could be no theoretical tradition (in history or philosophy) in the workers’ movement … on the one hand, the “spontaneous” ideology of the workers, if left to itself, could only produce utopian socialism, trade-unionism, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism; on the other hand, Marxist socialism, presupposing as it does the massive theoretical labor of the establishment and development of a science and a philosophy without precedent, could only be the work of men with a thorough historical, scientific and philosophical formation, intellectuals of very high quality.¹⁵

In an initial impulse of defiance, Rancière turned away from political theory and dived into the archives of the labor movement. He decided to search for original thought in the pamphlets and proclamations, diaries, and private correspondence of revolted proletarians. Thus, Rancière not only dodged the blackmail of scientificity established by Althusser but also defused the simplistic dichotomy already present in Marx’s writings: on the one hand, the idealized vision of the proletariat and, on the other hand, the caricatured image of contemporary workers’ activists. Rancière shiftes his focus to the question of individual subjectivity, metaphorically illustrated by the very title of the book that resulted from this search – La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth- Century France; 1981) – which focuses on the nights when workers read, wrote, educated themselves, and dreamed, instead of sleeping. Moreover, Rancière valorizes all forms of communal projects that orthodox Marxists discarded, such as Saint-Simonianism, which combined egalitarian reform with exuberant mysticism.

The decade-long struggle against the influence of the maître savant entered a decisive stage in May 1968 when the events in Paris brought a chance to delegitimize scientific discourse and open a new field of possibilities.

The Event

In the scientistic order, an event remains a surface effect: it gains meaning only in relation to the structure that determines it. Many intellectuals have tried to reduce the youth revolt to a source determinant or a set of determinants. Sociologists such as Raymond Aron argued that young people rebel because it is the law of youth, besides, universities are overcrowded, so students resemble “rats or other animals, forced to live at an excessive density, in a confined space.”¹⁶ Communist intellectuals like Althusser denied the riots a subversive character, because they believed there can be no revolutionary action without a revolutionary theory. Therefore, they all assumed the role of the police, assuring that “nothing happened, nothing changed, there is nothing to see.”¹⁷ Let us recall the indictment of Althusser’s Lesson, this all aimed at strengthening their position in accordance with the principle that the transmission of scientific knowledge – accessible to the few – is the remedy for the ignorance of the masses and the precondition of truly revolutionary action. However, unexpectedly, the student revolt taught the older generation of intellectuals a lesson: “cut off from revolutionary practice, there is no revolutionary theory that is not transformed into its opposite” (AL 154). Rancière realized that the whole system of knowledge transmission is based on the assumption that the little ones need a guide to lead them out of the darkness of ignorance: intellectuals must renew this assumption by fashioning themselves as sages and describing the masses as addled by the prevailing ideology.

The essential point of reference remains the generational experience of les soixante-huitards, namely the discovery of the gap between Marxist theory and real emancipation forms. Les soixante-huitards witnessed the negation of the traditional explicative model, according to which the task of the progressive intellectual is to know the mechanisms of the social system in and out and explain them to those who suffer from its inequalities to arm them for battle. As a result of this negation, a different approach was born, that is, one based on the “search for sources:” one must despise the abstract knowledge of philosophers and preachers and reconcile with simple people to recognize social injustice from pure, unmediated experience. Rancière quickly noticed that these two models formed a non-alternative system, based on the mutual blackmail of truth and political efficiency (ES 18). Neither of these propositions was convincing to him.

In a famous essay by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée 68, all revolutionary thought produced in the 1960s appears as an intellectual and rhetorical aberration. Ferry and Renaut fashion a philosophical constellation in which they place Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, and Bourdieu, and then characterize it in terms of anti-humanism, which is to accuse traditional humanism of becoming an accomplice to oppression, with totalitarianism always looming on the horizon. Ferry and Renaut discover common features in the intellectual structure of the 1960s: the reign of the end time theme and the paradigm of genealogy, the destruction of the idea of truth, the historicization of concepts, the end of references to universality, and action brought against the subject. The thought of 1968 even has its own style with a characteristic cult of paradox and refusal of clarity.¹⁸ Although the essay largely creates its object by combining and reducing to a common ground completely unrelated philosophical phenomena, it remains an interesting symptom by indicating a compulsive aversion to thought that refuses any foundation, be it ontological, epistemological, or axiological.

In an extensive study entitled La pensée anti-68,¹⁹ Serge Audier organizes this matter and distinguishes several different strategies of attack on the “anti-humanist” thought of the period. In particular, Audier identifies: a right-wing offensive that rejects the radical interpretation of the hermeneutics of suspicion and psychoanalysis, accusing them of “intellectual terrorism,” namely the systematic “dismemberment” of the state, national, Church, and family structures;²⁰ a neoconservative depreciation compares the incomprehensible “parade of socialist and communist ideas” to “archeo-Marxist madness;”²¹ a conservative rhetoric of cultural pessimism revolving around the motif of “loss” in a rapidly globalizing world; the “perdition” of (truth-seeking discourses), and “ingratitude” (heirs to a great culture who pursue nothing more than the redistribution of recognition);²² the ultra-leftist onslaught based on the topicality of a “betrayal of ideals,”²³ and a liberal counteroffensive calling for the abandonment of suspicion and a renewed trust in democratic institutions.²⁴ Significantly, none of these critique remarks refers to Rancière’s philosophy, as he develops his strongly ambivalent attitude to the legacy of Marx and Freud without abandoning emancipatory ideals, and combines distrust toward institutions with the conviction that they are where political moments are recorded.

Rancière defends the importance of the event and emphasizes its formative power. He would probably agree with Antonio Negri, who says in his memoirs that “the nineteen sixty-eight was not a revolution – it was the reinvention of the production of life,” and that its subversiveness consisted in the abolition of existing divisions:

Domination and power are clever: they reigned over life because they understood that it had to be divided up – into work, emotions, the public, the private – to be conquered. From this point of view, the recomposition of life was fundamental: one of the slogans of the 1970s was “We want it all.” This is what is important: everything.²⁵