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On Rancière’s Theatrocracy
I
n the last few years the work of Jacques Rancière has finally,
after a long period of neglect, begun to receive the attention it
deserves. One of the most brilliant of Althusser’s students at the
Ecole Normale Supérieure in the mid 1960s, he contributed an
important section to the Reading Capital project at the precocious age
of 25. Several years later, however, in the wake of May 68 and a move
to the new philosophy department at Vincennes, he wrote a stinging
critique of his former teacher and collaborators (La Leçon d’Althusser,
1974) before devoting himself to a series of archive-based projects—The
Nights of Labour, 1981; The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983; The Ignorant
Schoolmaster, 1987—that essentially turned Althusser’s theoreticist
principles on their head. Althusser had privileged scientific insight
over popular delusion; Rancière has explored the consequences of the
opposite presumption—that everyone is immediately and equally capa-
ble of thought. Against those who argue that only the appropriately
educated or privileged are authorized to think and speak, Rancière’s
most fundamental assumption is that everyone thinks. Everyone shares
equal powers of speech and thought, and this ‘equality is not a goal to
be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained
in all circumstances.’1
In most of the work he undertook during the 1970s and 80s, Rancière
defended this supposition through a painstaking reconstruction of the
subversive and elusive world of working-class intellectual production
that thrived in the 1830s and 40s, the years immediately preceding the
Marxist interpretation of class struggle. In much of his subsequent work,
he has pondered its implications in fields ranging from historiography
The basic argument that recurs throughout Rancière’s work is thus one
that pits the presumptions of a disruptive equality against the advocates
of an orderly, hierarchical inequality. In general terms, he has always
sought to explore the various resources of displacement, indistinction,
de-differentiation or de-qualification that are available in any given field.
His notion that ‘everyone thinks’ is premised on the individual’s free-
dom of self-dissociation: there is no necessary link between who you
are and the role you perform or place you occupy; no one is defined by
the forms of thoughtless necessity to which they are subjected. On this
score, at least, Rancière’s starting point is not far from Sartre’s familiar
account of conscious freedom as indeterminate being-for-itself, a way of
being that ‘must be what it is not and not be what it is.’3
1
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation,
tr. Kristin Ross, Stanford 1991, p. 138. Earlier versions of this article were presented
at the University of Pittsburgh, March 2005, and at Cerisy, May 2005.
2
Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, tr. Liz Heron, London and New York 1995, pp.
32–3. For the same reason, the egalitarian democracy that Rancière defends against
its neo-conservative detractors is neither a decadent form of social disintegration
nor an exemplary form of political government but rather that ‘ungovernable ele-
ment upon which every government, in the end, is founded’ (Rancière, La Haine de
la démocratie, Paris 2005, pp. 57; 105–6). For a more general survey of the anarchic
orientation of Rancière’s work, see my ‘Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery’,
Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1 (Summer 2005).
3
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes, London 1991, p. 67.
hallward: Staging Equality 111
performing or playing, in the theatrical sense of the word, the gap between
a place where the demos exists and a place where it does not . . . Politics
consists in playing or acting out this relationship, which means first setting
it up as theatre, inventing the argument, in the double logical and dramatic
sense of the term, connecting the unconnected.7
4
Rancière, ‘The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics’ (Goldsmiths
College, 17 September 2003); see homepages.gold.ac.uk/psrpsg/ranciere.doc; my
emphasis.
5
‘Entretien avec Jacques Rancière’, Dissonance 1 (2004); I’m grateful to Yves Citton
for this reference. Pierre Campion notes the prominence of theatrical analogies in
his detailed review of Rancière’s Le Partage du sensible in Acta Fabula, September
2000, available at www.fabula.org.
6
Rancière, Les Scènes du peuple, Lyon 2003, p. 10.
7
Rancière, Disagreement, tr. Julie Rose, Minneapolis 1999, p. 88, translation
modified.
112 nlr 37
are after, in the end, is a stage of reality as such.’8 In what follows I will try
to tease out the several ways in which this theatrical metaphor helps illu-
minate Rancière’s conception of equality and politics, before considering
some of the more obvious difficulties posed by such a conception.
Perils of mimesis
The theatre evoked in the Republic is a place where people who should
know better get swept up in the irrational enthusiasm of the crowd.
A gratuitous celebration of pure artifice, theatre promotes semblance
and appearance over dispassionate truth, and privileges the more ‘eas-
ily imitated . . . passionate and fitful temper’ over reason. It allows the
‘rebellious principle’ to prevail over ‘wise and calm’ deliberation.11 The
decadent ‘theatrocracy’ which Plato criticizes in Book Three of the Laws
is a regime of unlicensed ignorance and disorder that has its source in a
‘universal confusion of musical forms’ initiated by irresponsible artists.
Such confusion
inspired the multitude with contempt of musical law, and a conceit of their
own competence as judges. Thus our once silent audiences have found a
8
‘Entretien avec Jacques Rancière’.
9
Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris 1983, pp. 36, 84.
10
Rancière, ‘Thinking of Dissensus’; see also La Haine de la démocratie, pp. 41–7.
11
Plato, Republic, in particular 392d–398b; 595a–608b.
hallward: Staging Equality 113
voice, in the persuasion that they understand what is good and bad in art;
the old ‘sovereignty of the best’ in that sphere has given way to an evil ‘sov-
ereignty of the audience’, a theatrocracy (theatrokratia).12
The basis for this catastrophic scenario lies in the threatening duplicity
of mimesis per se. As Plato describes them, the mimetic poets ‘set up in
each individual soul a vicious constitution by fashioning phantoms far
removed from reality, and by currying favour with the senseless element
that cannot distinguish the greater from the less, but calls the same thing
now one, now the other.’14 For while Plato condemns the immoral and
decadent effect of fables, as Rancière notes, ‘the Platonic proscription of
the poets is grounded on the impossibility of doing two things at once.’15
By refusing to speak in their own name, by acting at a distance from
themselves or imitating the action of another, actors and poets threaten
the very foundations of authority itself. Mimesis confounds the order
of function and place, and thus opens the door to what Rancière will
elsewhere describe as the virtual programme of politics as such: ‘the
indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of speaking positions,
the deregulation of divisions of space and time.’16 Theatre is nothing
other than the place in which such vicious indifference to functional
place takes on its most seductive shape.17 As a bulwark against this disor-
derly improvisation, Plato proposes the choreographed performance of
12
Plato, Laws 701a. As Samuel Weber notes, even by comparison with unruly
democracy, what Plato finds ‘so frightening and fearful about the theatrocracy is
that it appears to respect no such confines. And how, after all, can there be a polis,
or anything political, without confinement? The previous divisions and organiza-
tion of music into fixed genres and types is progressively dissolved by a practice
that mixes genres and finally leaves no delimitation untouched or unquestioned’.
Weber, ‘Displacing the Body: The Question of Digital Democracy’ (1996), available
online at www.hydra.umn.edu/weber/displace.html.
13
Plato, Laws 701b–c. 14
Plato, Republic 605b–c.
15
Rancière, Partage du sensible, Paris 2000, pp. 14; 67–8.
16
Partage du sensible, p. 15. 17
Plato, Republic 604e.
114 nlr 37
communal unity and discipline; a similar logic will recur again and again
in subsequent theories of orderly political performance, from Rousseau
to NgũgỸ wa Thiong’o.18
Pedagogy of emancipation
18
See in particular ‘The Language of African Theatre’, in NgũgỸ wa Thiong’o,
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London 1986.
19
Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 2.
hallward: Staging Equality 115
20
Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ (August 2004); see theater.kein.org.
21
‘Emancipated Spectator’.
22
See in particular Rancière, ‘Biopolitique ou politique?’, Multitudes 1 (March
2000).
116 nlr 37
23
Lacoue-Labarthe, L’Imitation des modernes, Paris 1986, pp. 276, 100; cf. Lacoue-
Labarthe, ‘Stagings of Mimesis’, Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), p. 59.
24
Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, p. 56.
25
Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 174–5.
hallward: Staging Equality 117
26
Rancière, ‘Dix thèses sur la politique’, Aux bords du politique, 2nd ed., Paris 1998,
p. 241.
27
Rancière, ‘Politics and Aesthetics’, Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), p. 202.
28
Rancière, ‘Dix thèses sur la politique’, p. 242.
118 nlr 37
29
Rancière, Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, tr.
John Drury, Philadelphia 1989, p. 19.
30
Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser, Paris 1974, pp. 144, 96, 121.
31
Les Scènes du peuple, p. 11; Leçon d’Althusser, p. 154.
32
Les Scènes du peuple, p. 8; cf. Rancière, The Names of History, pp. 65, 73.
33
‘Le bon temps ou la barrière des plaisirs’ and ‘Le Théâtre du peuple’, both reprinted
in Les Scènes du peuple.
hallward: Staging Equality 119
where respectable married men can fall under the ephemeral spell of
harlots and actresses. In partial anticipation of those political spectacles
that take shape in February and June 1848, these crowded theatres offer
a nightly reminder of the fact that only ‘an uncertain line separates the
seated bourgeois audience members from the people standing in their
“little places”, places which aren’t proper places.’ As Rancière presents
it, everything about this theatrical experience, from the time ‘wasted’ in
jostling queues to the impulsive responses of untutored audiences, con-
tributes to its troubling confusion of reality and fiction.34
34
Les Scènes du peuple, p. 12. 35
Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 236–9, 214, 243.
36
‘Dix thèses sur la politique’, p. 245.
120 nlr 37
37
See La Haine de la démocratie, p. 54; and Aux bords du politique, pp. 229–31.
38
‘Dix thèses sur la politique’, p. 224.
39
Rancière, ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics’, in Peter Hallward, ed., Think
Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London 2004, p. 230.
40
Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, tr. Reginald Snell, New York 1965, p.
80; cf. Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris 2004, pp. 42–5.
41
Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, p. 132; cf. Schiller, Aesthetic Education,
letter 15.
hallward: Staging Equality 121
On the other hand, there is the role to be played, pure play uncontami-
nated by the grubby complexities of context or personality. Michelet’s
heroic theatre, for example, takes this second pole as its exclusive guide.
‘What is theatre?’ he asks; it is ‘the abdication of the actual person, and
his interests, in favour of a more advantageous role.’43 Already at work
in the ‘archipolitics’ that Rancière associates with Plato, variations on
this theme will continue to dominate political philosophy from Arendt
and Strauss through to the revival in 1980s’ France of a ‘purely political’,
republican space in which public actors are meant to play exclusively civic
roles. A similar pairing of extremes recurs in Rancière’s conception of
the aesthetic regime of art, itself a fragile liminal state balanced between
tendencies either to collapse the difference between art and non-art—as
anticipated in post-Hegelian visions of a life lived as art, or embraced in
the more mundane celebrations of a ‘relational aesthetics’—or else to
reify the gap between art and life, as in Greenberg’s purified modernism,
42
Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 169, 181–5; Disagreement, pp. 85–7.
43
Jules Michelet, L’Etudiant: cours de 1847–48 [1877], quoted in Les Scènes du peuple,
p. 175.
122 nlr 37
The predicates ‘human’ and ‘human rights’ are simply attributed, without
any phrasing, without any mediation, to their eligible party, the subject
‘man’. The age of the ‘humanitarian’ is one of immediate identity between
the ordinary example of suffering humanity and the plenitude of the sub-
ject of humanity and its rights.45
Strategic questions
44
Malaise dans l’esthétique, pp. 31–2, 162; see also Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution
and its Outcomes’, nlr 14, March–April 2002, p. 148.
45
Disagreement, pp. 125–6; cf. Malaise dans l’esthétique, 172. According to Rancière,
this is the outcome affirmed, in effect, by Agamben’s conception of the ‘state of
exception’, whereby ‘the idea of the purity of politics’ is turned on its head, so as to
‘empty the stage of political invention by sweeping aside its ambiguous actors. As a
result, politics comes to be identified with the act of a power that appears as an over-
whelming historico-ontological destiny: we are all, from the outset, refugees in the
homogeneous and pervasive space of the camp, entrapped in the complementarity
of bare life and exception’ (Rancière, ‘Thinking of Dissensus’).
hallward: Staging Equality 123
First and foremost, its effects are unabashedly sporadic and intermit-
tent. Rancière himself emphasizes this point: political sequences are by
their very nature rare and ephemeral. Once the stage is struck, little or
nothing remains. An improvisational sequence, moreover, is difficult to
sustain as a matter of course.46 This is a limitation Rancière accepts,
as do Badiou and the later Sartre. Missing from his account, however,
is an equivalent for what Badiou calls ‘forcing’—the power of a politi-
cal sequence to impose measurable change upon the configuration of a
situation. There is no acknowledgement here of the ‘incremental’ aspect
of even so intermittent and disruptive a conception of ‘poor people’s
movements’ as the one famously developed by Frances Fox Piven and
Richard Cloward.47 Like Rancière, Piven and Cloward privilege the direct
disruption of the status quo over the development of stable if not bureau-
cratic means of organization—trade unions, political parties, social
movements—that are easily accommodated within the prevailing order
of things. ‘A placid poor get nothing, but a turbulent poor sometimes
get something.’48 Unlike Rancière, however, Piven and Cloward pay at
least some attention to the question of how to hold on to such gains and
use them to enhance a capacity to make additional gains. They allow for
some consideration, however brief, of questions of strategic continuity.
Rancière, by contrast, offers little systematic justification for his assump-
tion that the politics of emancipation must or should always proceed by
means of disidentification and disassociation.
46
See Rancière, ‘Politics and Aesthetics’, pp. 196–7.
47
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They
Succeed, How They Fail, New York 1977.
48
Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, New York
1971, p. 338.
124 nlr 37
49
Partage du sensible, pp. 23, 68–9; cf. Malaise dans l’esthétique, p. 16.
50
Disagreement, pp. 72–6. As Aristotle candidly explains, the best democracy will be
one that, countering its spontaneous tendency, keeps the people at a distance from
the political process while ensuring that the privileged or well-born retain the actual
reins of power (Aristotle, Politics 1318b).
51
Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy,
New York 1975; see Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, pp. 12–4.
hallward: Staging Equality 125
52
See for example Chomsky, ‘Deterring Democracy in Italy: A Key Case of Thought
Control’ (2002), available at www.justresponse.net.
53
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, New York
1967, p. 16.
54
Disagreement, pp. 137–8; cf. Names of History, pp. 93, 98.
126 nlr 37
55
Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 44–5; The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pp. 105–6, 133–4.
56
See for instance Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 77. As Alain Badiou notes, Rancière’s
presumption is that ‘every social tie implies a master’ (Badiou, Abrégé de métapoli-
tique, Paris 1998, p. 123).
57
Like Jacotot before him, Rancière sometimes seems most comfortable defending
a cause whose integrity is guaranteed but whose implications are never likely to
‘take on’—proof, perhaps, of a willingness positively to embrace a version of what
Hegel called the unhappy consciousness. See Ignorant Schoolmaster, pp. 134, 139.
58
Shores of Politics, p. 41; La Chair des mots: politiques de l’écriture, Paris 1998, p. 11.
59
I develop this point in more detail in ‘The Politics of Prescription’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 4 (Autumn 2005), pp. 771–91.
hallward: Staging Equality 127
60
‘Politics and Aesthetics’, p. 202.
61
See ‘Le Compromis culturel historique’, Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 275, 279–80.
62
Ignorant Schoolmaster, pp. 65; 5–6.
128 nlr 37
In the end, much of what is most compelling and forceful about Rancière’s
theoretical position—and this is again something he shares with Badiou
and Lacoue-Labarthe—seems to rely on an unnecessarily simplistic artic-
ulation of all and nothing, of ‘no-one’ and ‘everyone’. Rancière’s politics,
like Badiou’s notion of an evental site or Lacoue-Labarthe’s conception of
theatre, depends on the existence of a part des sans-part, a ‘part of those
who have no part’: a group of people who are literally of ‘no account’, an
‘indistinct mass of people of no position’. And ‘whoever has no part—the
poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat—cannot
in fact have any part other than all or nothing.’64 Rancière doesn’t con-
sistently recognize the immeasurable difference between ‘nothing’ and
‘very little’, between ‘no part’ and a ‘minimal part’. Yet there are many
who, rather than having no part, have a very small one, a minimal or
marginal share that is nonetheless something rather than nothing. It is
vital for any universalist project to be appropriately articulated with this
interested, assertive or defensive aspect.
The danger, finally, is that Rancière may have left himself open to a ver-
sion of his own early critique of Althusser—that he has developed an
inconsequential account of democracy.65 Rancière’s theory may encourage
us to do little more than ‘play at’ politics or equality, and his egalitari-
anism, no less than Schiller’s notion of play, risks confinement to the
63
‘En allant à l’expo: l’ouvrier, sa femme, les machines’, Les Scènes du peuple, pp.
63–84; cf. Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 100–1; Leçon d’Althusser, pp. 162–3.
64
Disagreement, p. 9.
65
Leçon d’Althusser, pp. 207–8.
hallward: Staging Equality 129
66
Schiller, Aesthetic Education, letter 26.