@emancipation In watching this interview back, I can see that I wasn’t always very clear about some key terms of Rancière’s. As such, I offer some clearer and very succinct definitions below of these terms. What is aesthetics? It is the configuration of the sensible. What is the consensus? It is a configuration of the sensible by a police logic in the unequal distribution of the sensible because a police logic operates from a presupposition of inequality. What is dissensus? It is an act that causes the suspension of the inequality of the consensus. What is politics? It is the enactment of dissensus. Politics as the enactment of dissensus and aesthetics as the reconfiguration of the sensible are simultaneous. As such, I describe the simultaneity of politics and aesthetics in my book as the simultaneity of transgression (acts of dissensus) and transformation (aesthetics as the reconfiguration of the sensible). In this simultaneity we transform our ‘self’ into a political being, which in Rancière’s lexicon means a being of dissensus who acts from a presupposition of equality. Thus, in Rancière’s turn away from political philosophy and political revolution, he turns to an aesthetic revolution as a means to reconfigure the consensus and the unequal distribution of the sensible and to transform ourselves into political beings of equality.
The political limits of Rancière's theory of emancipation is made clear through the case of U.S. Civil Rights movement that Blaney highlights. Not only did the groups and individuals involved with the movement presuppose equality in their actions, but many of the them signaled the structural, systemic roots of inequality, linking them to capital. Martin Luther King did this himself, especially in his later writings. I think that Rancière's ideas on dissensus and emancipation can be productive for understanding the embodied experiences and practices of liberation, thinking of aesthetics in the broader sense of the word of course. But the either/or logic that one also sees in Foucault, "ethics of the self" instead of the revolutionary praxis associated with communist as well as some strains of anarchism, ends up reinforcing the status quo.
That’s the same critique that Žižek gave on Rancière (reinforcing the status quo) - see my comments on Žižek above. In a nutshell, what is offered in Rancière's aesthetics is an aesthetics of the self in conjunction with aesthetic communities of dissensus such as, for example, Occupy Wall Street in 2011 that used art installations and media projections etc. With Foucault, if we look at his engagement with parrhesia, we can see how this works in a similar way to dissensus, as I show in my book. That being said, I think the standard critiques against aesthetic forms of emancipation are that they are either a form of social atomism or reinforce the status quo, or both. This might be the understandable frustration of political revolutionists, but if we look at the last hundred years or so of the history of revolution, what tends to happen is merely power changing hands. Communists themselves said this about the American and French Revolutions - power changing hands from feudal aristocracy to bourgeois capitalism. Because of the history of revolution, Rancière, Foucault, et al., are extremely wary of revolution and new world orders and therefore, turned to alternative means of emancipation.
Don't we see a little of Zizek in Ranciere in The Nights of Labor, being able to refuse to play the game and prefer not to? To refuse to work to "improve" the production of capital? For many, it is increasingly more difficult to separate one's job, which they do to survive, and something that's a personal interest to them. It's treated as impossible to do both
We used to see a lot of Rancière in Zizek back when radical democracy was his political focus. The Ticklish Subject has some very compelling material on metapolitics for example. But Zizek was not ever interested in the proletarian archival work of Rancière. I think that Zizek has the same fatalism apropos class that Rancière has, it's not even a pessimism, it's worse than that.
@@emancipations Interesting. I never took Zizek as fatalistic, especially now. I believe something in Ranciere aids in articulating some aspects that limit jouissance and the ego ideal but involves the unary trait. You need a breakdown of the subject to get to the state of the one worker discussed in the Nights of Labor book. Neoliberalism functions to prevent this breakdown from occurring. Fredrick Hayek talks about the Spontaneous Order of the market. The market only perpetuates cruelty and aggression, which continue to support the super-ego and ego ideal.
@@emancipations @mitchell_fig Žižek was against Rancière. He states that an “aesthetic reconfiguration” such as Rancière’s form of dissensus, within the era of the spectacle, “has lost its subversive dimension” and thus, “it can easily be appropriated into the existing order” (Žižek 2008: 418). In a prior text-The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, Žižek describes dissensus as a “game of hysterical provocation” (Žižek 2000: 238) and translates mésentente (Rancière’s term for disagreement) as “misapprehension” (234) rather than disagreement and misunderstanding. He continues: The test of the true revolutionary, as opposed to this game of hysterical provocation is the heroic readiness to endure the conversion of the subversive undermining of the existing System into the principle of a new positive Order which gives body to this negativity [ . . . ]. (Žižek 2000: 238) However, as I stated in the interview, for Rancière, in his own words from his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, ‘Equality turns into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organisation’ (Rancière 1999: 34). Rancière, as I also stated in the interview, adopts the ignorant schoolmaster’s role, and so there is no offering of a Hegelian negation of the negation in a dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis, supposition; to expect this would be to misunderstand Rancière’s oeuvre. Instead, what Rancière offers, is a presupposition of equality within a democratic existence of political dissensus for the individual and communities (not society as a whole) to utilise and expand upon as they wish in an auto-emancipation. As such, for Rancière, equality is not a destination but a practice. Žižek states in his book Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis) use of a Notion (2001) that this kind of thinking (equality tunes into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organisation), although he does not cite Rancière, is nothing but an exploitation of “the horrors of the Gulag or Holocaust” as a means to renounce “all serious radial engagement” and thus defends “the existing order” (4). Of course, Rancière would disagree with this. This, in the end, is maybe, in a crude kernel, one of the main differences between an aesthetic revolution and a political revolution: an internal telos (autotelism) rather than an external one. In his posthumously published work, Althusser gives the analogy of a train and states the “the materialist philosopher” catches a train without knowing where it comes from or where it is going (telos), in contrast to the “idealist philosopher” who knows exactly where the train they will catch comes from and is going to. We can see this as a comparison between an aesthetic and a political revolution with a dialectic and telos. As such, it’s useful to think of Rancière, as Daniel astutely stated, as ‘a kind’ of Socrates. This is not only because he wishes us to think for ourselves but also, because Socrates in his old age went against the consensus indirectly by encouraging people to adopt the aesthetics of a care of the self. Foucault calls this a ‘discreet’ form of parrhesia - in my book I link parrhesia to dissensus. Interestingly as an aside, Rancière goes against Socrates in the interview ‘The Actuality of the Ignorant Schoolmaster’ in Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière and states that Socrates was not an emancipator but a stultifier à la the pedagogy that Jacotot goes against - see p.175. Apologies for the long and late reply!
@@sblaney66 Hey Stuart, I can fully understand Ranciere's point that auto-emancipation is a practice. Is his more traumatic discovery that any efforts of improve society as a whole, even if we think of something like climate change or improvements in the quality of life for many is doomed to fail. To me if that is the case the only way to have a practice of auto-emancipation is that you necessarily sustain the idea of the negativity of labor.
@@mitchell_fig Hi, thanks for your reply! I don't think he is saying that any effort to improve society will fail, be it climate change or otherwise. What I believe he is saying is that society will always be unequal so we shouldn't hang onto ideas of equality as an ideal that is forever deferred as a means to justify the inequality of the present. What we should do, according to JR, is presuppose equality by living life via practices of equality. If, as Aristotle states, the practices that we create in turn, create us, then living practices of equality can transform us accordingly.
I'm only a third through this podcast, but I gotta say, this all comes across as very regressive from a Marxist perspective.. I felt the same way towards Camus, though much more intensely; "Sure, rebellion, but no revolution!" - Why? Isn't this whole emancipation of the self exactly what we should try to avoid? If anything, in my opinion, the past few decades have proven pretty conclusively that this whole individual approach and limiting your scope as a leftist radical only to the personal and local has been a disaster; only spontaneous group forming, no disciplined organised left etc. hasn't worked out for us. - but yeah, I'm pretty sure we've all heard this critique I'm laying out here many times before, so I won't boter repeating it all here. I think, furthermore, there is something concerning about this whole, what i would call, defeatist attitude that started to gain traction among leftist intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century, which has become hegemonic "wisdom"; the idea that revolution probably won't happen, it's wrong to place your hopes in revolution, and even if it were possible, revolution can't bring about emancipation, that's something that can only be done individually in the mind, or whatever. This all seems like a pretty big departure from the basics of Marx.. but also it seems just, to me (and I'm not very educated on Rancière etc.) a very doomerist world view. It doesn't look like 'accepting' the world and the cold hard facts, as much as 'resigning' to the world such as it is now (or as it was then). Ok, please tell me where I'm wrong here, because I most probably am, but it really seems to me as though, with Marx you get: -workers coming together -workers working together and supporting eachother in their struggles for dignity and emancipation -an optimistic view of what the future may bring, if we get our shit together -a different world is possible -a sense of history, and that we're not just the helpless NPC's of history, but actually play an active role in shaping our destiny, together, in cooperation (NPC = Non Player Characters, the characters in a video game that don't change the world, but are just there for the player to be the main character, standing at the sidelines so to speak) Whereas with Rancière, and with other "post-Marxist", "French theorists", post modernists, post structuralists, or whatever label actually fits because none of these really do, you get: -everybody is basically on their own -a different world is not going to happen in out lifetimes -there's no point in organising, in fact, it may even be dangerous because you might do an accidental totalitarianism, so best not even risk it -revolution is just a myth -workers can't come together because we're all too unique and idiosyncratic for our interests to align -try and fix your personal life and live in accordance with your own values, and limit your scope to the personal and local this is just the vibes I get from the limited reading I did but yeah.. and to be honest, I have often felt that where ever I get recommended these "post-marxist" thinkers to read in more liberal, or politically "normie" spaces, they are just recommended to me to get me to change my mind about Marx, because Marx is sooo oobvviouuslyy discredited (supposedly), whereas time and time again Marx seems to be the most on the money, on the ball, thinker of the Western world in the last 200 years, pretty much. So I don't quite understand this impulse to leave Marx behind on core issues, aside from ideological discomfort of what Marx has to say.. yeah I don't have a real final point or question here, just sharing my thoughts in the aether
You have many pertinent points and I am actually in agreement with a lot of it. I tried to repeat that skepticism again and again. A lot of this is a question of reading methods because the stuff in Rancière on immanent equality, the three forms of politics, criticism of teleology and aesthetics resonates but the idea that we can then have a prescription of all of that to practice, there it becomes a pessimist politics that is regressive. So again, it's a reading method issue for me.
@@lotoreo In a way Rancière has a fundamentally difficult time converting his politics into a program - that idea that metapolitics is both in neoliberal politics and in Marxist politics is troubling imo!
@@emancipationsisn’t the real problem that Rancière’s politics are meant to be confrontational over what he calls ‘distribution of the sensible’ (who can occupy what spaces and for times both when & how long), the lack of the part-of-no-part to form a Subject or even something structurally coherent as a multiple on the edge of the void or inexistent? Dissensus as an encounter with the police doesn’t exactly become political because as we know, ‘tout ce qui bouge n'est pas rouge’. I think appealing to the worker that doesn’t want to make revolution is the equivalent of appealing to a neurotic who doesn’t want to face their own truth and instead knows how to fix their own problem. The proletariat is the unconscious of every worker.
![Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn't Want You To See - CTMU [Full Version; Timestamps]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9miVG2xT5jY/mqdefault.jpg)
@emancipation
In watching this interview back, I can see that I wasn’t always very clear about some key terms of Rancière’s. As such, I offer some clearer and very succinct definitions below of these terms.
What is aesthetics? It is the configuration of the sensible.
What is the consensus? It is a configuration of the sensible by a police logic in the unequal distribution of the sensible because a police logic operates from a presupposition of inequality.
What is dissensus? It is an act that causes the suspension of the inequality of the consensus.
What is politics? It is the enactment of dissensus.
Politics as the enactment of dissensus and aesthetics as the reconfiguration of the sensible are simultaneous. As such, I describe the simultaneity of politics and aesthetics in my book as the simultaneity of transgression (acts of dissensus) and transformation (aesthetics as the reconfiguration of the sensible). In this simultaneity we transform our ‘self’ into a political being, which in Rancière’s lexicon means a being of dissensus who acts from a presupposition of equality. Thus, in Rancière’s turn away from political philosophy and political revolution, he turns to an aesthetic revolution as a means to reconfigure the consensus and the unequal distribution of the sensible and to transform ourselves into political beings of equality.
Alain Badiou's greatest rebuttal to Rancière was to suggest that the worst thing he could do would be to agree with Rancière.
The political limits of Rancière's theory of emancipation is made clear through the case of U.S. Civil Rights movement that Blaney highlights. Not only did the groups and individuals involved with the movement presuppose equality in their actions, but many of the them signaled the structural, systemic roots of inequality, linking them to capital. Martin Luther King did this himself, especially in his later writings.
I think that Rancière's ideas on dissensus and emancipation can be productive for understanding the embodied experiences and practices of liberation, thinking of aesthetics in the broader sense of the word of course. But the either/or logic that one also sees in Foucault, "ethics of the self" instead of the revolutionary praxis associated with communist as well as some strains of anarchism, ends up reinforcing the status quo.
That’s the same critique that Žižek gave on Rancière (reinforcing the status quo) - see my comments on Žižek above. In a nutshell, what is offered in Rancière's aesthetics is an aesthetics of the self in conjunction with aesthetic communities of dissensus such as, for example, Occupy Wall Street in 2011 that used art installations and media projections etc. With Foucault, if we look at his engagement with parrhesia, we can see how this works in a similar way to dissensus, as I show in my book. That being said, I think the standard critiques against aesthetic forms of emancipation are that they are either a form of social atomism or reinforce the status quo, or both. This might be the understandable frustration of political revolutionists, but if we look at the last hundred years or so of the history of revolution, what tends to happen is merely power changing hands. Communists themselves said this about the American and French Revolutions - power changing hands from feudal aristocracy to bourgeois capitalism. Because of the history of revolution, Rancière, Foucault, et al., are extremely wary of revolution and new world orders and therefore, turned to alternative means of emancipation.
Great ep - Can we get a part 2?
I definitely want to do more on Rancière. Perhaps I will invite him onto the show.
That would be amazing!
Don't we see a little of Zizek in Ranciere in The Nights of Labor, being able to refuse to play the game and prefer not to? To refuse to work to "improve" the production of capital? For many, it is increasingly more difficult to separate one's job, which they do to survive, and something that's a personal interest to them. It's treated as impossible to do both
We used to see a lot of Rancière in Zizek back when radical democracy was his political focus. The Ticklish Subject has some very compelling material on metapolitics for example. But Zizek was not ever interested in the proletarian archival work of Rancière. I think that Zizek has the same fatalism apropos class that Rancière has, it's not even a pessimism, it's worse than that.
@@emancipations Interesting. I never took Zizek as fatalistic, especially now. I believe something in Ranciere aids in articulating some aspects that limit jouissance and the ego ideal but involves the unary trait. You need a breakdown of the subject to get to the state of the one worker discussed in the Nights of Labor book. Neoliberalism functions to prevent this breakdown from occurring. Fredrick Hayek talks about the Spontaneous Order of the market. The market only perpetuates cruelty and aggression, which continue to support the super-ego and ego ideal.
@@emancipations @mitchell_fig
Žižek was against Rancière. He states that an “aesthetic reconfiguration” such as Rancière’s form of dissensus, within the era of the spectacle, “has lost its subversive dimension” and thus, “it can easily be appropriated into the existing order” (Žižek 2008: 418). In a prior text-The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, Žižek describes dissensus as a “game of hysterical provocation” (Žižek 2000: 238) and translates mésentente (Rancière’s term for disagreement) as “misapprehension” (234) rather than disagreement and misunderstanding. He continues:
The test of the true revolutionary, as opposed to this game of hysterical provocation is the heroic readiness to endure the conversion of the subversive undermining of the existing System into the principle of a new positive Order which gives body to this negativity [ . . . ]. (Žižek 2000: 238)
However, as I stated in the interview, for Rancière, in his own words from his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, ‘Equality turns into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organisation’ (Rancière 1999: 34). Rancière, as I also stated in the interview, adopts the ignorant schoolmaster’s role, and so there is no offering of a Hegelian negation of the negation in a dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis, supposition; to expect this would be to misunderstand Rancière’s oeuvre. Instead, what Rancière offers, is a presupposition of equality within a democratic existence of political dissensus for the individual and communities (not society as a whole) to utilise and expand upon as they wish in an auto-emancipation. As such, for Rancière, equality is not a destination but a practice.
Žižek states in his book Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis) use of a Notion (2001) that this kind of thinking (equality tunes into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organisation), although he does not cite Rancière, is nothing but an exploitation of “the horrors of the Gulag or Holocaust” as a means to renounce “all serious radial engagement” and thus defends “the existing order” (4). Of course, Rancière would disagree with this. This, in the end, is maybe, in a crude kernel, one of the main differences between an aesthetic revolution and a political revolution: an internal telos (autotelism) rather than an external one. In his posthumously published work, Althusser gives the analogy of a train and states the “the materialist philosopher” catches a train without knowing where it comes from or where it is going (telos), in contrast to the “idealist philosopher” who knows exactly where the train they will catch comes from and is going to. We can see this as a comparison between an aesthetic and a political revolution with a dialectic and telos. As such, it’s useful to think of Rancière, as Daniel astutely stated, as ‘a kind’ of Socrates. This is not only because he wishes us to think for ourselves but also, because Socrates in his old age went against the consensus indirectly by encouraging people to adopt the aesthetics of a care of the self. Foucault calls this a ‘discreet’ form of parrhesia - in my book I link parrhesia to dissensus. Interestingly as an aside, Rancière goes against Socrates in the interview ‘The Actuality of the Ignorant Schoolmaster’ in Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière and states that Socrates was not an emancipator but a stultifier à la the pedagogy that Jacotot goes against - see p.175.
Apologies for the long and late reply!
@@sblaney66 Hey Stuart, I can fully understand Ranciere's point that auto-emancipation is a practice. Is his more traumatic discovery that any efforts of improve society as a whole, even if we think of something like climate change or improvements in the quality of life for many is doomed to fail. To me if that is the case the only way to have a practice of auto-emancipation is that you necessarily sustain the idea of the negativity of labor.
@@mitchell_fig Hi, thanks for your reply! I don't think he is saying that any effort to improve society will fail, be it climate change or otherwise. What I believe he is saying is that society will always be unequal so we shouldn't hang onto ideas of equality as an ideal that is forever deferred as a means to justify the inequality of the present. What we should do, according to JR, is presuppose equality by living life via practices of equality. If, as Aristotle states, the practices that we create in turn, create us, then living practices of equality can transform us accordingly.
I'm only a third through this podcast, but I gotta say, this all comes across as very regressive from a Marxist perspective.. I felt the same way towards Camus, though much more intensely; "Sure, rebellion, but no revolution!" - Why? Isn't this whole emancipation of the self exactly what we should try to avoid? If anything, in my opinion, the past few decades have proven pretty conclusively that this whole individual approach and limiting your scope as a leftist radical only to the personal and local has been a disaster; only spontaneous group forming, no disciplined organised left etc. hasn't worked out for us. - but yeah, I'm pretty sure we've all heard this critique I'm laying out here many times before, so I won't boter repeating it all here.
I think, furthermore, there is something concerning about this whole, what i would call, defeatist attitude that started to gain traction among leftist intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century, which has become hegemonic "wisdom"; the idea that revolution probably won't happen, it's wrong to place your hopes in revolution, and even if it were possible, revolution can't bring about emancipation, that's something that can only be done individually in the mind, or whatever. This all seems like a pretty big departure from the basics of Marx.. but also it seems just, to me (and I'm not very educated on Rancière etc.) a very doomerist world view. It doesn't look like 'accepting' the world and the cold hard facts, as much as 'resigning' to the world such as it is now (or as it was then).
Ok, please tell me where I'm wrong here, because I most probably am, but it really seems to me as though, with Marx you get:
-workers coming together
-workers working together and supporting eachother in their struggles for dignity and emancipation
-an optimistic view of what the future may bring, if we get our shit together
-a different world is possible
-a sense of history, and that we're not just the helpless NPC's of history, but actually play an active role in shaping our destiny, together, in cooperation
(NPC = Non Player Characters, the characters in a video game that don't change the world, but are just there for the player to be the main character, standing at the sidelines so to speak)
Whereas with Rancière, and with other "post-Marxist", "French theorists", post modernists, post structuralists, or whatever label actually fits because none of these really do, you get:
-everybody is basically on their own
-a different world is not going to happen in out lifetimes
-there's no point in organising, in fact, it may even be dangerous because you might do an accidental totalitarianism, so best not even risk it
-revolution is just a myth
-workers can't come together because we're all too unique and idiosyncratic for our interests to align
-try and fix your personal life and live in accordance with your own values, and limit your scope to the personal and local
this is just the vibes I get from the limited reading I did but yeah..
and to be honest, I have often felt that where ever I get recommended these "post-marxist" thinkers to read in more liberal, or politically "normie" spaces, they are just recommended to me to get me to change my mind about Marx, because Marx is sooo oobvviouuslyy discredited (supposedly), whereas time and time again Marx seems to be the most on the money, on the ball, thinker of the Western world in the last 200 years, pretty much. So I don't quite understand this impulse to leave Marx behind on core issues, aside from ideological discomfort of what Marx has to say..
yeah I don't have a real final point or question here, just sharing my thoughts in the aether
You have many pertinent points and I am actually in agreement with a lot of it. I tried to repeat that skepticism again and again. A lot of this is a question of reading methods because the stuff in Rancière on immanent equality, the three forms of politics, criticism of teleology and aesthetics resonates but the idea that we can then have a prescription of all of that to practice, there it becomes a pessimist politics that is regressive. So again, it's a reading method issue for me.
@@emancipations thanks for the reply
@@lotoreo In a way Rancière has a fundamentally difficult time converting his politics into a program - that idea that metapolitics is both in neoliberal politics and in Marxist politics is troubling imo!
@@emancipationsisn’t the real problem that Rancière’s politics are meant to be confrontational over what he calls ‘distribution of the sensible’ (who can occupy what spaces and for times both when & how long), the lack of the part-of-no-part to form a Subject or even something structurally coherent as a multiple on the edge of the void or inexistent? Dissensus as an encounter with the police doesn’t exactly become political because as we know, ‘tout ce qui bouge n'est pas rouge’.
I think appealing to the worker that doesn’t want to make revolution is the equivalent of appealing to a neurotic who doesn’t want to face their own truth and instead knows how to fix their own problem. The proletariat is the unconscious of every worker.
What's wrong with Left Calvinism eh.... the theory industry is pretty much filled with it.
see Thoreau