Jacques Rancière is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII.
Christian Höller is coeditor of springerin: Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Vienna.

While the Western democratic system is still presenting itself as a model for the rest of the world, it is facing all sorts of internal challenges. Some of these stem from concerns with citizenship and the domain of exclusive rights, or with the limits of the representative system quite generally. However, a much more fundamental attack has been launched for some time from the position of a power elite that is pitching itself as the true defender of Western democratic values. Jacques Rancière, in taking aim at this position, not only brings to the fore what a contemporary understanding of »the political« might be all about, but he also sets out to defend the democratic principle in its most comprehensive conception—a defense whose repercussions are as relevant for critical art practices as they are for new modes of political learning.

Christian Höller: A recent concern of yours has been tendencies of antidemocratic thinking that increasingly surface in public discourse today.¹ The focus of this concern, however, is not “anti-Western” manifestations of this tendency (something the media have accustomed us to over the past couple of years), but quite to the contrary: You locate serious antidemocratic sentiments right in the heart of so-called Western democracies, not least in the milieus of former leftist or post-Enlightenment thinkers. Why is it exactly here that some of the most persistent attacks stem from?

Jacques Rancière: It is clear that there are many forms of antidemocratic thinking and that, from a global point of view, Islamic fundamentalism weighs much more than the little group of Western intellectuals against whom I take sides. But I chose to focus on the sort of antidemocratic thinking that mattered to me: the one which was spelled out in the very core of our »democracies« by thinkers who came from the Marxist or progressive tradition. The loss of their revolutionary hopes has determined a double feeling of nostalgia and resentment which took on the form of an intellectual double game: on the one hand, they reject democracy because it belongs to the progressive tradition of which Marxism was the supreme expression; as they put it, the Gulag stemmed from the French Revolution. But on the other hand, they express that rejection in keeping with the Marxist view of »bourgeois democracy« as the mere expression of the reign of the commodity.

Höller: Challenges to democratic thinking are currently coming from a variety of positions. There are »people of God« of various flavors, ranging from those who seek a »new shepherd«² and the believers in the Koran to the global implementers of the Decalogue; but there are also the more profane followers of oligarchic interests as well as the proponents of the limitless circulation and expansion of capital. Can the antidemocratic stance of all these different people be traced back to a common basis? Or are they forming a kind of patchwork that might be all the more dangerous as it is combining radically different forces into one common thrust?

Rancière: It is not likely that Western financial oligarchies, Islamic fanatics, American evangelists, French »new philosophers«, and African military dictators will join their forces in one common antidemocratic thrust. But the point is that they conspire to dismiss the political signification of democracy. Most of them present it as a mere state of society characterized by individualism, consumerism, the »loss of the social bond«, etc. Those who praise it, praise it only as a system of government attuned to the power of the free market. But they reject it as the power of anybody. Their democracy is an oligarchy that must be ruled by experts and protected against democracy viewed as either the rule of the mob or the empire of individualism.

Höller: You are referring to a double discourse on democracy that has gained much currency in today’s (Western) world: Democracy as a—sometimes quite rhetorical—shield against all forms of tyranny, barbarism, and totalitarianism on the one hand; which also means the kind of democracy that has to be »delivered«, be it with bombs, to the rest of the world. And, on the other hand, the kind of democracy that is simply annoying to political and oligarchic leaders, and by this you mean the excesses of democratic life, the pursuit of particular interests by radically different subjects and communities. What, would you say, brought about this split in democratic discourse and what might have contributed to its widening over the past decades?

Rancière: The double discourse on democracy is as old as democracy itself. What we call »political institutions« or »political life« is the articulation of two antagonistic principles: the »police« principle, which has it that power belongs to those who are entitled to it because of their quality or capacity, and the properly political principle, which has it that power belongs to nobody, that »politics« means the specific power of those who have no »qualification«. After the English, American, and French revolutions, it had become a commonplace that politics meant »the power of the people«, but that this power of the people had to be preserved from the »whim« or the »ignorance« of the people. The collapse of the Soviet empire has redistributed the roles. On the one hand, the triumph of the global market imposes new constraints on the power of the people. The adaptation of nation-states to the global law of the circulation of wealth turns out to be the first concern of our governments, and it is thought of as too serious a matter to be left to the power of the multitude. On the other hand, religious fanaticisms and dictatorial states that had been supported as anticommunist bastions appear to jeopardize their former protectors. So the same governments complain about the risks engendered at home by democratic life and try to export democracy to the places where they had previously supported dictatorship and Islamism.

Höller: Today, democratic man (and woman) is sometimes portrayed, to quote from your book, as »the young, idiotic consumer of popcorn, reality TV, safe sex, social security, the right to difference, and anticapitalist or \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'antiglobalist’ illusions«.³ From this, the inference can be drawn that what democracy amounts to is a major civilizational catastrophe to be countered on all possible fronts. Is there something like the repercussions of—or reactions against—May 1968 and all sorts of liberation movements that articulate themselves in this kind of thinking? Or is this a genuinely contemporary diagnosis, appropriately developed for our very historical moment?

Rancière: The point is that the diagnosis identifying democracy with both popular turbulence and individual consumerism dates back to Plato’s Republic. In modern times it has been revived by the counterrevolutionary interpretation of the French Revolution. It accused the democratic revolution of having destroyed the reigns of the old social institutions and authorities and unleashed individualism and the power of the market. The triumph of individualism and consumption, the identification between democracy and the excess of individualistic appetites is a commonplace that has not much changed although the forms of consumption that it bemoans have. May 1968 is conjured up just as a symbol allowing us to lump together in the same basket social struggles, political claims for democracy, sexual freedom, minorities’ rights, etc.

Höller: A particularly startling symptom of current antidemocratic thinking seems to concern the historical role of the Holocaust. For some French intellectuals as well as for the ideologues of American neoconservatism, there is a link, sometimes very forcefully construed, between democratic modernity and the extermination of Jews. In what ways is the Shoah, considered as a central historical rupture, instrumentalized as the ultimate reason for discrediting the excesses and the disastrous permissiveness of democracy?

Rancière: Most intellectuals are apparently unable to think about politics apart from a view of history in general and modernity in particular as processes oriented toward a form of radical break or of decisive event. For a long time, social revolution played the part of the event organizing the historical development of modernity. With the collapse of the Soviet empire the Holocaust was substituted for the Revolution in this role, which also means that the messianic event achieving a history of progress was overturned as the catastrophe achieving a history of decadence. Now the interpretation of the decadence and the catastrophe was already preformed in the counterrevolutionary tradition I was speaking of: the tradition that portrayed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the triumph of individualism. Individualism was said to have broken the collective structures rooted in society and history and to have provoked the outburst of terror. It is exactly the schema that was revived, on a renewed basis provided by the Lacanian theory of the symbolic order, by Jean-Claude Milner’s book Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe).⁴ The Jews were exterminated because they embodied against democracy the power of tradition and transmission. Of course, this interpretation has to turn Nazism into the mere instrument of modern democracy.

Höller: Part of your argument is that the current fear or hatred of democratic life actually goes back to a much deeper concern which touches upon the nature of politics and the political more generally. As you put it in your book Disagreement,⁵ politics is primarily the activity of claiming a share, viz. by those who have not held any shares of the common good so far (»the count of the uncounted«, as you also call it). Is it that particular moment (which might be read as including those who have formerly been excluded from political life) that lies at the heart of contemporary resentment toward the democratic process? Or does this resentment go deeper, viz. toward a fundamental denial of the democratic principle itself?

Rancière: When I say that politics is the part of those who have no part, two things must be distinguished: there is the activity of groups, which claim a share because they are excluded from the public sphere. But there is also the fact that politics is not a simple redistribution of shares between social groups. It is the implementation of the power of those who are not members of any specific group, the collective capacity of those who have no specific capacity, or what I called the power of anybody. The growing entanglement of state oligarchies and market oligarchies demands that this power be strictly subjected to the power of economical science and to the negotiations based on its expertise. Now this »power of science« is limited to a very small group, which generates resentment in the rest of the intellectuals. This resentment is expressed in a way that in fact backs up this power: those intellectuals who are excluded from any real influence compensate for their humiliation by reviving the old discourse of the elites on the danger of ignorant mobs and the egoism of democratic individuals.

Höller: In unearthing a more substantial meaning of democracy and the political, you claim that democracy is neither a form of government nor a form a social life. Rather, it should be understood as the power of anyone and everyone to play a role in political life, of »those who have no other property that predisposes them more to governing than to being governed«.⁶ Once this radical absence of any entitlement to govern (be it by birth, wealth or faith) was accepted and implemented in society—something we are currently far away from—political life might look totally different from what it looks like today. What would you think might be the most startling consequences, besides a general condition of ungovernability?

Rancière: I am not envisioning a future in which this principle will be fully accepted and implemented in society. I don’t propose programs for the future but tools and gauges that enable us to judge the current state of things and reframe the stage of the possible. We are in a world where politics and police, equality and inequality are entangled everywhere in many ways. The point is not to propose a world cleaned of any intricacy but to provide tools that enable us to disentangle the principles and impose, in the present, the power of »ungovernability«. We must think of the future as the outcome of the possibilities created and the capacities enhanced in the present rather than put it as the goal determining what has to be done in the present.

Höller: Political action is, according to your conception of the democratic process, primarily about bringing into play claims by those who have not been considered to be legitimate political subjects so far (migrants, asylum seekers, undocumented workers, etc.). While this is surely aimed at an enlargement of the public sphere, I am wondering if this does not situate politics in realms totally different from the traditionally understood »political arena«—zones of civil life, spheres of culture, etc. At the same time, all those dispersed »theaters of the political« seem to move politics ever further away from decision-making processes. Can you comment?

Rancière: I don’t propose a view of politics that brings it back to claims made by outsiders. The part of those who have no part is not simply the part of the asylum seekers and the undocumented workers. Politics is not about integrating the excluded in our societies. It is about restaging matters of exclusion as matters of conflict, of opposition between worlds. The global logic of our world has it that all obstacles to the circulation of wealth have to be dismissed while the circulation of persons must be strictly controlled. The same powers open the borders to wealth and close them to the poor. This is what ties the struggles about immigration with the struggles against the dismantlement of social security systems, the reforms of the laws on employment, or of educational systems based on the sole logic of the market, etc. On all these points, there is a topography of the possible that is decided by national and international powers, and there are forms of refiguration of the possible created by the initiative of workers, students, etc., who embody the part of those who have no part. The problem is not so much the decentering of the political sphere as it is the enlargement of that sphere.

Höller: A quite influential strand of contemporary thinking identifies sovereignty in today’s democracies with an omnipresent state of exception, sees the nómos of modernity in the camp, and considers more or less all political life (bíos) reduced to bare life (zoe).⁷ What role does the democratic principle, the way you conceive it, assign to the notion of bare life? Is it really the inescapable condition that all possible participation in the democratic process is heading toward?

Rancière: The notion of »bare life« has been borrowed from Hannah Arendt, who had borrowed it from the aristocratic tradition that reserved the political stage to those who were free from the necessity of dealing with reproducing life and earning their livings. Politics begins with the refusal of the distinction, with the affirmation that people who were »just« living could participate in the configuration of the common world and that matters of »bare life«—employment, sexual roles, health, etc.—were also matters of collective deliberation and decision. The democratic principle is that there is no frontier between bare life and political life, that this frontier is a political issue at stake. The police law is not a »state of exception«. Instead it is politics, which consists in creating a tissue of exceptions to the police law.

Höller: A question related to the idea of »bare life« concerns the proper democratic conception of »the people«. They are considered as idiotic, self-indulgent, egotistical consumers by one extreme position, as the »multitude« that carries all future revolutionary hope by others, or—as Deleuze had it—a kind of empty signifier that points to something which »is always missing«. How does democratic thinking the way you understand it (and in distinction to the three positions mentioned) conceive of »the people«?

Rancière: The first two conceptions have something in common. Both have a positivistic conception of the people. They identify it with a form of society or with the deployment of »productive forces«. From my point of view, the »people» of democracy is not a social group, not an accumulation of productive forces. It is created by forms of subjectivization, by the configuration of dissensual scenes. The political people exists only when it disrupts the police distribution of the shares allowed to different parts of society. It is missing as a social body, but it exists in the present through the construction of its own space. It is not the people of a democracy to come.

Höller: With respect to a proper assessment of today’s political realities you state that »we do not live in democracies, neither … do we live in camps«.⁸ Leaving the camp and the state of exception aside for the moment, my question is if democracy, according to your view, is something not realized yet, or—quite to the contrary—something like an ever-receding horizon, a state of affairs that is unrealizable in principle?

Rancière: Democracy is an unattainable future only if we think of it as a perfect constitution or a state of perfect equality. That is not at all my conception. For me the »not yet« cannot be separated from an »already now and here«. Democracy exists only through its own acts and through the fabric of common life that these acts weave. It is not »unrealizable in principle«. It is a principle that we have always known as intertwined with its opposite and as relentlessly striving against it. The horizon of equality is not what determines a march toward an unattainable state of perfection. It is what frames the stage on which we can think and act.

Höller: For quite some time, we have witnessed attempts to democratize the arts and culture quite generally. Democratization has not only meant to make art more accessible and collapse hierarchies of high and low, but also to efficiently politicize it. Where, in your opinion, might a profound politicization and application of the democratic principle in contemporary art, start from—one that would go beyond a mere »thematization« of political issues?

Rancière: We must take into account that art has its own politics, which does not dovetail with attempts at »politicizing« it. The paradox of the aesthetic regime of art is that art produces political effects out of the very separation of the aesthetic sphere—which is not tantamount to the »autonomy« of the artwork, since this separation of a sphere of experience goes along with the loss of any determined criterion of difference between what belongs to art and what belongs to nonartistic life. What characterizes contemporary art is the way in which this disjointed junction between aesthetic separation and artistic indistinction becomes the form and matter of art. It means that its form of efficiency consists in the blurring of the borders, in the redistribution of the relations between spaces and times, between the real and the fictional, etc. In this respect it can play a role against the logic of consensus: What characterizes mainstream fiction, the fiction of the police order, is that it passes itself off as real, that it pretends to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the obviousness of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions, and utopias. And it also pins down groups to their identity, as Godard pointed out by saying that the epic was for the Israelis and the documentary for the Palestinians. It is not a question of reversing the roles, it is a question of creating a room for play, where the very distribution between epics and documentaries can be blurred. Contemporary art can certainly play a part in this respect, even more so as political groups don’t play it much today. Now this does not mean that artistic practice has become political practice, as some theorists assert it. They tend to identify artistic performance with new political activism on the ground that we are in a new age of capitalism when material and immaterial production, knowledge, communication, and artistic performance would fuse together in one and the same process of implementation of collective intelligence. In my view, this is a too easy way of erasing the specificities of both artistic and political dissensuality and of reviving the avant-gardist figure of the producer who is at the same time a worker, an artist, and the builder of a new world. There are many forms of collective intelligence just as there are many ways of performing and many stages of performance.

 

 

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