Notes from: Jacques Ranciere "The Politics of Disagreement"

Chapter 1: The Beginning of Politics

In this brief chapter, Ranciere through a critique of two patriarchs of political philosophy, Aristotle and Plato, introduces a notion of the of politics and its origin (the chapter title kind of gives that away). He also discusses the nature of class in society, and the counting of class which I suppose in normal language could translate as status. It is in dispute of the status between classes that politics begins.

He begins with Aristotle's 'Politics' where it is posited that man is a political animal by nature, owing to his ability of speech. This separates him from other animals who merely possess voice. Speech allows us to communicate what useful and just, and it is a view in common regarding these that defines a household and a state. Plato theorizes justice of the state through his critique of a guy named Thrasymachus (say that twelve times fast) who was a social darwinist of sorts, positing simply that one persons profit is another's loss (two terms spoken of loosely), and he uses this principle to define and legitimize the order of the state as the dominion of the strongest, in Ranciere's words 'what is useful in the order of individuals'. What T_ has left out is any sense of right or wrong and therefore any concept of justice. Furthermore, the preventing of wrongs also fails to provide us with a framework for justice in society, because addressing society means to speak of what is held in common. Aristotle taught that justice is a matter of each individual and class taking a fair share of desirable and undesirable things, or each his due, perhaps we could say he views it as a balance between entitlements and responsibilities. Plato held a similar theory, that of an intelligent ordering of society, a separate placing of men according to their natural talents.

This is the point where R_ takes issue with both of our patriarchs, and perhaps why they are both taken together, because to order society in any sense it is necessary to account for its parts, and this very count is what determines the distribution of roles and entitlements. It is this count and distribution that lays the framework for an attempt at an intelligent or Just ordering, however it is also the basis of a fundamental miscount, a mis-distribution. Philosophies project was to establish a society based a natural order, that sought to find a correct place for everyone. But there is always an asymmetrical disjunction, a tension between this order which escapes any symmetrical evaluation. In R_'s words, "the sum never equals the whole." The miscount of society's parts gives us in classical modes of statecraft, a structural inequality, a fundamental wronging which is the focus of a dispute original to politics. The subject of this wrong has carried various names; Plebian, Proletarian, the Poor, but in principle it is a group that is entitled to no entitled place of their own. The struggle of politics then, is a break from the established order for the setting up of a part for a class who has no part (or those who are counted in a way that does not count). R_ is very specific about the nature of this subject who, as those who have no part, the miscounted, must place themselves in the center of a dispute for the right to a dispute, for a right to politics, which is nothing other than politics itself.

What he is getting at I believe, is that there are and always have been people to varying degrees, who have no say and or status in society, except an absence of status. There are entitlements available to small quantities, and in the hands of those who are deciding stand entire peoples who have no entitlements or place except the place that is either handed down to them, or available to anyone, which is to say in many cases no place at all. The first dispute that may be called political is above all, about the right to litigate a dispute. Although in his analysis he takes the classics as his starting point, I think the argument is equally applicable to a modern society and farther reaching than areas conventionally labeled as political. It addresses something very basic about social roles that can be observed in daily situations where there are boundaries for our behavior at every turn, and customary postures for every interaction. And so there is a notion of an order that holds society together, and an ethics which binds us as a unitary whole. For the rest of society this is good and useful, but when in the balance of this order one of its members is conventionally discounted or held in the peripheral, there lays a social wronging, a wrong whose redress is by definition, political in nature.

The Re-politicization of Ordinary Things

For my first blog on this site, I would like to present a humble idea relating to an opinion I've held for some time now, being that American politics, and perhaps politics of the "First World' in general have become a somewhat stale and irrelevant undertaking for ordinary people, and fail to touch upon everyday issues and things in our immediate reality. When we take a close look at recent history and compare our institutions with those of other countries, political inclusion and participation appear to be on a sharp decline, while apathy appears to be ever more common. Often the problem appears as something of a general separation of the political process from everyday life, or as something inaccessible to many people. I've encountered a few plausible explanations for this (I'm not the only one apparently), that I will enumerate presently. If you are reading this blog and want to add something, comment, or disagree, please feel free.

1. Chantal Mouffe posits that the various political action groups, from the feminists, those fighting for racial equality, to the environmentalists etc, while undertaking politics for their own struggles have failed in general to evoke a common ground, or a struggle for politics in general. This has left the various groups all being a one-off in the process, on their own, and an exception to an otherwise exclusive political process.
2. Ernesto Laclau citing the failings of Marxism and the success of various groups throughout the 20th century, comments on the need for groups to touch on actual keystone issues of human interest and salience, where most still appropriate outmoded ideologies, political programmes, and pseudo-social sciences. More importantly he identifies politics as something more than lobbying or voting, propaganda etc. Effective politics is a social undertaking relating to identity, ideology, values, and it responds directly to expressed needs. It embraces a full range of human experiences and social dynamics, and is therefore more than a process, it is a social movement, one that we haven't seen for some time.
3. Here I will lump together various 'institution' theories. I term them so because they relate to the structure of the political apparatus itself. As early as Aristotle and Plato (not yet irrelevant), politics was supposed to be a medium of public will (whoever the public may include) managed by men of leisure, that is, persons of aristocracy, for the simple reason that working people do not possess the resources and time necessary for such undertakings. This is why Marx envisioned a "Vanguard of the Proletariat." Our institutions bear the mark of this arrangement, relating to our history of arrangements, and upon observation this reality 2000 years later continues to hold strong. For example, what percentage of our public and appointed offices are held by wealthy lawyers and industry captains? That information is somewhere in the book "Who Rules America?'" by G. William Domhoff (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/), I don't remember it exactly. In his opinion, American government has been constructed in such a way that policy is extremely difficult to be constructed and enacted, and as such, it is groups with the largest budgets that win out. In this way, the public is effectively shut out by a completely unrewarding process. Furthermore, as my professor Simon Gomez often pointed out, a political education is more expensive than is its payoff. This seems very smart to me. Mounting a very fragmented media landscape is a difficult task for someone interested in something very basic like the background of their political candidates. In many cases it appears to be a collective failure on the part of media to provide acessible, unbiased and usefull information. A lot of people probably get frustrated and don't bother.
4. Jacques Ranciere is frustrated with modern conceptions of politics that appear to be more akin to ideas of social management rather than ideas of participation and involvement. Representation, policy, and government in general fall into this charecterization. Not that representative systems are deaf to public needs, and cannot be channels of positive change, but that the system itself adresses the general populace from a standpoint of management, a quasi-policing that occurs at the level of policy. The undertakings of government are further enumerations of an allready established order, one whose stake is in maintaining itself intact, against the throws of 'intrusive' counter movements. As early as Machiavelli, and with a more critical approach by Etienne de la Boetie, political systems were said to have the capacity to persuade a public to its consent. Politics occurs when there is a viable and momentous challenge to the estabished order, (like Laclau) a proliferation of political identities, and (like Mouffe) an assertion of equality that evokes a common space for politics to take place. He defines this idea as 'Democratic Exceptionalism' because politics is in general a very rare exception the Rule.

I personally see the merits of all of these ideas. I believe interest groups should work for a common political involvement and that they have failed in doing that, I also think a salient politics has a basis in social and cultural inscriptions, and that the institutions that politics would play themselves out in are very resilient to popular intrusions, highly complex, and most excessible to those who have the means. I think we have fooled ourselves into thinking that voting once or twice a year gives us a claim to participation or democracy. I'm sure that there are power structures in many other places than the level of policy-making that our elected representatives c/would respond to anyways. All too often politics is mentioned in relation to something most of us have very little to do or say about, and is thus something left to the authorities, or the experts. Because of this I find it hard to imagine why most people wouldn't display some kind of political apathy...which brings me to my own humble idea, that of the re-politicization of ordinary things, especially the things that carry with them an abiding anti-polical status.

Consider for a moment how much involvement you or any of your friends have in making the decisions that that create lasting changes in the very place around you. Your neighborhood, your job, your apartment, your neighborhood police, traffic court, family services, financial institutions etc etc and on to the things around you, like common commodities and household items. How much of any of this bears the mark of a collective or popular will? For example, do you really want your shoes to be constructed by asian childeren in dangerous working conditions? If yes, for you it is ok, but if not, then there is ground for a claim to be made, not only for humane treatment of employees in its production, but full disclosure to the consumer regarding the details of its production. I think people should recognize that everything around us has a political dimension, whether it be expressed as an object of dispute, that is, overtly politivcal, or purely in anti-political terms of something undisputed. Every political act begins with the dispute of a claim, and every movement begins with the mourning of wrongs and a means to redress them. So please, please go do something about it.

Not Just-So

How does one go about presenting a simple everyday item as an object of social inquiry and on that basis consider a political claim with say, something like a cup of coffee? Well, coffee is an item of immense trade and commoditization, from the plantations, wholesale trade, massive roasting sites, in short from the farmer to the barista, the coffee bean is spun into a complex web of social/economic relationships and procurement on a grand scale, like most commodities. Yet if one were asked what sat in front of him or her at a cafe or a local Tim Hortans, they would probably find humor in the question. Of course it is a cup coffee! The instantaneous intuitions response hands over its most immediate and obvious object. "It is coffee, I just bought it." In most contexts, an item is treated as a thing in itself, or in this case 'just a cup of coffee'. But for our purpose, the thing in itself gives very little room for inquiry into a social dimension or a critical understanding to any stage of its procurement, as it is. Property rights, also offer very little to the discerning eye. Thus, we may begin to question the validity of such a just-so status. For a social consciousness to emerge in this context, one is required to look farther into the object at hand, and engage in understanding the history of that very object, the modes of procurement, and the institutions that legitimize it and so on, in this case I would say, we should look into the context of coffee consumerism.