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.