Notes from: Jacques Ranciere "The Politics of Disagreement" Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Wrong: Politics and Police


Chapter 2 is mostly an elaboration of chapter 1 with additional development of R_'s concept of the founding 'wrong' of politics and a re-orientation and broadening of the term police, to mean any social body, custom or activity which strives to conserve or legitimize things as they are. It is in fact any of the social management organizations known as government or power structures. Often the police order is mistakenly identified as politics, being based on the actions of elected representatives and so forth. However, in its role of establishing or supplementing the dominant order, it is what sets forth and establishes the initial wrong or 'miscount' that politics are based on.

R_ is not trying to confuse us by redefining the two terms: his nomenclature has a different criteria, which is does the social program in question (pick one) enforce or legitimize a status quo, or is it a challenge to such a state of affairs? He qualifies the term police as non-pejorative or neutral, meaning there is good and bad police, and so in this context politics takes on a similar neutrality.

The elaboration goes as such. Taking from Aristotle's posit of the speaking animal as political animal, he seeks to make a connection between speech and politics that shows the natural political order is commensurate to a division of groups who are granted a stage in the house of law, and those who are not on the basis of their judged capacity for intelligent speech before the law. R_ recounts Livy's Secession of the Roman Plebeians on Aventine Hill, as retold by Pierre-Simon Ballanche where the Plebs elect themselves representatives, and recount their grievances with the Roman state Consul and seek reparations in the form of political equality. The Consul delivers an apologia (a defense of the Roman position) but to no avail, for the Plebs listened politely and reasserted their position in the request for a treaty. Such an action on the side of the Plebs had the effect of proving themselves as beings capable of speech, effectively giving themselves a place in the political landscape that previously had no place for Plebeian masses. On the other hand, the apologia intended to deprive the Plebs their right to litigation was a traitor to its own cause, granting it's audience both intelligibility and a common stage for their dispute.

This is in fact R_'s model for political litigation: there is a break from the inegalitarian police order by the non-patrician class who demonstrate an equal aptitude before the law. This act is most potent when staged in the same institutions serving patrician dominance, and in the same terms of their logic. What this proves is not only an aptitude for intelligent speech before the law, but the contingency of the inegalitarian divide as it is experienced (the social order). Furthermore it is effectively giving names and faces to the 'undifferentiated masses' who are claiming a place to what is held in common. In Aristolean terms: their voices cease to merely make the animal noises of pleasure or pain and begin to show signs of intelligibility. However, R_ qualifies this formula as not merely a case of subjects 'finding their voice', nor is it a compromise or collaboration between interests prevalent in consensus theory. Like Rosa Parks on the bus or Martin Luther King in the Million Man March have shown, it is a re-composition of the places and ways of doing and saying politics, and the capacities involved in this pursuit.

Consider for a moment the Declaration of Independence(http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm), the beginning of all our legal institutions. First, in defiance of the British crown the authors declare themselves representatives of independent states, reinventing their former political identity as colonies. Secondly they make grievance with British domination that they demand an end to, calling in question the legitimacy of British authority via the inadequacy of its policies, and the axiom that governing bodies derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed". In its time this document served as the manifesto of a people redefining the status and place given to them, seeking to become an entity of their own (socially, culturally, politically, etc). It is one example of an emancipatory struggle with a social order that does not hear or see the party in question; the resistance of mere assimilation. By distorting or abolishing their given status or social category they emerge to the world as a living, breathing, independent body to be reckoned with.

So politics is a challenge to the harmony of the police order, whose arrival heralds a larger community experienced as divided, as inharmonious. The body politic broadens the social-cultural landscape, albeit painfully. Because this challenge regards their place in the dominant order, or the finding a part of those who have no part, it is a displacement of the subject itself. Thus R_ is insistent that politics is the experience of becoming subjects; it is the work of producing a body capable of enunciation before the law, whose identification (illumination) reconfigures the political landscape. This is the process he terms political subjectification.

Did Freud Hate Women?

While Reading Slavoj Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology I found quoted of Sigmund Freud the dubious statement "...women are impossible to bear, a source of eternal nuisance, but still, they are the best thing we have of their kind; without them it would be even worse. So if woman does not exist, man is perhaps simply a woman who thinks she does not exist."

Ifind this wildly interesting because Freud is supposed to be a chauvinist, but his statement applies equally to men: "...men are impossible to bear, a source of eternal nuisance, but still, they are the best thing we have of their kind; without them it would be even worse. So if man does not exist, woman is perhaps simply a man who thinks he does not exist." Jacques Lacan made an addendum to this statement that went "Woman is the symptom of man" which is again, equal to saying "Man is the symptom of woman" but also, "Woman is the fantasy of Man".

Zizek tells that in psychoanalysis personal enjoyment is bound up with personal suffering, in the sense that psychic displeasure or, the symptom, takes root in the inadequacy of the self as it relates the its surroundings. Conversely, fantasy as the object of personal pleasure, takes root in the inadequacy of surroundings as it relates to the self. Psychoanalysis then is the uncovering of the symptom to dissolve its corresponding fantasy. But, this symptom/fantasy conventionally returns because (another quote by Freud) "You must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in all its pathology you will recognize the element which gives consistency to your being."

This means that at the root of our craziness lies the fundamental expression of who we are. And so, treatment of the symptom/fantasy is directed at the forms in which these expressions take place. If the opposite sex is the subject of our dreams and yet our worst nightmare, it is only because we are experiencing in them what is closest to ourselves: ourselves.

Thus I believe we can reformulate Freud's words (yet somewhat paradoxically) to say "woman is the greatest pleasure, a source of eternal joy, but still, she is the worst thing that has happened to us; if woman does exist, man is caught in her image, a plaything of self reflection". I think Freud had a healthy taste for cynicism about the way we see ourselves. Cynical, but not prejudiced. The whole idea is that without this mutual appropriation of the other for the purpose of becoming ourselves, the whole game is over; without the Other, there is neither One.