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.