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.

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.