Interview with Jacques Rancière
How do we understand the political incoherence of our time? Has the master intellectual died? What is the true legacy of May 68?
I sit down for an interview with Jacques Rancière for the Emancipations podcast. In the unlikely event you are not aware of the work of Jacques Rancière, he is seemingly impossible to classify as a thinker. He emerges from the May 68 moment, a student of Althusser who broke from his teacher and went on to develop some of the most uniquely inspiring works on emancipatory politics, aesthetics and most interestingly, he wrote a series of works on proletarian intellectuals in the 19th century.1
I ask Jacques Rancière whether the seeming decline in ‘master philosophers’ from the time of French Theory is a good thing, and what a master philosopher is for him. I ask him what he thinks of the working-class today and its fragmented status. I ask him how we should assess the defeat of left-populism and what he thinks of Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri and other post-Marxist theorists of “radical democracy.” I ask him if he thinks our time resembles the pre-1848 period wherein class antagonisms were rampant but the working-class was unorganized.
Daniel Tutt
All right. Welcome, friends and comrades to the Emancipations podcast. I'm extremely honored to welcome Jacques Rancière, the great French philosopher, to our program. Good afternoon. How are you?
Jacques Rancière
I'm fine.
Daniel Tutt
Thank you. Good afternoon. Well, if you are not aware of the work of Jacques Rancière, I just want to say a few things about his books, about his research. Well, we have this thing in the United States known as French Theory and May 68 Thought.
Jacques Rancière is uniquely situated in this milieu and has a very fascinating biography. He was a former student of Louis Althusser, the great French Marxist thinker, and he contributed to Althusser’s Reading Capital, and he has written an incredible book called Althusser's Lesson, which I benefited from immensely. Rancière has also produced a series of historical studies about proletarian worker intellectuals of the 19th century, and in many ways has pivoted away from Althusserian Marxism, seeing some of its shortcomings, which will be something that I want to discuss with you in our conversation.
I want to begin with the following question, which is of a historical nature. A lot of Marxist historians often draw historical analogies to develop a sense of our time, i.e., how do we comprehend our time in relationship to prior periods of capitalism?
Does the fragmentation of the workers movement in today’s time reflect the pre-1848 situation wherein there's no international, there's no centralized working-class organizations, and yet we have class antagonisms, we have all kinds of instability, precarity amongst the working class and crisis after crisis. I wanted to ask you if you agree that we could conceive of our situation in such a way as a pre-1848? Is that a relevant analogy in your view?
Jacques Rancière
Yes, it's a relevant analogy, of course, we experience the same kind of fragmentation that I studied in my work on French workers in the 1830s and 1840s. But the first point for me is that this very similitude forces us to question the Marxist tradition about class formation itself, because in that tradition, class consistency and class consciousness are the effects of the development of capitalism. The logic of capitalism tends to concentrate the work in chaos and to strengthen it and make it more conscious of its common interests and common strengths. Well, the point is that today capitalism is doing the contrary. I mean that today's capitalistic progress means, in fact, a tendency to disperse and to dismantle the collective power of the working class; to weaken its collective capacity.
And so, well, the analogy at the same time is not exactly an analogy, because with 19th century fragmentations, the status and the condition of the workers in the 1830s, 1840s in France, well, it would nest a kind of early stage of capitalism, of capitalistic power. I think this means that it was a moment when the workers could think that by their association they could offer a kind of alternative to the development of capitalistic power itself. It was like a kind of moment of transition where perhaps it seemed impossible, but it was only for the workers, a matter of associating, of being together. And that's the idea of a kind of collective organization of production that could be substituted for capitalistic organization. Well, I think now it's quite different because this fragmentation doesn't mean it can generate the same collectivization. On the contrary, I think today's fragmentation means the extension of capitalistic power, and it means a defeat of the working class, and notably a defeat of working-class organization.
Well, this is the first point for me: even though we have the same fragmentation, it means that the collective power of workers can no longer be deduced from economic growth and I think it is something that was, of course, in the core of my studies. It had been seen before in the core of E.P. Thompson's new history of what he called the “making of the working class.” Speaking of the making of the working class precisely means that you cannot deduce the collective force of the working class just from the development of capitalism, that you have to take into account other factors, and for instance, it's very clear in Thompson's history that you have to take into account matters of religious dissent, but also the effect of the French Revolution as a kind of global upsetting of the whole world, of all of orders of places of capacity, who was allowed to do this or that, etc.
I think it is the same thing in my study of intellectual workers in the 1830s, there was at that time the development of capitalistic relationships. There had been the revolution in July 1830 and there's evidence of the collective power of workers. And the question then was what can be done out of this collective power that has been demonstrated. And this is why all the discussions at that time were between utopists and workers between different categories, different ideologies of the working class at that moment. So, if I go back to the question what I think about the possible analogy from then to now, it shows that you cannot define the subject of collective emancipation only out of the development of the economy of capitalism. The subject of emancipation never was the working class as a specific socioeconomic group and probably can less than ever be so today, when this socioeconomic group has lost much of its power in society. And so, well, I think the question that is raised by fragmentation today is, well, can we still think of this, can we still identify the subject of emancipation with a definite, with a definite class defined in socioeconomic terms? And I think it appears impossible now. And I don't think that the proletarian subject can be just substituted by a kind of alliance of different groups, identity groups, and so on.
And this is what I try to say when I claim that politics is not simply a conflict of force, but it is a conflict of words. And what this means is that perhaps the possible way to the future is this, that we can we think of a new form of subjectivity, of the multiple contemporary struggles against the multiple aspects of domination, of class domination, and state domination, and domination of the bourgeoisie in general.
Daniel Tutt
I've always considered your work on proletarian intellectuals, Louis-Gabriel Gauny etc. to be what you might consider a humbling lesson for Marxists because you offer a corrective, I think, to understanding the internal dynamics within the workers' movement, within the socialist movement, whether that be utopian socialists, or whether that be communists, etc. because you show the unique hierarchies of education and knowledge, and its transmission did not go according to the intent of the elected or master intellectuals.
Jean-Philippe Deranty once said about your work on 19th century worker intellectuals: “romantic descriptions of emotional torment and unhappy passions, when read from the perspective of one's dominated position in the productive order, harbored more subversive power than scientific critiques of the political economy.”2 And I wanted to ask if you could say something about education for socialists in today's time, based on that fundamental insight that you discover, which is ultimately an insight regarding emancipation and aesthetics.
We recently had one of your students on my program, Stuart Blaney who just finished his dissertation on your work. And he said that you helped him see how emancipation always entails a certain form of self-knowledge, which was not immediately the kind of knowledge that the master socialist or Marxist intellectual could give. It was generated elsewhere. Perhaps you might say something about your discoveries in this regard. And specifically, have you thought about the application of these wider insights to socialist education and pedagogy? Could you speak to that more broadly?
Jacques Rancière
Well, I would say that since I stopped being Althusserian what I gave up is the pretension to create some kind of pedagogy for political organization. Well, I just tried to write for readers, which means anybody at all. What I tried to say in my writings, I would say that I said it first for myself and for those who like me had had to cope with the gap between Marxist theory of class education and class consciousness and the reality of forms of perception, consciousness, and the consciousness and action of workers.
This doesn't mean that I wanted to oppose the reality of what workers felt directly, immediately and their emotional response to knowledge. Precisely what I want to do is to question the very opposition between logos and passion; between those who are supposed to live in a certain world, where they suffer and try to react, and on the other side people who are able to embrace the whole system, the whole dynamic of history which produces a fact that those workers are at this or that place and endure this situation.
So, I don't want to overturn your position between knowledge and knowledge and passion. I rather want to question the opposition itself and all the presuppositions behind the opposition. For instance, the presupposition that there is a kind of economic infrastructure that is the cause of what happens and the ideological level at which people become aware of that situation and become aware of it in the in a wrong way. So the first point for me is that what was true in my study of workers education in the 19th century is this simple notion: everybody thinks. And so you do not have two categories of individuals: individuals really entrapped in the universe of pain, suffering, and emotion, and individuals situated on the side of knowledge.
And what I tried to show, for instance in my study of Louis-Gabriel Gauny’s reconstruction of the working day, out of his own experience is that it was not the expression of a pain and suffering. It is already a kind of intellectual construction, a way of understanding what happens, what happens in the working day, what it consists of, etc. and it's always a form of knowledge of a system of domination. I would say that Gauny’s intellectual reconstruction of the working day is a form of knowledge, while Marx's analysis of the working day as a kind of matrix of capitalism, capitalistic dynamics, is another form of knowledge.
We do not have not knowledge on this side and ignorance on the other side. We have two forms of knowledge about education and domination, and two forms of knowledge about how a system of domination takes its grip on time. For me, this is the first point. The second point also is that you do not have knowledge on this side and feeling on the other side, that in fact, every form of knowledge is also tainted by a certain regime of effect. When I was young, when I was reading Marx’s Capital, I was not only acquiring the knowledge of the capitalist system I was at the same time enjoying the satisfaction of understanding and of being on the side of those who were not ignorant, were not stupid, etc. On the other side of that affect, for instance was the expression of the pain of the worker that was always at the same time a certain form of knowledge of what domination means. What domination means not only at the global dynamic but what it means as a form of domination over the time of individual, as a form of domination over their bodies.
Well, I don't know if it is exactly the answer you were awaiting, but it's important for me to say that knowledge is always associated with a form of affect and affect with a form of knowledge, which means that you do not have to know how the economic infrastructure plays the role of the cause and the ideological superstructure plays the role of the effect; because domination is a global phenomenon and emancipation is a global response. It is this global response that determines the capacity of action, and it is comprehension of that global response that allows us to understand the history of working class action. At least that is how it worked for me.
Daniel Tutt
Thank you very much. That is extremely useful, and I think the Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation is another text which really points to what many of your readers have suggested, which is that you do not really have a programmatic pedagogy. And I think this is a strength, even though some of us may may read you, and we may desire for a program. I want to now ask you about your personal experience with what we might call the disillusion of organized Marxism. The status of Stalinism in France during your youth was, I would say a tragic situation. And in your book, Althusser's Lesson, one of the points that you make is that within Marxism class theory became incoherent. For example, what does it mean to accuse or even to develop a theory of ideology as petty bourgeois? Ultimately, the way that the Marxists used this category was depoliticizing, it didn't have the proper effect.
So, as you reflect for today, and you think about the wider repertoire of Marxist theories, especially about class, but maybe other categories, what do you still find useful in Marxism?
Jacques Rancière
Well, what I still find important in Marxism is the fact of analysis in terms of division, class war, and what is usually now taken as the logic of consensus, consensus meaning, etc. While there is thought to be no such thing as social division, that there are only objective problems of development and redistribution, etc. for me what remains important is the idea of division and the idea of class war. This is the main point. Now there is something more puzzling that goes with this general agreement, which is that there has always been an ambiguity in Marxist definitions of class because for Marxism class has always been defined in two ways that don't overlap.
First, class is a social group, a part of the global society thought of as a project of a certain history, as a project of economic development, etc. And second, on the other end, class is thought of as a force that must intervene and intervenes itself in historical development. So it is not a power of history making, it is a force that, well, that pushes history forward, or holds it back. And so for me so you have two definitions of class, shortly speaking, I would say. You have a materialistic definition as a social group you have a dialectical definition as a force of negation and destruction.
For me, the point that there were two definitions of class never really coincided. And well, if you think about the theory of class in Marx’s text about the philosophy of history of Hegel, well, from the very beginning Marx says that the proletariat is not a class, it's no class, it's a dissolution of all classes which means at the same time that the proletariat must not be defined in terms of positive group, it has to be defined as the decompositions of all classes of society.
So, always at the same time there is a kind of negative vocation of class and a positive definition. And you have the same thing, of course when it comes to the bourgeoisie, if you think of the Communist Manifesto, and of the 18th of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte texts; at the beginning the bourgeoisie appears and both are the kind of positive creators and productive developers of the productive forces, but at the same time, the bourgeoisie is the class that has destroyed all ancient social forms, theology, the ideals of romanticism, etc., etc. Well, so bourgeoisie is mostly a kind of force that unleashes the forces of the future and it has a destructive character. When Marx writes about the role of the bourgeoisie in 1848 he perceives that bourgeoisie did not play that role of a kind of self-destructing force. It remained a positive social group looking for its own interest.
And so, in Marx’s thought the fact is that class analysis never really works. This is why Marx often invents categories, and I would say he invented fantastic classes such as the lumpenproletariat. You have this kind of phantasm that emerges to fill the gap between theory and what happened on the battlefield of class struggle. And I think the analysis of the role of the proletariat has always oscillated itself between a positive definition and the negative vocation where we—if we think of 68—it is very clear that the French Communist Party pitted the interest of the proletariat (of the working class) as a kind of positive class against the idealistic claims of the student’s movement for revolutionary action. But this was anathema to the notion of the working class as a force of destruction. The point is that today, both this positivity and this negativity have more or less disappeared, they are no more in the landscape.
And so I would say the paradox of the concept of class is that the concept of class war is still valid. The point is that the bourgeoisie itself, today says “yes, there is class war, and we are winning.” I think this was a statement by Jeff Bezos. Yes, and it is a problem because the only class that still exists in its Marxist definition is the bourgeoisie. They are there, they have their economic agenda, their political agenda, their ideological agenda. But at the same time class is a negative power. It is the power that is capable of dismantling the forces that oppose it. So, class wars still exist. But the war that is waged is waged by one class and it aims to prevent anything such as a class to exist as a force of resistance.
Daniel Tutt
It reminds me in your book, The Philosopher and His Poor, when you look at the theory of Bonapartism and the curious function of the lumpenproletariat. You do an interesting thing where you show that the lumpenproletariat becomes a verb, an active agent of the decomposition of all class coherence; the lumpenproletariat destroys the class coherence of both bourgeoisie and proletariat. So the binary two-class theory of Marx fragments and there's no longer this two-class theory. And then of course, at the end of Marx's Capital, Volume III there is a chapter on classes that is cut off and therefore the theory of classes is unfinished in Marx.
I want to shift now to our contemporary moment. Many commentators on the left have pointed out that today we experience something similar maybe to what happened in the wake of 68, which is the politicization of everyday experience, from the workplace, the family, popular entertainment, to sports all seem to have some kind of “hyper politics.” This notion of “hyper politics” is a phrase that's used. Now you have invented or elaborated a conception of politics of dissent, what you call “dissensual politics.”
And I want to invite you to say something about how you read the contemporary politicization of everyday fields of social life. How might you distinguish or qualify politics, and I know that your concept of “metapolitics” may be even valid or useful in this regard as well, but what is your sort of reading of the hyper politicization of things today?
Jacques Rancière
Well, my idea has never been that everything is political as it was said, as you remember, in the 1970s. My own statement is quite different, it is that politics has no specific object, which means that politics may happen everywhere at any time, but it may not happen as well. So I don't think at all that everything is political, and I will have always distanced myself from the idea that any part of society, any part of our life, is subject to conflicts or that there is politics everywhere.
But at the same time, I would not agree with the idea that we are today facing the politicization of everything, or perhaps only as a kind of a form of reaction. Because now we are living, in fact, under the domination of the consensual logic. And the logic of consensus is precisely a logic of depoliticization. It is a logic of transformation of all conflictual issues into objective problems, into objective problems that must be solved by consultation, expertise, and discussion between experts, and so on.
So for me, the starting point is the increasing power of the logic of consensus transforming any conflictual issue into an objective problem that depends on science, expertise, et cetera. And my idea is that, well, politics always consists in breaking the logic of consensus, meaning transforming an issue that may seem quite specific, local, casual, into a conflict between two words. It's not a matter of finding everywhere small conflicts with small subjects and small identity subjects. No, that is not at all my position. My point is that what we have experienced since 60s, since 68, and mostly since the 90s and the beginning of our century, that politics happens when a problem which seems to only concern a specific part of the population becomes, in fact, an opposition between two worlds. This has started, of course, many times from an economic problem, as it happened in France several times, conflicts about systems of pensions and so on and the state wants of course to reform the systems of pension. But it may be, for instance, for the Yellow Vests the price of gas, it could be also the price of public transportation, in Brazil or in Chile. And so what's interesting, if I come back to those conflicts about pensions, is that, well, the problem was transformed by political action into a global conflict, to the arena of a global opposition between two ways of considering our time, work, and life, because the reform of the system of pensions is about time, work, and life.
The point is that politics for me always consists in undoing the line of separation that is supposed to separate what is political from what is not, from what is not political. This is why I take it that politics is a kind of continuous recreation of its own space and time. It can start from almost nothing, and of course, this is what we experience with the Occupy movement in Turkey in 2013. Well, it was almost nothing the planned suppression of a small public garden, but politicization then consisted in opposing two uses of the same space, because two uses of the same space is also the opposition between two commons, between two ideas of what a common space is, and ultimately, two views of what a common word consists of.
It is important for me to distinguish this possibility that politics happens everywhere at any time from the idea of identity politics or from the polymerization of the political subject in a multitude of little subjects of an identity group. I think the evidence of the difference between the two conceptions was given during the Occupy movement where there were a multitude of activist groups representing various forms of militancy, economic, sexual, ecological, cultural, etc. But at the same time, the movement was not at all a gathering of identity groups. It defined itself for its objectives at that time.
Daniel Tutt
So, one of the question that I always think about in the history of capitalism really since the Second World War to now is to what extent there is dialectic between the forces of emancipation, the forces of the radical left, socialism, anarchism, movements for equality, for egalitarian expression, etc., and how these movements are absorbed and abused or made reactionary by the predominant system? One of the theories regarding the events which shaped your experience very much, May 1968—that I know you are critical of—is the idea that capitalism commodified 1968; it took the demands of the protesters and sort of integrated them into business and self-help literature, for example. This is the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello in their book, The New Spirit of Capitalism. How do you assess this general argument? Do you believe this or is this not how you see the logic of history?
Jacques Rancière
Well, I think that Boltanski and Chiapello really forgot what 68 meant because they assume that 68 created the culture which was later absorbed by capitalism. They assume that May 68 helped the modernization and rejuvenation of capitalism. But I think we must remember that in its very principle 68 was already a movement of reaction against the modernization of capitalism, because in France, in the years before 68, it was a great reformist moment and the idea of a new capitalism was already in the air, it was called “neo-capitalism” at that moment. It was the idea that the old class divisions would disappear and there was this kind of confidence in social science to form new generations of people integrated in modernist culture, which meant of course a new “modernist capitalism.”
Well, it's important to remember that the French 68 movement did not start in the old Sorbonne against the old bourgeoisie. It started in the new faculty of Nanterre, a faculty devoted to social science and devoted precisely to this kind of planned harmony between science and economic dynamism and new ways of thinking of individuals. The movement started as a students’ refusal to study to become the managers of this new modernized capitalism, it developed as a huge anti-hierarchical movement, shattering down all forms of social hierarchy and authority.
I think this is, for me, something that has really been forgotten by all those analyses. The point is that May 1968 was an anti-capitalist movement. And of course, you can see why “anti-capitalism” is a kind of a wide and vague word. But what I think was interesting in 1968 is this kind of widening of the very conception of class war, of anti-capitalist struggle. Because normally a student's movement is a movement kind of, well, subordinate movement because it is typically only about their conditions of work and life, etc., against the authority. Okay, but of course it is subordinate to the kind of hierarchy, of struggles and at the head of the hierarchy there is a struggle of the working class, which is at the core of capitalist exploitation.
Well, what is interesting about the students' movement is that they decided that the question of examination was not a local question, concerning only students but that their struggle contained the whole of the relationship between the university and the social system. In a way, this relationship condensed the whole of the social organization of domination. And I think this was very important in 1968, this idea of a widening, in fact, of the field of anti-capitalist struggle.
The idea that anti-capitalist struggle is not only in the factories, but it is everywhere, everywhere in all forms of social hierarchy and authority. And so, of course, any specific place in society where they could condense capitalist domination means that we come back to your prescient question because this means that at any place it was possible to target the whole capitalist system precisely because capital was not only the economic power organizing exploitation in the factories, but the global power organizing social hierarchy in general. So capitalism and anti-capitalistic struggle were not confined in the factories, they were everywhere which means also in all forms of social life, institutions, education, etc.
From the point of view of the students, anti-capitalism became a kind of global democratic struggle, much wider than the working-class movement organized by the trade unions and parties. And of course, at that moment this kind of overcoming of the traditional class struggle was deemed unrealistic and opposed to the realistic wisdom of the working-class organization because those organizations did not allow their class identity to get diluted in that global anti-capitalistic movement. But the point is that, as we know, this working-class identity was in a way more radically diluted with the so-called neoliberal offensive, which destroyed the factory and dispersed the working-class community of life and struggle.
So I would say that in retrospect, it may appear that it's kind of just a hypothesis. It may appear that the students' proposal in a way was idealistic. But in a way it was more realistic than the identity against the retreat of the working-class organization. What we have experienced since 1968 is the future of the anti-capitalistic movement and the widening of the anti-capitalistic movement, which means also an extension of the very idea and practice of democracy. And this is what we saw in the mass protests in France or in the Occupy movements everywhere in the world, in a way, those movements owe their strength to the fact that they were much more than a trade union thing; they became a kind of condensation of all class conflicts between two worlds.
Daniel Tutt
Thank you very much. The thinkers from France after the war, we call them different names from “French theory” to the “68 thinkers” such as Deleuze, Lacan, your work, Jacques Derrida, Foucault etc. These names had a certain power, a certain currency in the academy. And my interpretation is that in recent years, maybe we could periodize it—I don't know exactly when—but let's just say in the last 10 or so years, we've seen a slight decline in what we call the “master philosopher.” And I want to ask you what your opinion is about this fact and whether you see the same phenomenon? Given that you have written so much regarding the dangers of philosophical hierarchy, how do you assess this situation?
Jacques Rancière
Well, I think that it is in fact an intricate issue because first of all what do we understand with the name of the master? Well, let us say that the master in general is somebody who has the capacity of producing a specific effect, the effect of a change of direction in the intellectual life and practice of those who follow the teaching or follow the example of the master. And of course, the question is, how do we appreciate, how do we do this, how do we estimate, this role of the master? Of course, the master can become just somebody who is worshiped and people mimic them, et cetera, et cetera, people obey the master. This is, of course, one form of mastery.
But there is also another possibility in the role of the master, for instance, in the role of some master such as Foucault for me. This figure of the master means that, well... the effect of the intervention of the master is to create a kind of distance with several forms of hierarchy. I would say that the role of some masters, let us say for instance Foucault and Deleuze, was not simply to create obedience and worship, no, it was also an effect of distance in relation to two forms of hierarchy.
The first distance is to academic hierarchy, because it was a moment in the French university, a short moment when it was possible to go anywhere and to do anything, so it was a moment of distance with academic hierarchy for my generation. It was this moment of freedom in the 60s and 70s. But at the beginning of the 1980s we started to realize that now it was all academic authority again and that we had to confront it. So I would say that the master can create an effect of distance in relation to academic authority and a distance in relation to political authority. In this regard it was important and of course there were contradictory effects, but Foucault confronted forms of authority that had been dominant in leftist and Marxist groups in France during 68 and the following years.
The second point I’d make is that the master enacts a distance in the position of the intellectual. The position of the intellectual is a kind of social role and social group of people who oversee explaining what happens. Intellectuals are in charge of explaining what happens in history, what happens in society, etc. What is interesting is that there was a kind of oscillation in the 70s, for instance, at a certain moment it could be said that somebody like Foucault played the role of the intellectual but at other moments he created a distance with the role of the intellectual. I would say that it's not so easy to say there was a moment when the hierarchy of the master philosopher was present and now there is a kind of emancipation from that.
To me when the people really protested the war and rose up in 68, there were people from the right and the far right who also rose up in reaction against the master thinkers. The reaction against 68 was the beginning of the counter-revolution in our country. And now we have a kind of ambiguous situation I would say. It is true that the masters like Foucault and Deleuze, for instance, put people out of their normal way as it was the case with me. But at the same time, now we have a lot of dissertations about Foucault and Deleuze, etc., and they have been reintegrated into the academic system. So it's a complicated issue I would say.
Daniel Tutt
Thank you very much. I want to return to what I started with on the status of the fragmented working class. We see profound levels of discontent and social agitation combined with the absence of institutional bodies that might express this discontent such as the Communist International. We do not have large-scale organizations that represent working-class interest. And yet we have things like the Yellow Vest movement in France, which has the appearance, in some cases, of a kind of reactionary, maybe even in some expressions, a racist thrust. What do you see as the task of the radical left in this time? How do we deal with this fragmentation? What are your general observations as we face this sort of impasse, this challenge?
Jacques Rancière
I would say today we have a defeat of the class war. We cannot exactly draw lessons from what happened in the 19th century and apply it to the current situation. We are facing a situation where specific forms of rebellion start from a very tiny point, a very tiny issue. With the Yellow Vests at the beginning, it was the price of gas. Today there is nothing that can be the starting point from which people, one step after the other, would come to really confront the whole systems of inequality and injustice. And this was very present in the movements of the Yellow Vests. Despite the decline in working-class organizations we must not forget that in the movement of the Yellow Vests there were also many people coming from the trade union tradition that were involved. So, we cannot say that it is all just spontaneity, spontaneity, and turbulence in the face of an absence of working-class organizations.
There are two problems. First is the idea of organization. With the Yellow Vest movement they are not like the yoga movements or a consumer-based movement because they are not disorganized. There was a real organization of the struggle and of the collectivity. When we say there is a lack of organization we mean there is a lack of integration of this or that specific form of struggle in a wider anti-capitalistic movement and organization. Okay, now the question is what can we call today radical left as a force able to take over control of such movements and to coordinate them with other movements?
Honestly, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any such force existing in my country and I doubt that it exists elsewhere. What I think the problem is that in the current reality of anti-capitalistic struggle today is that those movements that appear I would say that right and left cannot be defined clearly. I think there was the time where there was the idea of a clear right and left, that there was a force somewhere, known as “the radical left” that marches in the streets, the avant-garde, a force that knows how to organize a conflict. I think this is an idea of the past. We may regret its loss, but I think it is something of the past.
And I think for me it's very hard to think the radical left as a political force that could integrate all those movements in the long-term strategy. Because in the long run, strategy means a view of history that goes in a definite direction and leads to a definite point. It supports a view of the future. I don't see anywhere today a view of the future that is able to help construct a new big movement. Whether we like it or not, I think we are today condemned to movements that are driven by emancipated collectivities created only for a moment. This is not exactly a new situation. Perhaps the idea of history leading to a definite point, leading to revolution, led by a party which has intelligence of historical movements has always been hidden.
In fact, there is an ambiguity of movements of emancipation themselves because what is an emancipation movement? An emancipation movement precisely is not simply the organization of a struggle for future emancipation. I would say since the very beginning, this is what I studied in my study of workers' emancipation in the 19th century. Emancipation is not just preparation for and a plan over liberating the future. It is a way of changing life here and now. It is an anticipation which means also a way of living, of living as free individuals connected in a world which is in fact a world of domination.
Daniel Tutt
I wonder if you could reflect on your book Hatred of Democracy. I always found this book interesting because at the time many Marxist writers from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri were optimistic regarding democracy. And since that time, we have had many setbacks in the effort of the radical left to win power. I'm thinking in Greece with Syriza, the electoral collapse of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders and the struggles with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Have you changed your thinking since you published this work on democracy? Can you reflect on the setbacks that the radical left has faced, specifically within the parliamentary and democratic sphere in recent years?
Jacques Rancière
I don't think I have changed my views so much since I wrote Hatred of Democracy, meaning that, as I said earlier, I do not have a very optimistic view. I don't think that we can wait for some new kind of new anti-capitalistic subjectivity coming from elsewhere than the real movements that we have experienced during the last 20 years. Well, of course you could say that in Negri and Hart and in Laclau and Mouffe they attempt to overcome this gap. And, of course, what Negri and Hardt tried to do is to reassess the old Marxist view that the development of capitalism would create a new form of anti-capitalistic subject.
So they reassessed, in their own way, what the idea of the role of material production is in the development of capitalism and whether capitalism creates the subject of a future communism. Sometimes, in Negri's provocative statements we get the idea that communism was already present but in a way as a world-cognitarian multitude of workers behind, behind their computer. In Negri we are already creating communism. And of course, in my view this conception entirely failed, and it was the last attempt to reassess the Marxist idea that capitalism creates its own grave diggers. And unfortunately, it increasingly appears that capitalism was not at all creating its own grave diggers, at least not at this moment. On the other hand, there was the attempt made by Laclau and Mouffe which was kind of mixed. When capitalism is not creating itself, it was the subject of communism, the subject of revolution.
We have to raise the issue of the subject of revolution based on what they call the “chain of equivalences,” which for me, in the last instance, means agreeing with the idea of the replacement of the big subject by the multitude of little subjects, which means in the last instance there is an implicit agreement with identity politics, with the idea of a kind of gathering of little identity groups. They had the idea that vital forms of militancy can create a political subject as a kind of unifying force to gather the political subject. This idea of left-wing populism means a new kind of agreement with the parliamentary logic, because in a way it is only inside the parliamentary logic that you can have this claim to the individual, to the leader, who is able to give a unified voice to the fragmentation of the wider working-class.
There was a moment in which this theory was promising, most notably of course in Greece. But the hyper-power of the economy and this idea of left populism showed that there was an incapacity to resist the capitalist international power. And we experience, virtually every day in France, the shortcomings of this idea of the unification of the whole of the left. The left-wing populist party must take on the same kind of arguments and the same kind of stimuli as the right-wing populist parties. But at least lately, Mouffe said that the French people are too rational, too Cartesian, they don't consider emotional affect and, of course, this emotional aspect is left to the right-wing and we must reassess it, to take it up. Unfortunately, I don't think that this is the way of the left. And what we experience is the way in which, after the occupied movements or the Yellow Vest and the Nuit debout movements in France, the potential that had been liberated and that the movements were more or less confiscated by a left-wing parliamentary movement. So the point is that, unfortunately, I cannot really move much forward from the point where I was at the end of the hatred of democracy.
Daniel Tutt
I want to thank you for your time and for your insights. This has been extremely beneficial for us to hear your thoughts and your assessment of both your work, interpretations of your work and the contemporary political conjuncture.
Jacques Rancière
Well, I recently published two books, but they don’t exactly touch on emancipation or politics because one of the books, published in France last year that was called the Voyage de l'Art, the Travels of Art, so it was an acknowledgement of my work on art and the movements of art to get out of itself, to become life, which of course was also something quite important in the relationship between aesthetics and politics. It's in the 20th century at least that I also published a book which apparently is a bit far from politics, a book about short stories called Au loin la liberté: essai sur Tchekhov it will come out in English I think next year. It is not political but deals with issues of freedom and servitude and our situation today. We are in a situation where we don't see any big perspective of liberation and we are at the same time in a situation where we live in a certain kind of servitude. And of course, we are not happy with it and we are a bit ashamed about it. But what I discovered in Chekhov's short stories is that there's a question of what freedom means, that we come into a world where we don't know exactly how to act, we don't know exactly what to do and in a way it's a bit of an analogy with our current situation meaning that we feel this same kind of servitude. You see this servitude in relation to the domination of capitalism, the domination of consensus, the domination of the right everywhere in the world. And at the same time, it's difficult for us to think of another world, to think of what we should have to do to create this new world.
Daniel Tutt
Thank you very much.
A good introduction to Jacques Rancière’s work can be found in the work of Stuart Blaney, who recently finished a dissertation on Rancière and Michel Foucault. I interviewed Blaney on Rancière’s theory of emancipation.
Deranty, Jean-Phillipe “Work in the writings of Jacques Rancière”
Fascinating