Jaques Ranciere On Europe
A new interview by Jaques Ranciere: here. Thanks to Peter Gratton at Philosophy in a Time of Error for pointing this out!
He sees something monstrous happening to the people of Europe, they are being divested of there soverign rights and decision making apparatuses. He tells us that what is happening in europe today is nothing less than the "systematic destruction of public services and all forms of solidarity and social protection that guaranteed a minimum of equality in the social fabric." He affirms that the conditions are ripe for demonstrations against the "apparatuses of domination", yet he is hesitant to see in this as a positive. In fact, he tells us that it is not "not enough for the circumstances to be there: it is also necessary that these be recognised by forces likely to turn this into a demonstration, once intellectual and material, and to turn this demonstration into a lever that is capable of modifying the balance of forces by modifying the very landscape of what is perceivable and what is thinkable."
For a rebirth of politics that is not distorted by the logics malformed spaces as respresented by both the Left and Right Parties within the EU he tells us that we need to create autonomous entities that open up "spaces of discussion and ways of circulating information, motives and ways of action directed, first of all, towards the development of an autonomous power to think and act." Yet, he seems to fall into mystification when he elaborates a position which removes philosophical speculation and philosophers themselves from the arena of politics, and instead offers the 'collective intelligence' of the multitudes:
"When a collective intelligence affirms itself in the movement it is the moment of doing away with philosophical providers of explanations or slogans. It is not, in fact a matter of presences or absences of philosophers. It is a question of the existence or the inexistence of a vision of the world that naturally structures collective action."
I question this concept of a 'collective intelligence', this idealist conception, that reverts to the Big Other that affirms itself immenently within the multitude. He tells us that demonstrators "today no longer have a floor nor a horizon that gives historical validity to their battle. They are, firstly, outraged, people who reject the existing order without being able to consider themselves agents in a historical process. And this is what certain people take advantage of in order to denounce, in a self-serving way, their idealism or their moralism." But if they no longer have a horizon, does he think without philosophical speculation or the influence of philosophers that these demonstrators will magically attain this horizon through some collective intelligence? As for a 'horizon' that gives validity to historical appraisals, isn't this back door invasion of the absolute alterity that can never give us validity because of the finitude of all such judgements. Gadamer once used the concept of horizon to speak of how comprehension takes place. The horizon is defined as, “…the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point... as something into which we move and moves with us”. In this sense I assume that Ranciere is telling us that we have lost step with history, that we no longer have a vantage point from which we can normatively assert valued judgement, that instead we are each alone in our semblance of outrage which is nothing more than our helplessness at confronting the powers that be.
I contend that we need a return to philosophical horizons, to comprehend through open dialogue rather than helpless outrage the difficulties that we face in this contingent moment that is both familiar and strange. Comprehension, therefore, is not awakened whilst the individual is surrounded only by the known and familiar. In order for there to be comprehension, it is necessary that there be an encounter with that which is strange. We need to differentiate between the familiar and strange, how we situate ourselves in relation to the events that occur. The familiar is defined existentially as that which brings us feelings of comfort and security. The strange, on the other hand, is that which brings us feelings of loss and disorientation. Through disillusionment, loss, and disorientation we enter the realm of absolute contingency. We learn to confront ourselves and each other as strange strangers (Timothy Morton) whose outrage awakens us to the capacities and powers of our autonomous individuality. It is only out of this contingent condition that thought itself begins to touch the real, translating it into the conversations of individuals as they move toward the real of democracy.
Ranciere speaks of the recovery of democarcy as possible, yet not inevitable; in fact, he tells us first we need a clear definition of the kind of democracy we want to attain, and that we must differentiate it from the illusion of democracy within the so to speak free market systems of modern European states. He explains it this way:
"Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power. .... To recover the values of democracy is, in first place, to reaffirm the existence of a capacity to judge and decide, which is that of everyone, against this monopolisation. It is also to reaffirm the necessity that this capacity be exercised through its own institutions, different from those of the State. The first democratic virtue is the virtue of confidence in the capacity of anyone."
Against victimization and the powerlessness of the individual citizen to combat the present state of affairs he tells us that we must not allow ourselves to be dispossessed of our soverign rights and powers as citizens, and that we must begin to act as autonomous forces against the monopolization of power that would defeat us and make us subserviant to its will. The present modality of media and discourses victimize us as individuals, and indeed it is these very discourses that blame us as individuals for the present 'crisis' by moralising our bad behaviour and lack of good citizenship. These discourses he tells us try "to blame the citizens in order to capture them more easily within the institutional game that only consists of selecting, between members of the ruling class, those they would prefer to allow room to dispossess them of their power to act."
At present there is no global culture, no platform of political or social investment to alleviate such malaise, that indeed the oligarchies of the present world free market system through crisis management have imposed a set of both economic and legal measures to restrict the multitude to the laws of late capitalism: "capitalist power is exercised firstly from the top down, through statal policies which, with the pretext of fighting against the selfishness of privileged workers and individualist democrats, imposes, in the name of the crisis, a programme of subordination of all aspects of life in common to the laws of the market."
He offers us no solutions and little or no summation other than that what dominates us today in the world are "official cultural celebrations, and intellectual discourses which are supposedly critical but are really subordinated to official logic." His logic is very Foucauldian in that we are all caught in the web of power relations, shaped by discourses out of our control, and policed by a beaurocratic elite empowered by the Oligarchs they serve to shape our vision of democracy and create value systems that distort the horizons we need to free us from their imprisoning light. Their light is our darkenss. May our outrage, our darkness, turn toward the light of new speculative horizons and free us from such a dark inheritance.
He sees something monstrous happening to the people of Europe, they are being divested of there soverign rights and decision making apparatuses. He tells us that what is happening in europe today is nothing less than the "systematic destruction of public services and all forms of solidarity and social protection that guaranteed a minimum of equality in the social fabric." He affirms that the conditions are ripe for demonstrations against the "apparatuses of domination", yet he is hesitant to see in this as a positive. In fact, he tells us that it is not "not enough for the circumstances to be there: it is also necessary that these be recognised by forces likely to turn this into a demonstration, once intellectual and material, and to turn this demonstration into a lever that is capable of modifying the balance of forces by modifying the very landscape of what is perceivable and what is thinkable."
For a rebirth of politics that is not distorted by the logics malformed spaces as respresented by both the Left and Right Parties within the EU he tells us that we need to create autonomous entities that open up "spaces of discussion and ways of circulating information, motives and ways of action directed, first of all, towards the development of an autonomous power to think and act." Yet, he seems to fall into mystification when he elaborates a position which removes philosophical speculation and philosophers themselves from the arena of politics, and instead offers the 'collective intelligence' of the multitudes:
"When a collective intelligence affirms itself in the movement it is the moment of doing away with philosophical providers of explanations or slogans. It is not, in fact a matter of presences or absences of philosophers. It is a question of the existence or the inexistence of a vision of the world that naturally structures collective action."
I question this concept of a 'collective intelligence', this idealist conception, that reverts to the Big Other that affirms itself immenently within the multitude. He tells us that demonstrators "today no longer have a floor nor a horizon that gives historical validity to their battle. They are, firstly, outraged, people who reject the existing order without being able to consider themselves agents in a historical process. And this is what certain people take advantage of in order to denounce, in a self-serving way, their idealism or their moralism." But if they no longer have a horizon, does he think without philosophical speculation or the influence of philosophers that these demonstrators will magically attain this horizon through some collective intelligence? As for a 'horizon' that gives validity to historical appraisals, isn't this back door invasion of the absolute alterity that can never give us validity because of the finitude of all such judgements. Gadamer once used the concept of horizon to speak of how comprehension takes place. The horizon is defined as, “…the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point... as something into which we move and moves with us”. In this sense I assume that Ranciere is telling us that we have lost step with history, that we no longer have a vantage point from which we can normatively assert valued judgement, that instead we are each alone in our semblance of outrage which is nothing more than our helplessness at confronting the powers that be.
I contend that we need a return to philosophical horizons, to comprehend through open dialogue rather than helpless outrage the difficulties that we face in this contingent moment that is both familiar and strange. Comprehension, therefore, is not awakened whilst the individual is surrounded only by the known and familiar. In order for there to be comprehension, it is necessary that there be an encounter with that which is strange. We need to differentiate between the familiar and strange, how we situate ourselves in relation to the events that occur. The familiar is defined existentially as that which brings us feelings of comfort and security. The strange, on the other hand, is that which brings us feelings of loss and disorientation. Through disillusionment, loss, and disorientation we enter the realm of absolute contingency. We learn to confront ourselves and each other as strange strangers (Timothy Morton) whose outrage awakens us to the capacities and powers of our autonomous individuality. It is only out of this contingent condition that thought itself begins to touch the real, translating it into the conversations of individuals as they move toward the real of democracy.
Ranciere speaks of the recovery of democarcy as possible, yet not inevitable; in fact, he tells us first we need a clear definition of the kind of democracy we want to attain, and that we must differentiate it from the illusion of democracy within the so to speak free market systems of modern European states. He explains it this way:
"Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power. .... To recover the values of democracy is, in first place, to reaffirm the existence of a capacity to judge and decide, which is that of everyone, against this monopolisation. It is also to reaffirm the necessity that this capacity be exercised through its own institutions, different from those of the State. The first democratic virtue is the virtue of confidence in the capacity of anyone."
Against victimization and the powerlessness of the individual citizen to combat the present state of affairs he tells us that we must not allow ourselves to be dispossessed of our soverign rights and powers as citizens, and that we must begin to act as autonomous forces against the monopolization of power that would defeat us and make us subserviant to its will. The present modality of media and discourses victimize us as individuals, and indeed it is these very discourses that blame us as individuals for the present 'crisis' by moralising our bad behaviour and lack of good citizenship. These discourses he tells us try "to blame the citizens in order to capture them more easily within the institutional game that only consists of selecting, between members of the ruling class, those they would prefer to allow room to dispossess them of their power to act."
At present there is no global culture, no platform of political or social investment to alleviate such malaise, that indeed the oligarchies of the present world free market system through crisis management have imposed a set of both economic and legal measures to restrict the multitude to the laws of late capitalism: "capitalist power is exercised firstly from the top down, through statal policies which, with the pretext of fighting against the selfishness of privileged workers and individualist democrats, imposes, in the name of the crisis, a programme of subordination of all aspects of life in common to the laws of the market."
He offers us no solutions and little or no summation other than that what dominates us today in the world are "official cultural celebrations, and intellectual discourses which are supposedly critical but are really subordinated to official logic." His logic is very Foucauldian in that we are all caught in the web of power relations, shaped by discourses out of our control, and policed by a beaurocratic elite empowered by the Oligarchs they serve to shape our vision of democracy and create value systems that distort the horizons we need to free us from their imprisoning light. Their light is our darkenss. May our outrage, our darkness, turn toward the light of new speculative horizons and free us from such a dark inheritance.