The real world of ideology Book

In 'The Philosopher and His Poor' the core argument revolves around the question of what assigns the philosopher and the artisan to their mutually exclusive roles in the order of power. For Rancière the 'philosopher' stands for any thinker and writer legitimated by established Society, as well as the canon forming literary elite. The artisan is a figure that stands for any working class person who relishes freedom to think and act. The Shoemaker is his archetypal worker, who has in particular been targeted for abuse in philosophy.

The book is in three sections: the neo-classical philosophy Plato; the monumental philosophy of Karl Marx and finally those that followed in his shadow - the Marxists.

Part 1. Plato's Lie

This first section refers mainly to Plato's 'The Republic' and goes on briefly to his book 'Laws'. The classification of people and the allocation of roles and occupations was central to Plato's concerns. In other words he was 'putting people in their place' with his discursive justifications. "There are greater or less noble tasks, jobs that are more or less degrading, natures appropriate for one group or another, and all these must be distinguished" p.3

Platos lie is most succinctly put in the figure of the value of metals:
'While all of you in the city are brothers, we will say in our tale, the deity who fashioned you mixed gold in the makeup of those fit for rule, for which reason they are the most precious. In that of the defenders he mixed silver, and iron and brass in the makeup of the plowman and other craftsmen"  Republic III  JR p.19
This shows the duplicitous forms of rationality and justification which are at the core of the foundational values of Humanism (not Ranciere's point but my conclusion.

Meanwhile philosophy's concern is still to safeguard its own appearance. To naturalise its claims to nobility or intellectual prowess and superiority. We can probably replace 'philosophy' with the word theory nowadays. Even with so many people invited to pass through university since the Sixties it is amazing to me how timid, grateful and well-conditioned the cohort of 'graduates' are as a whole. 

Part 2 Marx's Labour

Karl Marx sees the modern proletariat, who are defined by the rigid constraints on their time, as the hope of the future. A hope based on the injustice of the exploitation of their labour value and their potential solidarity. But Rancière argues that it is the ability to think as individuals that is as much key to a new world as is solidarity of action without an emancipation of thinking. Without it any action is left to be led by the inheritors of 'Plato's Lie'. Before getting to his critique of Marx there is a long preamble about the figure of the shoemaker that embodied the stereotypes of workers in discourse.

A singular idea 'resounds' through the 'The German Ideology' that echoes Plato's commandment of 'nothing else'. There is no choice to be had for ordinary people on developmental paths. But at the same time Marx famously says that people are the producers of their representations and ideas and so also of human consciousness p.71. But he does not see that as the way to make a decisive break with the capitalist ontologies. "In the gold of thinking there will never be anything but a certain transformation of the iron of production" p.72. The question is to what extent is the production of thoughts tied down in Marx's thought to the logic of capitalist production? p.74.

Marx is charged with projecting future outcomes that in Rancière's view need to be given over to an active process of democratic dissensus. Thinking is production but its outcomes do not obey scientific laws. What conditions allow the General Intellect to begin thinking beyond the constraints of capital? For Rancière innovative thinking does not happen on an even front that equates with a reductionist image of materialist conditions/ stages of technological development. In the reality of mixtures there are all kinds of breaks and special lacunae within which there can be breakouts of thought taking its liberty. What constrains these breakouts from linking together is the operation of the old blueprint that relates more to orders of discourse that it does means of production.

The Communist Manifesto's optimism is not founded on experience but on theorising. Ranceire suggests that it is a theory that does not emerge from the power of an actual proletariat but rather from the power of the contemporary bourgeois class. The action it addresses is bourgeois action and passion. The power of the Communist party and its legitimacy is based on the fearful reaction of those in power (i.e. the 'Spectre of Communism'). "The power that invents the communist spectre is the same power that invented the railroads" p.91. It is this Bourgeois passion that sustains a fear of communism and it is bourgeois action that sustains the proletariat as an idea.

Rancière presses the point that Marx's idea of communism is deeply bourgeois:
"For in the Manifesto the bourgeoisie alone has the power of agency. It is the agent of a civilisation of the universal whose cities, factories, railroads, ships and telegraphs are breaking down all barriers of caste and nation and wiping from the earth all traces of primitive savagery and peasant backwardness… The Manifesto is an act of faith in the suicide of the bourgeoisie… In this drama there is no way that the proletarians can be gods. At most they might play bit parts. Gravediggers, not even assassins. Everything they do they owe to bourgeois action or passion. They are mere soldiers of industry, instruments of labour, appendages of the machine." p.92

Part 3  The Philosopher and the Sociologist

This section focuses on Marxism rather than the man himself. The Marxists he chooses to make an example of are Jean Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu.

Rancière hones in on a key image used by Sartre in his 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' (1960) to analyse the separation of workers.
"From my window I can see a road paver on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge of each others presence." (CDR p.100)
The philosopher is here criticised as imagining himself to be a 'transcendental subject constituting others in his own perception'. In this way Sartre "seals meaning in consigning backward workers to their solitude…. their aphasic dialogues" p.145.

He argues that Sartre's image also stands for a Marxism that assigns a hierarchy of value to different types of worker and in so doing "disallows room for another thought in the body that it subjugates"… and workers who follow (this) Marxist orthodoxy cannot "earn the least liberty by themselves" p.145. "The praxis incorporated in things never has reason to make the leap that would turn it back to needy, working people" p.146.

Rancière does not believe that the mystification of 'equal opportunities' and the evident inequality of giftedness is believed anywhere but in theories which 'explain' society to the poor typified by Bourdieu's influential 'Distinction' (1979) p.173. He suggests that what actually happens is that the 'habitus' is reproduced as status quo, so that everyone continues to do 'his own business' and nothing else. Bourdieu expresses the hope that the poor can appropriate his 'science' of their dispossession but Rancière questions whether this could ever be useful? In truth the "symbolic game is reserved for the rich and is merely the euphemising of domination" p.183.

Bourdieu's discourse acts as a veil to hide working class realities even as it seems to explicate, theorise and demystify them. In the process proving only that the reader (of Distinction) has no business going there and so should only do-one-thing - her job!

My own conclusion

Plato deserves all the criticism he gets from Rancière. What we need is a class analysis of the influence of the rediscovered ancient classics by the Humanist scholars in their role as the managers of the new city states of Europe and how this heretical force played within the Christian hegemony to produce the mind that freed itself from Christian mystical fatalism and gave rise to the Enlightenment and the coherence of the bourgeoisie as a class. What I am indebted to Rancière for is in showing the key role that Plato's ideas played in the constitution of or at least the justification of European class separation.

The criticism of Karl Marx that follows seems almost theatrically overdone - when he clearly an admirer. I think Marx can still give us the reference point that sees the capitalist system producing poverty, famine, war and environmental degradation rather than negative conditions being seen as localised and reformable. At the same time Marx was of course limited by his class position and time period. Though it is good that Rancière points out these limitations with such force, we can still appreciate that Marx struck a red wedge into the heart of European philosophical discourse.[xi]

Marxism as a field of discourse however has become overly academicised and out of touch with struggle since Lukacs and Gramsci were active revolutionaries. His criticism of the communist party route to socialism resonates with my experience. All my intuitions about Jean Paul Sartre from my youthful period of radicalisation in the late Sixties were brought into focus here. What I felt as his overbearing and out of reach presence was not just my own ignorance reacting from its subaltern position. He actually was out of touch with the class that I was part of!

It is the critique of Bourdieu in the third and last section that for me is most useful. Distinction shows how society as a whole was structured by a set of aesthetic values - good taste that had morphed from the mores of aristocratic court society. However it had struck me in the early Nineties, in complete ignorance of Rancière's 'The Philosopher and His Poor' (which was only published in English in 2004), how Bourdieu's method was limited to measuring norms and culture didn't evolve in that way. The new can only begin with the idiosyncratic. It was these actions on the borders of the normal distribution curve that mattered in terms of cultural resistance - things that Bourdieu failed to capture.[xii]

On top of that Bourdieu seemed to have little detailed understanding of working class culture(s). For him working class culture was entirely dominated. Rancière is also himself prone to a kind of blinkered view of what is considered valid culturally. He doesn't go to where working class people invest most of their attention.

'Scourge though he may be of those Marxists contemptuous of the peasants' taste for ugly trinkets and calendars, his universe of refer-ence is not that of Britney Spears, Roland Emmerich or J.K.Rowling, but that of a legitimate culture, a culture legitimated a posteriori by the critical and academic institution." p.31 Nicolas Vieillescazes Radical Philosophy 177 2012

Rancière opens up an incisive critique of Bourdieu's method that I had felt but been unable to articulate. But there is a bigger aim here in 'The Philosoher and His Poor' than the debunking of a few stars of Humanist philosophy. The bigger idea is that philosophy and European literary history is complicit in the reproduction of the intellectual mind sets that both maintain the 'poor' as a class. A reifying concept of intellectual inequality that allows the system of gross economic equality to seem natural. To me it is becoming clear this was formed by the 1000 year formation of the European Humanist/bourgeois class and is deeply embedded in the functioning of the state.

Material wealth is justified on the basis a class separation of intelligence and a profound dis-entitlement of the thinking capacity of working class/poor people.[xiii] The key to our escape to a more rational way of living on earth is the human ability to think clearly. It is not about the reiteration of knowledge as accretions that reinforce the throne of oppressor. It is the idea that 'the poor' could make the tools for thinking about liberation on their own terms. Perhaps led by the work of some unpredictable vagabond intellectuals that overcome their embarrassing awkwardness with words, persist in blurting out their thinking and insist on being heard.

Economic inequality has a corollary that is our perceptions of who is intelligent and able to think about what might be possible.

Rancière ends the book by summarizing his arguments in a sentence:

"For me, this was not a question of opposing voices from below to discourse from above, but of reflecting on the relation of division of discourses and division of conditions, of grasping the interplay of borders and transgressions according to which the effects of speech that seize human bodies becomes ordered or disturbed" p.227.

Footnotes
[xi] In his review of Jonathan Sperber's new biography of Marx, Tristram Hunt writes: "In the rest of the world, where capitalism is exhibiting exactly the same kind of energies it did in early-19th-century Britain, the relevance of Marx's critique retains its potency."

[xii] An recent example of this was the 'Diran Adam' action that swept through Turkey and around the globe within hours of performance artist Erdem Gündüz taking his stand.

[xiii] This simple statement has been confused by an enlargement of higher education and the upward mobility this has seemed to make possible. I intend to explore this in a future blog.


This is taken from longer reviews of each section on my blog.