[Felix Hoenikker]

(De)void of Politics?: A Response to Jacques Rancière's Ten Theses on Politics
6:4 | © 2003 Michael Dillon

Michael Dillon

· At the risk of being overly schematic, one might say that there are three, related, philosophical provocations to the kind of political thought of which Jacques Rancière's political thought is a specific structuralist example. It helps contextually to specify these. First is the deconstructive ruination of being. Second is the ruination of the subject via the void, supplementarity or excess in existence itself that is said to ruin all onto-theological accounts of being. Third, is the technological ruination of the world, said to follow from avoiding, via technologisation, the void that effects the ruination of being and subject. Taken together the ruination of being, subject and world amount to a comprehensive dissolution of the markers of certainty for political thought, since neither the unity of being, the stable properties of a pre-formed subject nor the existence of a reified world of abiding functional necessities allows one to read-off the nature of politics from these supposedly secure bearings. Because the ruination of being, subject and world are open to a wide variety of interpretations, thinking politics in their wake becomes a diverse and by no means uniform or homogeneous enterprise.
· These philosophical provocations do not simply create a void in political thought. More fundamentally, they create a void -- the void deeply implicated in this tripartite ruination of being, subject and world -- for political thought from out of which political thought is challenged to re-think politics. Jacques Rancière's political thinking seeks to do precisely this. As he says, "The whole question of the political lies in the interpretation of this void." The object of my response to his thinking is not of course to ask how true is Rancière's account of politics. Rather, out of a basic sympathy with the provocations that prompt it, and out of a deep admiration for the way in which Rancière himself responds to those provocations in a rare and sustained act of political thinking, my reading of him is concerned to determine from whence his thought derives? What logic drives it? And, what entailments or collateral effects are consequent upon the operation of that logic?
· I want to concentrate on the last two of these three questions. The first would entail an exegesis for which there is no space here. In any event the ruination of being, subject and world gestures towards at least some of the influences at work in Rancière's thinking, if it by no means exhausts them. In particular, the last two questions direct the line of questioning to Rancière's most recent work, Ten Theses on Politics. The line of questioning is itself political in as much as it attempts to disagree. It is political also in ways, I charge, not specified by Rancière. It not only attempts to bring Rancière into question, it also seeks to put Rancière to the question, thereby evoking something more than, something in excess of, the proprieties of politics that Rancière himself identifies. I deliberately want to invoke a scene that moves us beyond the scholastic rendition and organisation of litigation, argumentation and demonstration, favoured by Rancière as the modes proper to politics, towards a more performative theatre of violence, power and cruelty. Since there is always already an excess of performativity over litigation, argumentation and demonstration, incorporating the full power, violence and decision of the political 'passage á l'acte' forcibly breaches and exceeds the proprieties of Rancière's politics of Dis-agreement. However much I sympathise with Rancière's fundamental point concerning the essentially polemical character of politics, Rancière struggles to domesticate the radical impropriety of politics by confining it to a proper topos and to proper tropes of encounter in a structurally underwritten scene of dis-agreement.
· The title of my response, (De)void of Politics?, thus signals a suspicion concerning Rancière's rendition of the void whose interpretation, he rightly says, is crucial to any account of politics deprived of the fixed bearings of being, subject or world, and thus a suspicion also of his account of politics as such in the aftermath of their ruination by that void. From out of a certain interpretation of this void Rancière enunciates an ontology of structural difference that underwrites a process of political subjectification which owes its dynamic to the time-less universality of the paradoxical magnitude of, and contrariety in, the logos rather than to the rupture and rupturing of time whose wound or opening Rancière's structuralism itself may threaten to fore-close. In short, the suspicion I pursue in my line of questioning is that Rancière's structuralism may also threaten to avoid the void in whose opening all those accepting the ruination of being, subject and world, agree politics arises as what Derrida would no doubt call an (im)possibility.
· Each line of questioning is rudimentary even elementary. The first concerns what I will call Rancière's onto-theological default. This entails the general difficulty of escaping metaphysics. The second concerns Rancière's demotion of time and the radicalising effects of substituting time as the locus of the rupture or void from out of which to re-think politics. The third and final line of questioning concerns Rancière's characterisation of police, the lack of discrimination between different orders of policing and, Rancière's charge that policing is a form of political arithmetic without remainder, as if there may not also always already be an excess of being over appearance in respect of policing as well. Each of these lines of questioning may ramify in a whole variety of different ways, but I will confine myself simply to opening them up and setting them running.
1. Rancière's Onto-theological Default

· Like many contemporary continental thinkers the starting point for Rancière is that, "the initial logos is tainted with a primary contradiction." (Dis-agreement). That primary contradiction, as he says in Ten Theses on Politics, establishes a fundamental incommensurability that is in turn a supplementarity or remainder. What is novel about Rancière's thinking is that he shifts the locus of supplementarity from language and or time, where many other continental thinkers locate it, to the locus of account. What is incommensurable for Rancière, riven by supplementarity and an ineliminable remainder, is what he calls the paradoxical magnitude of the whole of parts. The whole of parts does not add up. He also re-figures, as he re-locates, this primary tainting of the logos as a structural principle rather than, say, a deconstructive move or simple trick of fate. Marking a difference form Derrida and other thinkers, Rancière emphasises that his account of the void has to be understood in a structuralist sense. Here too lies the substance of Rancière's quarrel with Claude Lefort. Whereas Lefort sees the advent of the void -- in terms of the empty place of power -- as an epochal moment inaugurated by the dis-incorporation of power effected by the revolution of modern democracy, Rancière insists that it is a structural principle that does not owe its existence to the historical, although it may/may not find contingent expression there.
· So, Rancière's way of speaking about the originary rupturing of the logos in terms of an ontology of structural difference, to which he gives the expression paradoxical magnitude, powerfully subverts all reifications of any and every partition of the sensible, each of which he equates with policing. The insurrection of the remainder -- 'contrariety' -- for Rancière thus expresses a difference (specifically not différance) that is structural. Temporal separation does not lie within the structural principle of paradoxical magnitude itself for Rancière. If it did the movement of difference might be the temporal deferral signalled by the 'a' of différance. Temporal difference for him occurs instead in the historical contingency of dissensus. Time is not in or of the structural vacuum of paradoxical magnitude's egalitarian contingency, only in the contingent realisation of its immanent possibility. Structural difference is not of time but is itself the opening specifically of the possibility of political time. Contrariety is a difference that does not owe its existence as such to the historical, although its realisation may contingently to be found there. At work in history, in as much as it may be the structural progenitor of (again specifically political) histories, the structural difference or contrariety of paradoxical magnitude is not itself historical.
· Thus, whereas Lefort's response to the permanence of the onto-theological, or onto-theological labyrinth as he also describes it, is to say that it is in the process of being superseded by the epochal break of modern democracy, whose singular achievement has been the dis-incorporation of political power, Rancière's response appears instead to transpose the theo-logical political into a structural principle as timeless as the theos itself, one, in addition, whose contrariety replaces the device of the King's Two Bodies with an ontology of structural difference.
· In short, what warrants the unwarranted opening of space and time for Rancière is warranted outside all space and time in the form of a structural principle that is not itself historical. As he says, one's egalitarian share of contingency exposes one to the possibility of politics, to disputing the order of one's subjectification by modes of objectification through which one's presence is largely determined. This is a possibility or potential always waiting to happen since, he says, "politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates society." A structural principle nonetheless does.
· My line of questioning here then charges that this leaves Ten Theses on Politics enmeshed in the labyrinth of the onto-theological in as much as the structural vacuum of paradoxical magnitude appears as a deus ex machina. Certain consequences follow from this. I don't have space to pursue them, but let me specify three.
1.First, what follows from the onto-theological default is a covert policing of the radical impropriety of politics, a curious restraining of its immemorial association especially with violence and power, the symptom of which I think lies in the prevailing tension throughout the Ten Theses between the proper and the improper in Rancière's account of politics. Whereas the scandal of the insurrection of the remainder renders politics contingent in time, Rancière accedes to the ways in which the timeless structuralism of paradoxical magnitude calls for a proper place (topos) and proper modes of articulation (tropes) for politics.
2.Second, is the problem of how to account for the incarnation in time by historical bodies of a principle that is neither temporal nor carnate. Indeed, how to tell whether or not the incarnation of politics has ever truly taken place at all.
3.A third follows from the second which is the question of how to differentiate between claims to incarnate or in-corporate the political and indeed whether or not it is possible to incorporate it at all as a social form.
2. Rancière's Demotion of Time, The Radically Disruptive Aporia of Time and the Bloody Coup de Théâtre of Politics.

· For those like Rancière committed to a structuralist ontology, structure existing outside time provides the ontological unity of all phenomena taking place within time. Thus politics takes place contingently for him, as the demonstration, litigation and argumentation of dissensus, through different forms of politically subjectified beings on different occasions and in different locations. What unites these otherwise radically different historical phenomena widely dispersed throughout time -- the demos of Athens, the people of the 17th and 18th centuries, the proletariat of the 19th and 20th centuries -- is not some omission or demission of time, but the structural difference of the egalitarian contingency of paradoxical magnitude. Thus time is ultimately chronological for Rancière. An enumeration of political events, time is merely political chronology: the time of politics having taken place, or not. It occurs after the space of speaking and appearing has been opened by a structural principle devoid of time. Time is merely the enumeration -- in Rancière's terms one might say (ac)counting -- of what takes place.
· But. What if timerather than structure was the un-accountable event and not merely the chronological taking place of (un)accountable events? What if time rather than structural difference provided the analogical unity of the phenomenological appearing-as? What if the topos of (political) encounter was moreover a time that itself preceded or superseded structure? Such a time could not, of course, be Rancière's chronological time of successive partitions of the sensible, successive regimes of rule or orders of policing, punctuated by restitutive political nows. By virtue of its very change of location in the order of things, time would become a different kind of time. It might be the providential time of some onto-theologies. But, what if instead it was a time as riven as any ruptured logos? What if it was time rather than structure that was radically (un)accountable, unconstrained in the radically disruptive effects of its aporetic rivenness by any a-temporal domesticating structure, however divided and supplementary that structure may be said to be?
"The time is out of joint.
Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right."
· Shakespeare's tragic rendition of the void as the omission of time that demands a commission to set it right long before it became Derrida's deconstructive hauntological refrain. What if the taking place a relationality that was common and dissensual -- and thereby, at least partially according to Rancière's criteria, political -- had no recourse to an ontology of structural difference to stem the radical impropriety and aporias of a riven time? Why then I want to suggest we may enter onto a mise-en-scene, a mise-en-sens and mise-en-forme of politics that polemically exceeds Rancière's depiction of it as a scene of dis-agreement.
Rancière's account of politics therefore remains vulnerable to the intrusion of an un-warranted time that his timeless warranting structure excludes in the course of demoting time to the enumeration of rule as successive orders of police, and politics as the periodic restitution of an irreparable wrong manifested as specific wrongs in historical partitions of the sensible. But un-warranted, riven, time is not so easily excluded and neither is the question of power, denied any proper or effective place in Rancière's scheme, so intimately associated with an account of time as the opening in which one must act, decide and be decided however 'mad' (Derrida) the assumption of that obligation may be said to be. And so time returns -- one might say it is the remainder that exceeds the remainder of accounting -- to challenge Rancière's confinement of political appearances to the demonstrations and litigations of a domesticated chronological time of (ac)counting.
· In thinkers for whom taking-place-as takes place as temporalising time rather than as structure realising itself contingently in chrono-logy, time is kairological rather than chronological. The topos of its taking place is also characterised there as a decisive and deciding topos of encounter in which one is obligated to act, however much definitive grounds for acting are absent, and in consequent the act itself is intrinsically violent. Here the full force, radical impropriety and violence of the political 'passage á l'acte' is exposed in ways that seem to be occluded or elided in Rancière's rendition of a more scholastic scene of politics as litigation and dissent. The tropes of that political topos of encounter are those of the moment, of augenblick, chora, de-cision and being decided. This locus of temporal impropriety, of inescapably having to make a stand within the open rupture of time that is capable of controlling neither its conditions of possibility nor its final outcome, was of course pursued by Heidegger into fascistic conclusions, and by Derrida, in part to avoid Heidegger's fate, into a continuously re-opening deconstructive recurrence. But it is also the locus of the tragic as such, explored with genius throughout the Greek tragedies. One is not obliged to endorse Heidegger or Derrida against Rancière, one does not have to conclude that either of them is right and he is wrong, to conclude that there is a an issue here that challenges his structuralism to its foundations. Certainly, also, one is not obliged to say that Derrida or Heidegger have a more secure account, a more accurate description of politics to offer than does Rancière. Quite the contrary. Fundamental, if different, difficulties attend the possibility of deriving an acceptable or effective account of politics from either or both of these other two thinkers. But, time, rather than a structure that is out of joint, threatens radically to subvert an account of politics that depends upon the operation of structural difference. Through its very removal from time, Rancière's un-warranted but nonetheless warranting structure furnishes an un-warranted arrest in -- and thus a form of covert policing of -- the radical mise-en-abyme of temporal difference.
· Restored to difference -- for example as a différance in Derrida, or as fate in tragedy -- the event of an un-warranted and un-accountable temporalising opens-up the political scene in the form of the scandalous spectacle of a coup de théâtre. In that improper topos of encounter many more, and more improper, tropes of politics occur than litigation, demonstration and argumentation. They include the arts of compositon, modes of disposition, and spectacularisation in addition to the deconstructive movement of specularisation ceremony ("And what have kings that privates have not save ceremony? And what art thou, thy idol ceremony?") and lethal force ("It is a fearsome thing to kill, but it is not given to us not to kill."). At some point here, the proper proprietorial political tropes that Rancière offers us seem swiftly to be overtaken by performativity, poetics and the tragic, as the taking place of politics in the un-warranted movement of time witnesses the insurrection of time's ineliminable remainder in bloody rather than litigious force. Here is a scene characterised by the dangerous violence and impropriety of a polemos that seems to exceed Rancière's politics of dis-agreement where the social body is not unified by the principle of dissent but conjured out of the performative interventions of (il)legal power.
3. Orders of Policing. Policing and the principle of Structural Difference. The remainder of the political arithmetic of policing.

· I open my line of questioning concerning the police by noting Rancière's lack of distinction in the characterisation of policing by charging that there may be an affinity between Rancière's ontology of structural difference and a certain contemporary order of policing -- that of the modern biopolitics of liberal governance which embraces structural difference as a principle of formation for the strategising of the self-regulating freedoms and power relations of its subjects. These are increasingly conceived as bodies-in-relation that are simultaneously also bodies-in-formation. Embracing structural difference, not only agreeing that things do not and cannot add-up but locating the dynamic of social and technical change in the very principial character of uncertainty formed by structural difference, elements of biopolitical governance seek to formulate this into a principle of technical rationality via discourses of complexity, non-linearity, networks, and the behaviour of complex adaptive systems. Here structural difference is allied to what Lefort correctly identified as, "the project of creating a self-organising society which allows the discourse of technical rationality to be imprinted on the very form of social relations and which ultimately reveals social raw material to be fully amenable to organisation." (Lefort). Organisation conceived in auto-poietic terms fits this description precisely.
· In conclusion:
· If paradoxical magnitude is a deus ex machina, how does Rancière account for its incarnation? As election? As obligation? As itself choosing or interpellating its subjects? And how are we to determine whether or not it has taken place or, if it can be instituted at all as the principle of formation of a special social form known as politics or democracy?
· Where, and how, is power to be recuperated by Rancière after his insistence that power is not definitive of the political? Is power merely to be relegated to the stabilisation effected by police? Substituting the rivenness of time for structural difference re-opens the question of power. It also poses the question of power in disturbing ways. Time out of joint poses an unavoidable kairological moment of intervention that exceeds both definitive justification and technical-rational control: the obligatory, bloody and violently decisive passage á l'acte that inaugurates an order which can neither be legitimated in terms of the preceding order nor guarantee the outcome of its own dynamic. Might democratic revolution be such an exercise of power?
· Finally, what of police? In Dis-agreement Rancière does note that there are better and worse orders of police. By what criteria do we exercise such discrimination? Admitting a kairological rather than a merely chronological account of time, may police too not also have its violent kairological remainder?

Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, England. Author of Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (Routledge, 1996), he is international editor of a political theory monograph series entitled Taking on the Political published by the Edinburgh and New York University Presses.