Rancière's Partager

IN THIS CHAPTER two scenes resonate throughout. One is from Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and the other is Rancière's own declamation about his research ambitions throughout his career. In the very first sentence of part 2 of the Second Discourse, Rousseau deploys ekphrasis to describe a cartographic act and its aesthetico-political force, saying this: "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society." And now Rancière: "And this redistribution itself presupposes a cutting up of what was visible and what was not, of what can be heard and what cannot, of what is noise and what is speech. This dividing line has been the object of my constant study."

I can't possibly claim that Rancière had Rousseau in mind when he wrote his statement of purpose in the afterword to the English edition of The Philosopher and His Poor, but it's also impossible for me to read these two formulations as if they were innocent of one another. For in both instances, and dramatically so, there is an alignment of forces and gestures, of activities and utterances, of vistas and sounds that coordinate a political cosmology of inequality as an aesthetico-political practice of line-drawing. Rousseau's man draws a line in the ground and, in doing so, grounds the relation of property to propriety through the orchestrated ensemble of a pictorial gesture, a technical design, and a performative utterance. Indeed it would seem that for Rousseau the cartographic is synesthetic in that it conjoins the pictorial and the aural, the seen and the heard. That technical design of enclosure delimits a propriety that is now bound to property. The cartographic and declamatory gestures are auto-authorizing acts that affirm and assert the existence of a sovereign author as well as the propriety of property relations (i.e., the auctor as property designer). The author isn't simply the one who says "This is mine"; he is also the one who inscribes territory by authoring his own self as a natural object. The gesture is thoroughly Adamic, and, as Rousseau remarks, it is also pedagogical: in order for the gesture to work, it requires a space of ignorance, of "simple" others.

Rancière's own phrase picks up on the aesthetico-political nature of Rousseau's Adamic line and its pedagogic implications. Here the act of naming and designating (i.e., the relation of self to territory, propriety, and property) is a lesson in orthodoxy that can only be undone by an act of radical mediation that disfigures the mode of pictorial seeing implicated in Rousseau's cartographic scene. The grounding line of property that authors the propriety of authorial subjectivity is a partage that mediates (i.e., both connects and divides and thus transforms) the nature of the elements arranged therein.

I propose that in Rancière's treatment of the partager of aesthetico-political sensibilities one finds his theory of radical mediation. I consider the distensions of partager as central to Rancière's aesthetics and politics and to his affective pragmatics more generally. Partager on my reading is less a conceptual concrescence than the predicate of unspecified labors of mediation where demarcated lines are reworked and repurposed — remediated, if you will — to reconfigure spaces and times. Here mediation is not a term that marks the reproduction of an extant political order, nor does it denote a function for the transmission of values. Mediation for Rancière regards the work of transformation of an order's design in a way akin to how Rousseau's cartographic scene marks an ekphrastic moment of transformation of the relations among man, mine, ground, founder, sovereignty, property, and inequality.

I borrow the term radical mediation from Richard Grusin. It is a term that Rancière doesn't himself use, nor does Grusin discuss Rancière's work in his treatment of radical mediation. That said, it is a helpful term to incorporate in my treatment of Rancière's aesthetics and politics because it provides access to the transformational properties of political participation and agency that are at work in Rancière's affective pragmatics. As Grusin accounts for it, radical mediation considers how the force of mediation in everyday life is not reducible to preestablished accounts of structure or change. "Mediation," he affirms, "should be understood not as a standing between pre-formed subjects, objects or entities but as the process, or action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation of entities within the world." Mediation is not that which mediates between hylomorphic forms, but is the operation of interstitial immediacy out of which forms individuate.

For Rancière partager is the aesthetic operation that rearranges the dividing lines that structure sociopolitical divisions; it is a spatiotemporal predicate of in-betweenness wherein he locates the subject of politics. "A subject," he writes, "is an in-between," and "political subjectivization is the enactment of equality — or the handling of a wrong — by people who are together to the extent that they are between." We might be persuaded, then, to consider partager to be Rancière's effort to amplify Marx's concept of division (as in "division of labor") beyond the scope of political economics and class distinctions. That is, rather than marking definitive distinctions, a partager marks "a process of subjectivization" as "a process of disidentification or declassification" or a dissensus. Rancière's own insistence is thus to show how every division is also a "partage du sensible" — at once a dividing and a sharing of the in-between. Partager is the dissensus in between division and sharing.

In this account of Rancière's theory of radical mediation, aesthetics matters to politics because the aesthetic marks the site for practices of reconfigurations of the sensible — what in the introduction I described as Rancière's artisanal sensibility. In contrast to theories of the aestheticization of politics that treat aesthetics as synonymous with ideology, and thus as a source for the anesthetization of political agency through the stultification of intellectual autonomy, Rancière's sense of aesthetics refers to affective practices of sensorial reconfiguration that enable a radical mediation of the in-between of those dividing lines that authorize inequality. In the aspectual relation I set up earlier, Rancière is returning us to the "ekphrastic temptation" in Rousseau's account of inequality (i.e., the temptation of treating pictorial lines as if they were natural) and extracting from it the gesture of artisanal artifice that repeats itself at every juncture where distinctions and differentiations are drawn, ordered, and designated. Notably the ekphrastic temptation of treating drawn lines as if they were natural (a temptation we might also call "Westphalian") is not, for Rancière, a cognitive illusion or an epistemic mistake. It marks, rather, a perceptual milieu of networked sensibilities subject to the radical mediation of the partager of "several names, statuses, and identities; between humanity and inhumanity, citizenship and its denial; between the status of a man of tools and the status of a speaking and thinking being."

This chapter is divided into three parts, and each part raises some of the concerns spelled out in my remarks. In part 1 I work through Rancière's critique of Althusser's orthodoxy and the implicit critique of Althusser's theory of mediation therein. I want to pick up on the shift between the idea of mediation as a force of repetition and reproduction, a force that can be interrupted only by an orthodox way of knowing (i.e., the epistemic break), to the idea of radical mediation as a process of transformation through undetermined labors for the reconfiguration of the sensible. This is to say that I read Rancière's critique of Althusser's orthodoxy as a critique of his theory of mediation that (for the former) is a carrier of an orthodox lesson plan for sociopolitical emancipation that reduces political work to a single form of intelligence, namely the science of theory. Rancière's break from Althusser is not an epistemological break but a break with epistemology, and thus a break with the privilege of Althusser's reductionist account of political work as intellectual labor. Part 2 offers the reader an excursus on the definitional subtleties of partager as both a force of sharing and division; in French, the verb means both sharing and dividing. Here I'll indicate how partager's liminal stature is the marker of in-betweenness.

Finally, part 3 undoes the approach to conceptual clarification of the previous sections. Here I am interested in putting on display the networked distensions of partager in Rancière's oeuvre. To do so I must therefore shift my stylistics of reading and writing from a Porphyrian to a sentimental arrangement of terms that shows the dispositional distributions of senses in Rancière's conceptual morphology. The processual dimension of in-betweenness at the heart of Rancière's theory of radical mediation requires that the terms of relation not be treated as transcendental and immobile but as elements or parts of a kinematic arrangement. The point here is a classically sentimental one: pace Aristotle, it is not just the ideas and the senses that are not innate, but the relations that conjoin or disjoin subjects and objects — the forces that generate relations of solidarity or dissidence, for instance — are equally not innate. So whereas some of the classical sentimental authors may have pursued what Hume called a "human science" for the discovery of natural sociability (Hutcheson, Hume, and Rousseau chief among these thinkers), Rancière radicalizes their insights by showing that sociability itself is an object of artisanal manufacture. In part 3, then, I show what the mode of radical mediation Rancière proposes does to the pedagogy of conceptual morphology, where not only the terms but also the relations between terms are subject to dissensus.

PART 1: Rancière's Radical Mediation

It is important to point out that Rancière does not explicitly elaborate a theory of mediation — or at least, he doesn't refer to his account of partager as a theory of mediation. Rather his work enacts radical forms of mediation that transform the existing divisions of any aesthetico-political arrangement. And by "acts of mediation" here I mean that his work is occupied with instances of partakings in unspecialized capacities that restructure the perceptual milieu of any coordination of persons, places, events, spaces, and sensibilities. I explained in the introduction how these dynamics play themselves out in Rancière's discussion of the Belvedere Torso from Aisthesis. There he offers up an instance of radical mediation in terms of the effects of time's erosion upon a piece of stone. Geological erosion is a kind of automatic partaking that has no purpose; it is a practice of doing without a determined subject. But that erosion, and the razed statue that emerges from erosion's labors, transforms the figure of the heroic man of deeds into a found object, or a ready-made, that compels us to come to terms with the qualification of sculpture as a superlative form of art. The Belvedere Torso is a part that has no parts (no head, no limbs, no fingers, no groin, etc.) but that nonetheless capacitates an alteration to the extant distribution of perceptions that determine the relation between art and doing, and thus the relations of authority, action, qualification, and legitimacy. No human transformed the work from statue to found ready-made. It happened as a result of the automatic caprices of erosion. The result is the eruption of a becoming sensible that queers the dividing lines correlating sensation and perception. It's not just that the Belvedere Torso changes late eighteenth-century conceptions of art. It is the case that after the Belvedere Torso, representational art no longer has the stature it could previously claim.

For Rancière, then, mediation is not reducible to either transmission or reproduction. It is a force of transformation. And this difference is what is at stake in his critique of Althusser's lesson in orthodoxy. Rancière's polemic against Althusser has been well rehearsed in several publications, most recently in Samuel Chambers's The Lessons of Rancière. The explicit issue regards the relationship between emancipation and enlightenment, that is, the expectation that emancipation regards "a specific scene for the effectivity of thought." Here "effectivity" reports a causal dynamic where the purpose of critical thinking is to enact change through a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy. To break with ideology it is necessary to change people's minds so they will interpret the world differently. Thus Althusser's theory of revolutionary emancipation requires a form of conceptual realignment that harmonizes the relationship of words and things so as to generate accurate representations of the world and thus restore what had been distorted by capital's exploitation. This is the function of Althusser's "epistemic break" (a term borrowed from Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science that also influenced Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm shift) that designates "the mutation in the theoretical problematic contemporary with the foundation of a scientific discipline." The epistemic break will thus expose the illusion of ideology through a cognitive remapping of the world.

Much of Rancière's response to this account of ideology critique, and to the theory of mediation implied therein, is outlined in Althusser's Lesson and, earlier, in the essay "On the Theory of Ideology: Althusser's Politics," first published in 1970 in Argentina and based on a course Rancière taught the previous year at the Université de Paris VIII–Vincennes. This earlier publication coincides with the publication of Althusser's own important essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970), which likely suggests that Rancière was not relying explicitly on any published account of ideology by Althusser when penning his own polemic. That said, what is immediately relevant is the extent to which the epistemic break as a scientific theory for the correction of a distorted picture of the world — or, better, a distorted signaletics — is also a science of reading. And as a science of reading, Althusser's epistemic break regards the correct transmission of knowledge so as to interrupt the subordination of ideological reproduction. He declares ideology nefarious because it is a form of repetition that reproduces (and thus calcifies) relations of exploitation. In this regard mediation is the force of ideology that functions as a mode of transmission through repetition and reproduction. All mediation is ideological mediation that, on this view, functions like a signal repeater. Social values that are carriers of inequality are reproduced through the repetition of signaletics that ensure the intergenerational transmission of domination and exploitation. Hence the famous scene of subjectification as interpellation that comes with ideological recognition. Relations of domination are reproduced simply through the behavioral habit (i.e., unreflective repetition) of responding to the signal prompt of hailing. The dynamic is thoroughly cybernetic (i.e., it relies on a negative feedback loop), as is the system of relations that enables it. The trick for Althusser is to revoke that behavioral automaticity (i.e., the stimulus-response dynamics) by breaking the signaletic cycle of ideological reproduction. But that break cannot come with an alteration or transformation of the extant relations that guarantee habitual repetition. This is because for Althusser the dividing lines and the political relations of domination they determine are natural objects in the world.

For Althusser the problem of mediation is one of false homologies, and his account of political work regards intellectual intervention in order to establish true homologies, as Fredric Jameson helps explain. Jameson describes mediation as "the relationship between levels or instances, and the possibility of adapting analyses and findings from one level to another." In short, inquiry into mediation is inquiry into relations, their nature, and their application. From the Althusserian position, some relations are natural to a specific form, while others are not. Mediation is thus the operation where false unities of relation and form (i.e., class relations) are repeated. Such false homologies are reproduced because institutions that promote them are extended through time in a manner akin to the ways in which property or intergenerational wealth is inherited, thereby reproducing class differences between generations. This means that mediation is a kind of embedded code (as are all homologies) reproduced by an institutionalized mode of repetition endemic to the system.