On the Shores of Politics by Jacques Ranciere

Author:Jacques Ranciere
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

4. Democracy Now

I have considered two instances of democratic practice, one taken from the heroic age of a combative democracy, the other from the ambiguous age of a democracy which in the very banalization of its rule, of its self-regulation, allows us to glimpse the outline of its involution. It seems to me that these two examples shed a new light on certain contemporary analyses of the phenomenon of democracy.

I am thinking in the first place of the vision encapsulated by Jean-François Lyotard in the idea of postmodernity. After the age of grand narratives of the social, centred on the theme of the absolute wrong and the universal victim, democratic indeterminacy has turned out, according to Lyotard, to be synonymous in principle with that ‘insistent pressure of the infinite on the will’ which characterizes the infinite tumult of capital.6 The logic of capital tends always to create discordance, heterogeneity between linguistic discourses. This heterogeneity prohibits the discourse of the universal victim but allows the same experience to be phrased in an infinity of different ways; thus working-class experience may be variously articulated in the language of contractual negotiations or in that of discourse on the subject of Labour.

This approach has the merit of abolishing the distance that suspicion maintains, but it does so from the starting-point of the categories of suspicion themselves. Just as, for Marx, bourgeois progressivism dissipated the illusion of chivalry, so, for Lyotard, the democracy of capital dissipates the proletarian illusion. With the collapse of the political fantasy of the One, what asserts itself, in its positivity, is solely the economic tumult of difference, which is called, without distinction, either capital or democracy. More generally, Lyotard evokes a positive aspect for the various forms of suspicion regarding democracy.

He thus inverts the Platonic condemnation of indeterminacy, of the democratic apeiron, ascribing a positive value to the theme of democracy as a bazaar. Likewise, he reverses the usual interpretation of the contemporary themes of the ‘end of ideology’ or of ‘depoliticization’ in advanced democratic societies. Yet this upside-down Platonism surely fails to break out of the Platonic mould and continues to identify the democratic apeiron with nothing more than the turbulence of appetites, even if this makes two readings possible: an exoteric reading which stops short at the narcissistic self-gratification of the ‘pluralist’ society, or an esoteric reading which reopens the infinite gap between the Republic and democracy, seeing the rule of administrative rationality as a ‘soft’ form of totalitarianism. When all is said and done, does not such an approach fail to grasp all the current complexity of the democratic phenomenon? For example, what made the French students’ strike so strange was the durability of certain identifications in the very midst of the rout of all the great incorporations, the recognition of a wrong even in the absence of a victim. In a situation where the demands of economic competition and geopolitical equilibrium now leave democracies the slenderest of margins for political alternatives, where individual ways of assessing

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