The Philosopher and His Poor by Jacques Rancière

Author:Jacques Rancière
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE ERRANT SCIENCE

A singular relationship between the time of the work [l’oeuvre] and that of revolution, far beyond all rationality of economic development and the constitution of class. There is no political art that makes the blade of science coincide with the cuttings of social history. German poverty, which gives the science of capital its chance to be produced in London, also seals its erratic destiny. This science is not the mastery of any object or the formation of any subject. By proclaiming the primacy of production, it paradoxically shuts itself up in the solitude of an art henceforth situated at an infinite distance from all technique. The materialist “reversal,” the return from heaven to earth, has the unexpected result of destroying the space of practice. No more right opinion there, where every circumstance depends by right on science but where science is condemned always to interpret, after the fact, the reversal of circumstance. No more political art capable of effecting the happy intertwining of social characters. It would certainly be strange to find a weaver-king in the new age inaugurated by the mechanical loom, but it is even stranger that the radicalness of the revolutionary future is presented here under the archaic image of the silkworm revolution.

The silkworm is indeed the unity of two opposites. On the one hand, it represents the nobility of free nature, the activity of the poet, unconcerned about wage earnings. On the other, the silkworm represents the inverted image of the mechanical worker, and lacks only the latter’s speech. This hieroglyph of the identity of opposites is a figure for the destiny of a science whose power is remanded to the absolute risk of art confronted with the density of the bourgeois world.

“Everything is bourgeois.” One need not take this to mean that bourgeois prosperity puts consciousness to sleep or that “bourgeois ideology” clouds it. As I have tried to show, this “ideology” about which there has been so much fuss is only the banality of the laboring order. “Everything is bourgeois” means there is no outside. There is no other place from which to raise another army, an army for which science would provide the training. Everything takes place within the sublime and grotesque tragicomedy of the bourgeois era. And revolutionary justice can come about only as the product of a double annulment, of a perpetual reversal between the normality of historical development and the pathology of its decomposition. In this play of reversals science by itself does not have the power of decision. It is pointless to ask of science whether we should place our confidence in the god of productive forces and the spontaneity of the soil from which will spring the party of destruction, or risk it all in the dice-throw of revolutionary decision.

The fact is that nothing could be more ridiculous than trying to extract from Marx’s writings arguments to justify the reformist approach or the revolutionary approach. Science does not teach its usage. Its point of arrival resembles

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