Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 280

borderlands

e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

INTRODUCTION

Jacques Rancire on the Shores of Queer Theory

Samuel A. Chambers
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Michael ORourke
Independent Colleges, Dublin

This special issue of Borderlands proposes to consider an engagement that has never occurred, between two fields of thought that have never been (and have often resisted becoming) proper fields. This issue itself must therefore stage that encounter, but to do so both the issue and the pieces that comprise it must flirt with a particular danger: namely, that the engagement staged here will be a staging in the worst possible senses.[1] Staging could mean a false and forced construction, a merely academic exercise, or perhaps just a sham. While it goes without saying that we, as editors of the issue, hope to bring about a different sort of staging, it remains for us to say what sort, and why. In thinking through the encounter orchestrated and presented here, we consider the meaning of staging as a mise en scne. We might think such a staging in Rancires sense as a particular partition of the sensible. In a response to a recent issue of Parallax devoted to his work, Rancire, speaking in the third person, discusses precisely the dramaturgical aspects of his work and its refusal to solidify into a field or a method: This is not a theory of politics, setting the principles for political practice. This is a dramaturgy of politics, a way to make sense of the aporias of political legitimacy by weaving threads between several configurations of sense (Rancire, 2009b: 120). We might also think such a staging in the terms of queer activism, as a political confrontation (for example, ACT-UPs staging of kiss-ins or die-ins). Therefore, this special issue rests on the wager that the encounter between the thought of Jacques Rancire and the work of queer theory will add up to much more than exercises in comparison/contrast or trumping efforts; an effective

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

staging of this encounter must seek to transform both fields of thought. Rancire conveys just this sense of transformation:
Performing or playing, in the theatrical sense of the word, the gap between a place where the demos exists and a place where it does not Politics consists in playing or acting out this relationship, which means first setting it up as a theatre, inventing the argument, in the double logical and dramatic sense of the term, connecting the unconnected. (Rancire, 1999: 88, emphasis added)

Despite being well aware ourselves that queer theory, even broadly construed, has shown little interest in the writings of Rancire, and despite understanding fully that Rancire has at best entirely ignored, at worst actively disdained, the work of queer theory (see Rancire, 2005), we chose to make this wager (as did, in their own unique ways, the authors who responded to our invitation to write and whose work constitutes this issue) for a number of significant reasons.[2] First, even a superficial reading of Rancires conception of politics and police orders, of his understanding of subjectivization (assujetissement), of his theory of the subject as in-between reveals powerful affinities with queer theorys thinking of norms, subversion, and subjectivity as positionality, as relationality (Rancire, 1995b; 2001). More felicitously, the logic of the tort, which is so central to Rancire's thinking of politics, may share an etymological link with the word queer.[3] Furthermore, a number of thinkers working in and around queer theory, including such influential figures as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), Adrian Rifkin (2003, 2004), and Lauren Berlant (2007) have also taken a keen interest in Rancire despite not necessarily bringing these areas of interest together in any explicit way.[4] Andrew Parker, translator of The Philosopher and his Poor, hearteningly concludes a recent essay by foregrounding this possible conjunction:
one of the best approximations of what Rancire defines as 'properly' political is the emergent Anglo-American model of queer politics: anti-identitarian, anti-statist, anti-normative in its emphatic swerving from the rhetoric of gay and lesbian civil rights. If 'We're here, we're queer, get used to it' is something other than a claim on behalf of an identity, queer theorists might look indeed to Rancire's work for its way of posing rigorously the relation between voice and body and the impossible speech acts that bind and divide them. (Parker, 2007: 75)[5]

All of this adds up to a strong case for actively engaging Rancire with queer theory, queer theory with Rancire, since the possibilities for new lines of thinking begin to multiply rapidly.[6] And, indeed, we have tried to bring together a diverse group of thinkers and writers to carry out the staging of this encounter, precisely so as to begin that process of multiplying possibilities.[7] In a recent interview, Rancire himself (in Les Inrockuptibles, where he shares a cover with Nicole Kidman) comments with no small degree of amusement upon the impending queering of his work in the present volume and the potential disagreements he might have with such an endeavour. Responding to

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

the interviewers question about the overlaps between the queer project and Rancires own disidentificatory work in The Philosopher and his Poor, Rancire admits to being intrigued by queer theory. But he goes on to claim that the question of the sexual lies at the heart of the project of queer theory, and this question, he continues, does not have a special place in his own oeuvre (Rancire, 2008: 29).[8] Taking our cue from Parkers work, we might suggest that the radical potential in such an encounter lies precisely in working through the non-sexual aspects of queer thinking. However, before developing a suggestion such as this, we should state directly at the outset what should become quite clear upon reading their work: the contributors to this volume have no shared agenda, certainly not ours. And their articles were chosen (through a double-blind external review process) not for their ability to achieve any particular predetermined ends, but for their capacity to bring different, vibrant theoretical backgrounds and political perspectives to their readings of the two broadlyconstrued areas of inquiry that make up the axes of this special issue. Many of our contributors do choose to leave the sexual in place in queer theory (though surely not without problematizing its centrality), while others establish a critical distance from sex/uality and identity as they gravitate towards modes of queer inquiry that have little or nothing to do with the sexual. None of this is to say, however, that we do not have our own theoretical and political concerns. And just as it would be intellectually ungenerous and stifling to inquiry if we had sought to press those concerns upon the authors (or the selection thereof), so also would it be slightly disingenuous of us to mask those investments and interests behind the screen of editorial objectivity. Much of the impetus for this special issue can be captured by the account of the fecund yet nascent connections between queer theory and Rancires thinking that we documented in the preceding paragraphs. But our enthusiasm in bringing these areas of inquiry together also arises from a particular set of theoretical and political commitments and concerns. Put succinctly, within queer politics we worry about an increasingly normative swerve toward identity politics, and a narrow focus on state-sanctioned gay and lesbian marriage (see Stryker 2008). Within academic work receiving the general label of queer theory, we find ourselves anxious over the trend to make sexuality the only proper object of study, since such work quite often reduces understandings of sexuality to fixed identities or orientations. The institutionalization, domestication and one might even say banalization of queer theory has taken many forms both within and outside the academy, but most obvious have been preoccupations with same/sex marriage, the emergence of neoconservative agendas, and the return to an essentialist identitarianism (to a solidifiable subject). In the end, we have some serious concerns that the mainstreaming of the term queer, and the tendency to use it as a catch-all general term for the cumbersome stringing together of identity categories (L, G, B, T, Q, A...) may serve to make queer studies nothing more than a substitute for gay and lesbian studies.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Indeed, to borrow and perhaps turn on its head a famous line from Leo Bersanis well-known, powerful, and important early critique of queer theory in which he worried aloud about queer theorys despecifying of properly gay sexuality we worry about the de-queering of queer. When queer goes mainstream it has, by definition, lost its meaning, since to be normal is precisely not to be queer (Halperin, 2003). Queer must retain elements of deviance, of the perverse a perversion we find in Rancires early archival and historiographical work, especially The Nights of Labour (1989) and The Names of History (1994). Moreover, queer theory must challenge, resist and subvert regimes of the normal. If it fails to do so it may end up completing a process of apolitical catachresis in which queer comes round full circle to name the very identities that it was originally connected to, yet still distinguished from. In other words, when queer merely points to or categorizes a group of non-heterosexual identities, when it no longer actively resists heteronormativity, when it loses its capacity to thwart at just these moments it is no longer very queer at all. Part of the project of bringing Rancire to bear on queer theory (and vice versa) emerges from a certain optimism on our part. It is easy to forget that Rancire always remains a relentlessly optimistic thinker. But we follow Kristen Ross (2007) who consistently reads Rancire as optimistic when we focus on the possibility that Rancires radical resistance to the proper, and his consistent refusal of police orders (with their attendant categories of identity and interests), might just serve to queer that which today travels under the heading of queer theory and queer politics. Another way of putting this might be to say that we are most interested in the possibility of distinguishing between, on the one hand, a queer politics that can easily be reduced to lesbian and gay identity interests, and on the other, a properly queer politics that seeks to disrupt the police order that is regimes of normalized sexuality. Translated into Rancires terms, queer politics as lesbian and gay interests turns into a set of strategic moves within the terms and framework of liberal-democratic social orders (in other words, it is simply policing). Queer politics is disruptive in the way Rancire says politics must be. Another way of putting this point would be to say that we are on the side of optimism and hopefulness at a time when many who work in queer theory uncritically and exuberantly embrace negativity and hopelessness.[9] The question of the extent to which the encounter produced by this special issue will lead to the transformation of queer theory, or to the reformulation of a Rancirean political theory, remains to be answered by the articles themselves and by way of the potential impact they may have on those respective fields of thought and study. It is not our role to pre-judge or spin the reception of these articles. Nonetheless, we can say at this point that we are heartened by the incredible diversity of approaches and by the wide variety of engagements: the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

articles in this issue demonstrate forcefully (it is no accident that Badiou relates torsion to forcing in his work after Theory of the Subject) that there is no single way or right way to consider Rancire and queer theory. Of course, this makes the editorial task of categorizing the articles or synthesizing their key arguments rather vexing. Certainly there are overlaps and interconnections that emerge at almost every turn upon first reading these pieces and which only proliferate upon multiple readings. Furthermore, there is, no doubt, great potential for synergistic readings of pairs or groups of pieces. We therefore hope that this special issue will serve as an important resource for thinking, rethinking, and certainly for teaching, both Rancire and queer theory. Once again, however, we will not play the role of stultifiers: it is not for us to determine the uses to which these essays might be put. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that the remainder of this introduction will attempt to map the possibilities for reading and making use of the articles that constitute this special issue, but it will surely not circumscribe or limit those possibilities. Perhaps a better way of saying this, in Rancires language, is that we insist on remaining the ignorant editors (Rancire, 1991b). For this reason, the adventurous or emancipated reader (or since this is a staging, the emancipated spectator) may wish to dive into the essays directly, to read them without any trace of explication by us. But for those who want a bit of a roadmap, it follows below. Putting Rancire on the queer theory stage Roger Cook and Daniel Williford are both concerned to work out a queer aesthetics or a queer politics of aesthetics at the intersection of queer art and Rancires radical re-thinking of the politics of aesthetics what art can be and can do today (Rancire, 2008a). Cook and Williford are each in their own way aware that Rancires recent turn to film, art, and literature does not constitute a break with his earlier work on politics. In fact, what both Cook and Williford demonstrate in their different ways is an absolute consistency to Rancires project. As Jean-Philippe Deranty has argued, there has been a tendency among critics to divide Rancires writings into two distinct periods: the first being concerned with political questions, equality and democratic politics in particular; the second comes in the mid-1990s when a shift is putatively detected, as Rancire moves from questions pertaining to the political to concepts of the aesthetic, to the politics of literature, film, and art. Deranty claims, however, that this apparent division in his career hides a deep unity and coherence. As is well known, for Rancire, politics is aesthetic (a challenge to dominant social perception); and aesthetics is political (introducing the principle of equality in the practices, representations and perceptions that count as art and aesthetic experience) (Deranty, 2007: 230-31). This shifting between questions concerning literature, film, pedagogy, historiography, politics, and philosophy, has been characterized by Sudeep Dasgupta as an attempt to rethink and subvert categories, disciplines and discourses (Dasgupta, 2008: 70). That is to say that, as Williford in particular recognizes, Rancires work is disturbingly in-disciplinary, falling in-between and disturbing

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

disciplinary divisions (Rancire, 2008c). This politics of writing, of images (which is a bodily one: communication between bodies is itself always a matter of images, Rancire, 2009c: 16) is promiscuous, as Rancire, Williford, and Cook, wander from text to text, from image to image, from discipline to discipline. This wandering is precisely what Rancire intends by the politics of literarity and, more broadly, by the politics of literature (Chambers, 2005; Rancire, 2000, 2004b, 2004e). The promiscuous images that Cook and Williford read are ones that (like the bodies of Rancires proletarian workers) refuse to stay in their place. This ability for the subject sous rature to imagine new forms of life what Rancire calls their aesthetic capacity (Rancire, 2009d: 15) in the aesthetic revolution (Rancire, 2002) opens up an interval for an excessive, incommensurable queer politics of aesthetics. Nina Power uses Rancire rather directly to enter into a specific queer theoretical debate. She does so by challenging Lee Edelmans influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), a book that has inaugurated the so-called anti-social thesis in queer theory. Power takes issue with Edelmans adoption of a hopeless position against reason, a position on the other side of politics. In response, Power invokes Rancires conception of rational equality in order to make a space for a queer rationality that is properly political. If Edelman is against futurity, then, for Power, Rancire is shown to be a hopeful thinker of the a-venir, of the to-come. In her recent essay on Badiou and Rancire, Power makes a similar case for the way in which the two dis-agree about the concept of equality, a disagreement over the role of continuity and strategy in relation to equality (Power, 2009: 63).[11] Given that Edelman, somewhat erroneously, presses Badiou into service as someone who is against all hope, we might side with Power when she concludes that, against Badious militant notion of equality, Rancires positing of the equality of speaking beings, and of the assumption of an intelligence shared by all are in fact much more useful, and much more egalitarian (Power, 2009: 78). If Edelman negates the very politicality of politics and the very futurality of futurity, then Power and Rancire give us very good reason not to do so. In his essay, Sam Chambers approaches the meaning of queer theory, and its transformation in recent years, through the logic of Rancirean politics. Chambers looks for a crossing over between Rancire and queer theory in the work of Judith Butler, work that has consistently shared Rancires attention to the miscount, to equality, to a particular form of recognition, and to an anti-statist, radically democratic politics (see also Chambers and Carver, 2008a, 2008b). Butler has, like Rancire, been vigilantly attentive to those whose lives (and voices, bodies) dont count as liveable (women, queers, the transgendered, Jews, the intersexed, among others) and to fashioning a politics based not on ontologized subjects, but on those abjects lying outside (constitutively outside) the moral and social order. There is much to be said, and Sam Chambers has begun this conversation here, about Butlers suspensive subjects and Rancires miscounts,

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

(his incalculable, paratactical or impossible subjects), especially as both draw on and depart from Althusserian interpellative politics and performativity/speech act theory all in order to imagine a dissensual politics. Chambers argues here that Butlers theories of unintelligibility productively parallel Rancires account of the democratic miscount. What brings these two thinkers of precarious political subjects together is their shared interest in what Chambers calls a politics of in/audibility. Two recent examples from Butlers writing one theoretical, one journalistic should make this link between speech and noise, intelligibility and unintelligibility, more clear. The first is from Butlers dialogue with Gayatri Spivak on the nation state, in which Butler tries to formulate a nascent theory of what she terms sensate democracy (a further link between Rancire and Spivak on subalternity, populism and speech could be traced in this vein). Amidst a discussion with Spivak concerning statelessness and illegal immigrants singing the US national anthem in Spanish, Butler says the following:
I want to suggest to you that neither Agamben nor Arendt can quite theorize this particular act of singing, and that we have yet to develop the language we need to do so. It would also involve rethinking certain ideas of sensate democracy, of aesthetic articulation within the political sphere, and the relationship between song and what is called the 'public'. Surely, such singing takes place on the street, but the street is also exposed as a place where those who are not free to amass, freely do so. I want to suggest that this is precisely the kind of performative contradiction that leads not to impasse but to forms of insurgency. (Butler and Spivak, 2007: 62-3)

And, more pressingly, in her protest against the budgetary cuts at Californian universities, she strikes an even more obviously Rancirean note: The vocal and theatrical demands of the demonstrators were not, as governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quipped, just noise coming from another screaming interest group. On the contrary, a rare solidarity among unions, students and faculty sought to save the university, and their cry clearly struck a chord across a broad political spectrum (Butler, 2009). Chambers demonstrates in a manner that suggests a fundamental misreading of the concept of intelligibility by Edelman how Butler and Rancires conceptions of a politics of un/representability and in/audibility mutually illuminate each other. Both Power and Chambers prioritize an untimely politics where democracy can thrive and survive, and this is a space where Todd Mays post-anarchist thought emerges. While Chambers re-queers queer, Todd May invokes Rancires logic of politics to try to develop a post-identity politics, i.e. a queer politics, but one that remains faithful to many of the most important commitments of both Marxism and anarchism, and arguably to lesbian and gay politics. Developing an argument first laid out in his recent book The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality (2008b), May asserts that Rancires core political idea is

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

one that privileges the presupposition of equality. Against a dangerous conception of passive equality (which he associates with Rawls and Nozick among others) May argues for an active equality, a dissensual, anarchic ethico-politics (see also May, 2007b and Critchley, 2007: 128-32). Politics, for May, is a process of declassification; to develop a post-identitarian politics means to abandon the identity one has been given (May, 2008b: 50) whether that is as a woman, gay man, lesbian, African American, sans papier, student, mestizo, Tibetan, worker (See also May, 2008a). For May, and for Rancire, politics begins with the presupposition of equality rather than with the siting of it as a goal or telos. If politics starts from this point then its queer potential to disrupt the existing politico-social order based on inequality, on the hierarchical police order, emerges: It is these dynamics present in the enactment of equality and liberty that create new possibilities and not strategic goals (Rancire, 2008b: 182). If both May and Chambers refuse to draw a line separating political theory from political activism, then Paul Bowman refuses to draw a line distinguishing pedagogy and political activism. By taking an implicitly queer approach to Rancire starting with the idea of Bruce Lee as Jacototian pedagogue and working from there to the politics of Rancire Bowman is able to remind us forcibly that the presupposition of equality May talks about, the presupposition that underpins any democratic politics, is the presupposition that people are equally intelligent. Bowman has elsewhere warned us about a kind of street fetishism to be found in Judith Butlers work (arguably one could say this about the quote about the Californian universities above). Bowman stresses that Rancirean politics is always about how we can cause a wider debate and induce a social convulsion (Bowman, 2008: 90, see also Bowman, 2007). One such antiinstitutional and counter-cultural figure in whom Bowman locates an emancipatory (convulsive, queer, deconstructive) pedagogical potential is Bruce Lee. Slavoj iek also turns to Kung Fu films in his effusive afterword to Rancires The Politics of Aesthetics before claiming that flash mobs stand for the aesthetic-political protest at its purest (Rancire, 2004d: 79). iek concludes by saying that Rancires thought and writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist (Rancire, 2004d: 79). Bowmans lesson in aberrant pedagogy is that we need to go much, much further. Putting queer theory on the Rancire stage In his contribution Sudeep Dasgupta reveals the interventions Rancire was already making in his perverse book about perverted proletarians, The Nights of Labor, on what would much later become queer theory. Specifically, that book speaks directly to the question of how to have politics after the deconstruction of identity and representation. Rancire thereby becomes in Dasguptas hands, just as he was in Nina Powers a potent and (again) optimistic force

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

in challenging the anti-social wing of queer theory. Here, as elsewhere (Dasgupta, 2008), Dasgupta problematizes the ways in which words, bodies, and images are emplaced and circumscribed (Dasgupta, 2007). Mobilizing an argument found in The Philosopher and his Poor (2004c) and The Nights of Labor, Dasgupta deconstructs the opposition between proper and improper uses of bodies (and body parts: eyes, hands, mouths) and discloses how Rancire frequently questions the normative uses and proper locations of bodies. It is in moments where workers (and queers) twist their bodies away from the right way that they bring about new regimes of thinking, seeing, writing, talking. This undermining of identity opens up another time, what Dasgupta elsewhere calls a conjunctive temporality (Dasgupta, 2009). One of Rancires favourite figures, whose writings Rancire collected, is the floor-layer Louis Gabriel Gauny. Dasgupta comments on Gauny in the context of temporality: the wandering gaze of Gauny alights on the beauty of the house he should see only as a work-site, and converts the time of work to that of aesthetic appreciation (Dasgupta, 2009: 16). It is in the improper bodies of Rancires queer worker subjects-in-the-making that Dasgupta locates new spatio-temporal arrangements and possibilities for beingwith, for an in-disciplinary (Rancire, 2006d), a queer relationality. Oliver Davis also attempts to develop what he calls a Rancirean queer theory, one which demands (of queer theory) a Rancirean challenge to heteronormativity and (of Rancire himself) a setting aside of Rancires only explicit remarks on queer theory. Like Andrew Parker in his essay cited above, Davis sees a certain surface irritability between Rancire and queer theory, especially given Rancires remarks on Foucault and sexuality and given Rancires somewhat complicated relationship to psychoanalysis a relationship that remains complicated despite ieks attempts to recuperate Rancire for a Freudo-Lacanian political ontology. (see iek, 2006; Cf. iek, 1999: 171-244; see also Guenon, 2004). However, Davis, like Bowman, goes on to develop a radically egalitarian queer theory committed (as Dasgupta also argues) to the words of ordinary subjects-in-the making. As with Power, Davis finds spaces of overlap between Rancire and Edelman, but, through a reading of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Davis is able to claim that Rancire avoids a reproductive futurism and instead offers more livable forms of being that can queer lines of filiation and kinship without opting for narcissistic solipsism or an apolitical sinthomosexuality. Hector Kollias similarly begins from the position that ours is an unlikely convocation of queer theory and Rancirean thinking. Despite the seductive possibilities offered by a whole range of Rancirean concepts such as demos, equality, tort, subjectivation Kollias, like Davis, finds a tangible irritability between the two. Indeed, he stages his essay as a confrontation rather than a marriage between the unlikely couples of Rancire and queer theory, on the one hand, and Rancire and Edelman, on the other. Even though he covers similar ground to Power (and to MacCormack, Davis and Dasgupta) Kollias constructs a slightly different argument by reading Rancire and

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Edelman in terms of their dis-agreement, their speaking past one another. Kollias agrees with the other contributors that Rancire is a more optimistic, radically humanist thinker and Edelman a negative inhumanist one, but Kollias leaves his own readers with a difficult choice: to take up the position of Edelmans queer political subject is to accept a place outside the police order (heteronormativity) but it is also to lodge oneself in a position outside Rancires idea of politics. As we have seen, both Power and Davis choose Rancires position. Richard Stamp and Charles Phillips both bring queer theory to Rancire by way of other thinkers (Deleuze in Phillipss case, Derrida and Foucault in Stamps case) who are themselves not queer theorists, or, rather are queer theorists, but avant la lettre. Deleuze has become increasingly central to queer theory because, like Rancire he offers a way out of discursivity, identitarianism, representation, and signification (see ORourke, 2005/2006; Nigianni and Storr, 2009). However, Difference and Repetition, a book that lacks an obvious political engagement with questions of democracy, has received rather scant attention on this front. In his essay, Phillips goes further than those surface explorations of the resonances between Deleuze and queer theory by arguing for an unexplored chain of equivalence between (at least) three entities: Deleuzes understanding of difference (and his queer ontology of becoming); Rancires understanding of disagreement (and his queer concept of the miscount); and the current political understanding of queer. Phillips argument moves in three steps. First, he shows that queerness is contingent and not assimilable to a certain kind of identity politics (the type that Chambers criticizes).[9] Second, he demonstrates that Rancires disagreement stems from the partitioning of the sensible in which the miscounted have no part. Third, he uses Deleuzes concept of the virtual to point to the potentiality for those without a part in the political order to disrupt it. Phillips claims that Rancires democratic politics actualizes the queer virtuality already to be discerned in Deleuzes concept of pure difference. This futural time as described by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition is pure difference, pure temporality untethered to identity, to the subject. If Phillipss is a torquing argument that produces an unlikely alliance, or fold of friendship, between Deleuze and Rancire, then Stamps is a twisting argument that queers Rancires relationship to figures with whom he is close (Derrida and Foucault) and yet often only nearlyproximate. Stamp asserts that Rancires political thinking owes much to Derridean deconstruction, even though Rancire distances himself both from Derridas so-called ethical turn (Rancire, 2009e) and, in particular, from the Derridean temporality of the democracy a-venir (to-come).[12] However, when it comes to the question of friendship and equality, Stamp, perhaps unsurprisingly, suggests that it is Foucault whom Rancire is closer to (see also May, 2007a). As Todd May reminds us, it was Foucault in his lectures on governmentality in the late 1970s who first discussed the term policing as a broader set of practices concerned to do [sic] with the health of the state (May,

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

2008b: 41). Rancire himself, in an interview with Peter Hallward, admits that he has read Derrida with interest but from a certain distance, from a slightly out-of-kilter perspective but that if, among the thinkers of my generation, there was one I was quite close to at one point, it was Foucault (Rancire, 2003b: 208-9).In particular he cites Foucaults earlier archaeological project as influential on his thinking. But, just as Phillips surprises by choosing Difference and Repetition as a key text for queering Rancire, Stamp surprises by positing that it is the late Foucault on ascesis and friendship as a way of turning oneself into a work of art that actualizes a queer virtuality in Rancires conception of the police order and the invention of unanticipatable new modes of relationality. Finally, Patricia MacCormack uses Rancires work, particularly On the Shores of Politics, to locate a position for queer beyond the human, fashioning in the process what she calls a jubilant ethics. This experiment allows her, then, to argue for an ethical shift from queer understood as a political term to queer considered as a term of art. Rancires corporealized politics or his politics of disincorporated subjects is a space of excesses (outrances), evanescence, intermittence (Gibson, 2005, 2006) and of in-betweens (in between desire and the emancipated spectator). If for Phillips and Stamp, Rancires politics actualizes a queer virtuality, then for MacCormack, his corporeal politics, his flesh of words, actualizes a queer theory that takes representations of subjectivity and sexuality away from centralized positions into a dissipative multiplicity (see also MacCormack, 2008). In his afterword to the collection Adrian Rifkin meditates at some length upon our title Jacques Rancire on the Shores of Queer Theory. In On the Shores of Politics (1995) Rancire discusses Platos opposition between, on the one hand, the terra firma of the arkhe, the place where the philosopher philosophizes, where the warrior defends the city, and where the worker works and serves, and, on the other, the an-archic, stormy seas associated with democracy (Labelle, 2001). If the demos can ultimately be kept on the shores of politics, away from the terra firma, then, perhaps to twist the metaphor again we should move away from centralized positions (queer as institutionalized theory on terra firma) back to the stormy sea where it smells of democracy (Rancire, 1995: 2). Rancire, then, finally, on the insurgent seas of queer theory. Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He has recently published The Queer Politics of Television (IB Tauris, 2009). His previous publications include the monographs Untimely Politics (NYU, 2003) and Judith Butler and Political Theory (with Terrell Carver, Routledge, 2008), edited volumes on William Connolly and Judith Butler, respectively, and numerous journal articles. He is currently writing a book on the politics of social orders. Michael ORourke teaches continental philosophy at Independent Colleges in Dublin. He is the co-editor of Love, Sex, Intimacy and

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Friendship between Men, 1550-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory (Ashgate, 2009); and special issues of the journals, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (The Becoming-Deleuzoguattarian of Queer Studies) and Romanticism on the Net (Queer Romanticisms) and the editor of Derrida and Queer Theory (forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan). Acknowledgements We would like to thank all our contributors, not just for warming to the task of queering Rancire but for staging an encounter that far exceeded our initial vision. We are especially grateful to Jacques Rancire for his encouragement and for his support of this project. Perhaps our greatest debt is to our anonymous external reviewers whose careful critical work quite simply makes this issue possible. Our thanks go also to Vijay Devadas at Borderlands who shared our initial excitement. Finally, we would like to express our deep gratitude to Kristen Phillips for putting the final touches to the special issue not to mention her patience. Notes 1. On the importance of staging in Rancires work see Hallward (2006) and Bayly (2009). Hallward critically anatomizes a theatocratic dimension to Rancires conception of equality; he sets out from the assertion that perhaps the most fundamental, and illuminating, dimension of Rancires anarchic conception of equality is that which relates to theatre in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the term (Hallward, 2006: 110). 2. This short text on Foucault is discussed by Oliver Davis in this issue. A translation by Richard Stamp, a commentary by Sam Chambers and Michael ORourke, and a response from Jacques Rancire are forthcoming in Theory & Event (2010). 3. As Deranty helpfully points out, the French tort comes from the Latin torquere meaning twisted, athwart (2003a: 154). The existence of both Torquere Press (publisher of Gay and Lesbian literature) and Torquere: Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association certainly suggests some sort of connection between torquere and queer. The etymological evidence, however, proves somewhat thin: the English queer derives from many possible sources, but neither the OED nor other Etymology Dictionaries suggest a direct link back from queer to the Latin torquere. The OED traces queer back to the Latin querere, a word that sounds like torquere but remains distinct. And the Online Etymology Dictionary derives queer from the pan-Indo-European twerk, which means to turn or to twist and is related to thwart (etymonline, 2009). The English

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

thwart, of course, does derive from torquere, and there is no doubt that thwarting has been of great interest to Rancire, particularly in his recent Film Fables (2006a: 1-19). In his Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou deploys the words torsion and torsade, torsion and twist, to describe the ways in which the subject works back upon the structure that determines it in the first place (Badiou, 2009b: xxxvi). 4. For more on Berlant and Rancire see: http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2008/04/supervalent-secrets-berlant-andrancire.html 5. Recently, Andrew Parker (with Janet Halley) has co-edited an important special number of South Atlantic Quarterly posing the question After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (2007) where a number of prominent and emerging queer theorists are asked to reflect on what in their work is non-sexual. Rancire doesn't figure much in the pages of that issue (the exception is Lauren Berlants Starved where she briefly mentions Rancire on ellipsis and Althusser). But the possibilities Rancire offers (as Parker so lovingly delineates in the quotation above) for an anti-identitarian queer theory that is not just about sex/ sexual acts but that might have something to say about world politics right now are obvious. 6. For a much more detailed rationale for the present issue see: http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2007/12/ranciere-and-queer-theorysome-further.html 7. We are well aware that the corpus of works addressed here is limited and that much remains to be done by queer theorists with, for example, The Names of History (1994), Hatred of Democracy (2006b), and The Future of The Image (2007), not to mention the works yet to be translated into English on Mallarme, on the politics of literature and on psychoanalysis. 8. The French text reads: Je ne connais pas trs bien la littrature queer, mais je pense quelle nest pas sans lien avec ce que jessaie de faire, mme si je ne me suis pas occup de la question de la construction sexuelle, qui est au couer de la question queer. Une revue [this special issue of borderlands] veut confronter la thorie queer avec mes crits. Le programme est de metre plus de Rancire dans le pensee queer et plus de queer dans la pense de Rancire {rires}. In response to the question as to whether this interests him he replies, laughing again: Oui. Mais le courant queer peut devenir aussi une forme didentification. En cela, le dialogue peut tre intressant. Donc, voil, jattends dtre queeris {rires} (Rancire, 2008: 29). 9. On queer optimism see Snediker (2009). The positions taken up in Sara Ahmeds special issue of new formations on queer happiness continue to polarize the field into the queer optimists and the queer pessimists. But there are some thinkers who manage to stage a dialectic between the two positions: Heather Love (2007/2008) for

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

example. On hope, hopelessness, and politics see Jose Esteban Muoz (2009) and the dialogue between Muoz and Lisa Duggan (2009). 10. On the points of contact and significant differences between Badiou and Rancire see Van den Hemel (2008), Read (2007), Deranty (2003b), Badiou (2005: 107-23), Badiou (2009a: 560-61), Rancire (2004a). 11. On contingency and Rancires discussions of politics and democracy see Jodi Dean (2009). 12. On the ethical turn generally see Rancire (2006c, 2009a). On a plurality of times see Rancire After what (1991a). Rancire disagrees with Michael Dillons reading of his disjointed time in his response to the special issue of Theory & Event on his work (Dillon, 2003; Rancire, 2003a; see also Dillon, 2005). On the connection between Derrida and Rancire see Robson (2009) and Parker (2004) where he says that Rancires differences from Derrida are as significant as their similarities (xvii). It will be clear that almost all our contributors share our understanding of Rancire as a thinker of the future to-come. Bibliography Arditi, B. (2005), Stirred and shaken: a symptomatology of the art of the possible, Parallax, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 12-22. Badiou, A. (2005), Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker, London: Verso. ---. (2009a), Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. A. Toscano, London: Continuum. ---. (2009b), Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels, London: Continuum. Bayly, S. (2009), Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancire, Virno, Radical Philosophy, vol. 157, pp. 20-29. Berlant, L. (2007), Starved, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 433-44. Bowman, P. (2008), Deconstructing Popular Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave. ---. (2007), Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, J. & Spivak, G. (2007), Who Sings the Nation-State? London: Seagull Books.

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Chambers, S. (2005), The politics of literarity, Theory and Event, vol. 8, no. 5. Chambers, S & Carver, T. (2008a), Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, London: Routledge. ---. (eds) (2008b), Judith Butlers Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge. Critchley, S. (2007), Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso. Dasgupta, S. (2007), Jacques Rancire en de spiraal van het denken over politiek en esthetiek, in J. Rancire, Het Esthetische Denken, Amsterdam: Valiz. ---. (2008), Art is going elsewhere and politics has to catch it: an interview with Jacques Rancire, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 70-76. ---. (2009), Conjunctive times, disjointed time: philosophy between enigma and disagreement, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 3-19. Dean, J. (2009), Politics without politics, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 20-36. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London: Athlone Press. Deranty, J.-P. (2003a), Jacques Rancires contribution to the ethics of recognition, Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 136-56. ---. (2003b), Rancire and contemporary political ontology, Theory and Event, vol. 6, no. 4. ---. (2007), Democratic aesthetics: on Jacques Rancires latest work, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 230-55. Dillon, M. (2004), (De)void of politics? A response to Jacques Rancires ten theses on politics, Theory and Event, vol. 6, no. 4. ---. (2005), A passion for the (im)possible: Jacques Rancire, equality, pedagogy and the messianic, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 429-52. Duggan, L. & Muoz, J.E. (2009), Hope and hopelessness: a dialogue, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 275-83.

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham: Duke University Press. Gibson, A. (2005), The unfinished song: intermittency and melancholy in Rancire, in M. Robson (ed.), Jacques Rancire, Paragraph, vol. 28, no.1, pp. 61-76. Gibson, A. (2006), Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guenon, S. (2004), Jacques Rancires Freudian cause, SubStance, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 25-53. Halley, J. & Parker, A. (eds) (2007), After sex? On writing since queer theory, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3. Hallward, P. (2006), Staging equality: on Rancires theatocracy, New Left Review, vol. 37, pp. 109-29. Halperin, D.M. (2003), The normalization of queer theory, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 339-43. Hemel, E. Van Den (2008), Included but not belonging: Badiou and Rancire on human rights, Krisis, vol. 3, pp. 16-30. Labelle, G. (2001), Two refoundation projects of democracy in contemporary French philosophy: Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancire, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 75-103. Love, H. (2007/2008), Compulsory happiness and queer existence, new formations, vol. 63, pp. 52-64. MacCormack, P. (2008), Cinesexuality, Aldershot: Ashgate Press. May, T. (2007a), Equality as a Foucaultian value: the relevance of Rancire, Philosophy Today, vol. 51, pp. 133-9. ---. (2007b), Jacques Rancire and the ethics of equality, SubStance, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 20-36. ---. (2008a), Equality among the refugees: a Rancirean view of Montreals sans-status Algerians, Anarchist Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 121-34. ---. (2008b), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Muoz, J.E. (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Nigianni, C. & Storr, M. (eds) (2008), Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed 14 October 2009, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=queer&searchmode=n one ORourke, M. (ed.) (2005/2006), The becoming-Deleuzoguattarian of queer studies, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, vols 11 and 12, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/index.html Parker, A. (2004), Mimesis and the division of labor, in J. Rancire, The Philosopher and his Poor, pp. ix-xx. ---. (2007), Impossible speech acts, in M. McQuillan (ed.), The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, London: Pluto, pp. 66-77. Power, N. (2009), Which equality? Badiou and Rancire in light of Ludwig Fuerbach, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 63-80. Rancire, J. (1989), The Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. J. Drury, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ---. (1991a), After what, in E. Cadava, P. Connor & J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? London: Routledge, pp. 246-52. ---. (1991b), The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. K. Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ---. (1994), The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. H. Melehy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (1995a), On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso. ---. (1995b), Politics, identification and subjectivization, in J. Rajchman (ed.), The Identity in Question, London: Routledge, pp. 6370. ---. (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2000), Jacques Rancire: literature, politics, aesthetics: approaches to aesthetic disagreement, SubStance, vol. 92, pp. 3-24. ---. (2001), Ten theses on politics, Theory and Event, vol. 5, no. 3. ---. (2002), The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes: emplotments of autonomy and heteronomy, New Left Review, vol. 14, pp. 133-51.

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2003a), Comment and responses, Theory and Event, vol. 6, no. 4. ---. (2003b), Politics and aesthetics: an interview with Peter Hallward, trans. F. Morlock, Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 191-211. ---. (2004a), Aesthetics, inaesthetics, anti-aesthetics, in P. Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London: Continuum, pp. 218-31. ---. (2004b), The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. C. Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ---. (2004c), The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. A. Parker, Durham: Duke University Press. ---. (2004d), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill, London: Continuum. ---. (2004e), The politics of literature, SubStance, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 10-24. ---. (2005), Chroniques des Temps Consensuels, Paris: Seuil. ---. (2006a), Film Fables, trans. E. Battista, Oxford: Berg. ---. (2006b), Hatred of Democracy, trans. S. Corcoran, London: Verso. ---. (2006c), The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics, Critical Horizons, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-20. ---. (2006d), Thinking between disciplines: knowledge, Parrhesia, vol. 1, pp. 1-12. an aesthetics of

---. (2007), The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliot, London: Verso. ---. (2008a), Aesthetic separation, aesthetic community: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art, Art & Research, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-15. ---. (2008b), Democracy, anarchism and radical politics today: an interview with Jacques Rancire, T. May, B. Noys & S. Newman, trans. J. Lechte, Anarchist Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 173-85. ---. (2008c), Jacques Rancire and indisciplinarity, trans. G. Elliot, Art and Research, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1-10. ---. (2008d), Jessais dviter la position de celui qui conseille: Entretien avec Jacques Rancire, Les Inrockuptibles, no. 679.

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2009a), Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. S. Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity. ---. (2009b), A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancire, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 114-23. ---. (2009c), From the poetics of the image to the tragedy of justice, in James Coleman, Dublin: IMMA. ---. (2009d), Notes on the photographic image, Radical Philosophy, no. 156, pp. 8-15. ---. (2009e), Should democracy come? Ethics and politics in Derrida, in P. Cheah & S. Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Read, J. (2007), Politics as subjectification: rethinking the figure of the worker in the thought of Badiou and Rancire, Philosophy Today, vol. 51, pp. 125-32. Rifkin, A. (2003), Inventing recollection, in P. Bowman (ed.), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice, London: Pluto. Rifkin, A. (2004), Confessions of a gay Lacanian, or the parable of the master who laughed, http://www.gai-savoir.net/queermatters.htm Robson, M. (2009), A literary animal: Rancire, Derrida and the literature of democracy, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 88-101. Ross, K. (2007), Kristin Ross on Jacques Rancire, Artforum International. Sedgwick, E.K. (2003), Touching Feeling: Performativity, Durham: Duke University Press. Affect, Pedagogy,

Snediker, M. (2009), Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Stryker S. (2008), Transgender history, homonormativity, and disciplinarity, Radical History Review, vol. 100, pp. 145-57. iek, S. (2006), The ParallaxView, Cambridge: MIT Press. ---. (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.

borderlands ejournal 2009

19

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

There are no Queers


Jacques Rancire and post-identity politics Todd May
Clemson University

Much of the discussion of homosexuality and homosexual rights these days centers on issues of identity. Is homosexuality natural? Are there genetic or other physiological predispositions for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and others? Many of us are uncomfortable with these questions. They seem, like so many questions in identity politics, to isolate political struggles against oppression of homosexuals from other solidarity struggles. And yet we wonder how to conceive such struggle without returning to the liberal politics of individualism. Here is where the thought of Jacques Rancire becomes useful. For Rancire, any democratic politics is a collective struggle from the presupposition of equality. The question for him is not one of identity, then, which presupposes orders and hierarchies. It is rather one of equality, which undercuts identities and orders. This paper investigates Rancires view and what it might mean for GLBT political thought and resistance.

Progressive politics has entered what might be called a post-identity politics phase. And, like most post phases, it is being defined by what it no longer is rather than by what it is now. There is good reason for this. The project of identity politics, which I will define broadly as politics grounded in particular posited identities (whether seen as essential or non-essential), has foundered. Although identity politics was grounded in an important insight that not all political struggle is reducible to class struggle[1] its trajectory took it to a place where each struggle was isolated from every other struggle, and political solidarity was lost.[2] We have seen the damage done by identity politics, and it no longer holds the imagination of many. Indeed, as

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

early as the misnamed anti-globalization movement, which was really an anti-neoliberalism movement, solidarity began to return to the scene in place of ghettoized identities. However, we have yet to develop a common theoretical framework, something that can play the binding role that Marxism once played without the Marxist reductionism that spawned identity politics.[3] Thus we remain in the phase of post-identity politics. Much of the discussion of homosexuality and homosexual rights in particular has centered on issues of identity. Is homosexuality natural? Are there genetic or other physiological predispositions for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and others? Is homosexuality found in every culture and society? What characteristics, if any, are to be associated with homosexuality aside from attraction to someone of the same gender (and what do we mean by the term gender)? Many of us are uncomfortable with these questions, not because we are squeamish, but because they seem somehow like the wrong questions. They seem, like so many questions in identity politics, to isolate political struggles against oppression of gays and lesbians from other solidarity struggles. (I should note here that I use the term gay and lesbian throughout this paper solely as shorthand, standing also for transgendered, bisexual, etc.) And yet we wonder how to conceive such struggle without returning to the liberal politics of individualism. We seek to maintain the vibrancy of an agenda committed to an emancipatory gay and lesbian politics, without it being simply an emancipatory gay and lesbian politics. There must be connections to other struggles, or else we risk marginalizing the struggle and undercutting that agenda. The difficulty of forging and maintaining such connections was brought home to the gay and lesbian rights struggle with the 2008 vote on Proposition 8 in California. This Proposition overturned the legality of gay and lesbian marriages in California by declaring marriage to be solely between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, the African American vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the proposition, evidence of the difficulty of maintaining solidarity through group identity politics. Essentially, articulating a post-identity politics faces a trilemma. There are three separate dangers that must be navigated, each of which threatens to push us into one of the other two. The three dangers are these: identity politics, reductionist Marxism, and liberalism. If we are to avoid both the marginalization of identity politics and the reductionism of Marxism, we seem to be forced into saying that each person must be thought of and treated separately and regardless of his or her particular identity. That is the formula of liberalism. If we reject liberalism for its individualism and identity politics for its ghettoization of struggles, then we seem to be faced with a return to a single type of struggle of the kind reductionist Marxism proposes. Finally, if we reject the reductionism of Marxism and the individualism of liberalism, we find ourselves thrown toward identity politics.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

This trilemma is not, of course, a logical one. The rejection of any of the two does not inferentially entail that we must embrace the third. It is more a political than a logical trilemma. Given the character of our political space, these seem to be the options. The question is one of how to escape this trilemma in the context of a progressive politics. How do we recognize the irreducibility of different struggles, the need for solidarity, and the integrity of individual participants within the framework of a single compelling political theory? How do we avoid betraying one of these commitments when we embrace the other two? Here, I believe, the appeal to Jacques Rancires thought can assist us in finding our way forward. Rancire opens a path toward a progressive post-identity politics with a positive content, one that, in addition, navigates through the trilemma of our current situation. In what follows, I will offer a sketch of that thought, show how it navigates the trilemma, and end with a couple of quick suggestions regarding the relevance of all this to gay and lesbian politics. No quick summary can avoid neglecting or simplifying nuances of Rancires thought, not to mention several of its suggestive ambiguities. I hope that some of what I gloss here will receive more detailed treatment by other articles in this volume, or by the readers own research into his work. What will be highlighted here are several central elements of his political thought that have bearing on the question of how to conceive a post-identity-politics progressive thought. For Rancire, much of what goes under the name of politics is actually not really politics at all. It is simply a matter of the hierarchical administration of society, to which he gives another name. Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution another name. I propose to call it the police (Rancire, 1999: 28). The police referred to here are, of course, not simply the folks with guns and truncheons. Rancire borrows the term police from the research of Michel Foucault, explaining that, Michel Foucault has shown that, as a mode of government, the police described by writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered everything relating to man and his happiness. (Rancire, 1999: 28) The police, then, is the broad administration of society, the hierarchy that governs its citizens in the name of their welfare. This hierarchy finds expression in a number of state institutions, but it would be mistaken to reduce policing to the state. This is not only because private institutions are also contributors to a particular police order think, for example of the role of corporations in transnational neoliberal capitalism but also because non-institutional practices can play a role in creating or maintaining a police order. The practices

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

of dating, for instance, help sustain and reproduce particular gender hierarchies. In a police order, there are those who benefit and those who do not. In addition, and perhaps more important, there are those who have a say and those who do not. As Rancire sometimes puts the point, there are those who are counted and whose views count, and then there are the uncounted, those who have no part to play. We must be careful in how we understand this counting and not counting, or else we will be tempted to read Rancires work as some sort of reductionism to a single class division of counted and uncounted. In a given society, there is not one particular body of people who are counted and another who are not. Societies, particularly complex ones, function with a number of hierarchies. There are gender hierarchies, racial hierarchies, sexual hierarchies, religious hierarchies, economic hierarchies, and others. Who is among the counted and who is among the uncounted, who has a part to play and who does not, depends on which hierarchy one is looking at. Rancires thought, sensitive to the truth we cited earlier in regard to identity politics that not all oppression occurs along a single register, utilizes the concept of police in a fluid way. It refers not to a particular hierarchy but to the various hierarchies that govern societies. It is entirely possible for one to be a member of the uncounted in one part of the police order and among the counted in another part, as the recent example of Californias Proposition 8 demonstrates. Much of what is discussed in traditional liberal theories of justice is, in Rancires schema, a matter of policing. Distributive theories of justice, which dominate the liberal theoretical tradition, concern how the benefits and burdens of a society should be distributed. As such, they concern the institutional arrangements of a particular police order.[4] If we are to discuss what Rancire calls politics, and what, for the sake of clarity, I will call democratic politics, we must look elsewhere. Rancire defines his vision for such a politics this way:
Ipropose to reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration that of the part that has no partpolitical activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of the part who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being. (Rancire, 1999: 29-30)

There are several elements of this definition of politics, of democratic politics, that are worth unpacking: the equality of every speaking being, the heterogeneous assumption, and the contingency of the order. The equality of every speaking being lies at the heart of any democratic politics. Rancire appeals to the idea of a speaking being

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

for a simple reason. Those who can speak to one another are capable of forming plans for their lives and enacting those plans alongside others. Rancire writes, There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order (Rancire, 1999: 16). In what sense must the person who understands an order be the equal of the one who issues it? Precisely in the sense that they can communicate with one another and conduct their own lives on the basis of these communications. Thus the equality of every speaking being with every other one is an equality that undermines the claim of anyone to be entitled to give orders. One may be in a position that permits one to give orders, but that position is never justified by any inequality between those who give and those who receive orders. The equality of every speaking being is precisely the heterogeneous assumption that every democratic politics posits against a police order. Police orders work on the assumption of inequality. Some are to give orders, others to receive them. Some are to order the lives of others, others to have their lives ordered. Racial, sex, gender, and class distinctions (and these are not all) ground themselves in the police assumption that there is an inequality between those who can order the lives of others those who have a part and those who do not. The heterogeneous assumption introduced by a democratic politics is that every speaking being is equal to every other one. Its heterogeneity lies at two levels. First, and most obvious, it poses equality against inequality. It challenges the right of those who are positioned to decide upon the character of the lives of others. Those who fail to have a part do not do so because of some lack they possess. They find themselves where they are, not because it is right that they be there, but because the police order just happened to place them there. It could well have been that they were placed elsewhere, better positioned in the police order, and the order would be no worse off for that. Which leads to the second level of the heterogeneity of the assumption: the contingency of the order itself. If everyone is equal, then the fact that some have a part and others do not is not a naturally justified fact, but a purely contingent one. Being in the position to decide for others is never justified. This does not mean that people ought never to agree to delegate authority to one or another of their members. But the fact of delegation itself presupposes the participation of the delegators, and presupposes their equality. Police orders, in dividing along various registers those who have a part those who count and those who do not, refuse to recognize the contingency of their divisions. They take those divisions as justified, and even as natural. That is why a democratic politics, in positing the equality of every speaking being, gnaws away at any natural order.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

In order to clarify these ideas, lets take as a brief example gay marriage, leaving aside (for the sake of simplicity) the question of whether marriage itself is an oppressive and inegalitarian practice. The refusal to allow gays and lesbians to marry is presented as grounded in a natural fact: that marriage is between a man and a woman. This supposed natural fact generates the inequality of two sets of people before the law. If, by contrast, we suppose the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals as speaking beings, this directly challenges their unequal treatment before the law. And in doing so, it claims the contingency of the restriction of marriage to a man and a woman. What is taken by the police order to be a justified restriction, grounded in the nature of things, is revealed by a democratic politics to be a contingent practice that, without reason, denies the equality of all speaking beings. What is a democratic politics then? We might define it as collective action that arises out of the presupposition of equality. If we define it this way, though, we must be careful. There does not need to be an explicit recognition of that presupposition among the individual members of a collective process. Rancire writes that, Equality is not a given that politics then presses into service, an essence embodied in the law or a goal politics sets itself the task of attaining. It is a mere assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it (Rancire, 1999: 33). Participants in a collective action do not need to be telling themselves that they are acting from the presupposition or assumption of equality. They need not even use the term equality to characterize what they are doing, although it is likely that at least some among them will. It is, rather, those who interpret the action, whether participants or not, that will recognize the equality out of which people act. They will recognize it in the collective actions that are taken by the group. This seems to leave open the question of whether a particular collective action can be seen as democratic or not, depending on how it is interpreted. Indeed that is the case. However, this does not mean that interpretation is purely subjective. Although we cannot linger over this point, there are certainly signposts for interpreting a collective action as being from the presupposition of equality or not.[5] To take an obvious contrast, many of the actions of the civil rights movement of the 1960s clearly emerged from a presupposition of equality; the movement of the Christian right to ban equality of gays and lesbians before the law, although sometimes taken in the name of banning special rights, just as clearly does not. In order to see how Rancires politics point a theoretical way forward, we need to introduce one more term: subjectification. It is a term that has been associated with Foucaults work, and has come to mean the way power circulates among daily practices in order to create people to be the subjects they are. In a sense, Rancire, like Alain Badiou,[6] uses the term with an almost opposite inflexion. This does not mean that Rancire denies Foucaults studies. In fact, he does not, as we

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

have seen briefly above. The difference is solely terminological. While Foucault uses the term to describe particular historical unfoldings, Rancire uses it to describe a political phenomenon associated with a democratic politics. He defines subjectification this way: By subjectification I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience (Rancire, 1999: 35). Subjectification is a production that arises through collective action. It does not give rise to collective action, and therefore does not pre-exist the action. Neither does it arise from collective action as a consequence. It arises through such action, within and alongside it. What is it that so arises? In essence, a collective subject, a we. Where there once were only individuals, each seeking to survive as best he or she can, with the advent of a democratic politics there arises a subject of action, one whose members recognize one another and those in solidarity with them, and confront the police order as such a collectivity. In a striking formulation, Rancire claims that, Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity (Rancire, 1999: 11). He does not mean, of course, that nobody is poor before the emergence of a democratic politics. What comes to exist is not poor people, but the poor, a collective subject taking action that challenges the police orders presupposition of the inequality of poor people. We might be tempted to think that with subjectification we face the return of an identity politics. What, after all, is identity politics but an oppressed group taking action in its own name, whether that name be poor, black, queer, women, or, in another of Rancires examples, the proletariat? This would be a mistaken interpretation of his idea of subjectification. As a first approach to this, we must recognize that for Rancire, a democratic politics is declassifying rather than identifying. A democratic politics rejects the hierarchy of a police order, not in the name of particular identities, but only in the name of equality, the equality of every speaking being. There is no black or white, no women or men, no gays or straights, but simply equals. The poor that comes to exist as an entity is not some poorness that is possessed by people without money. It is instead, if we can use a cumbersome locution, the poor-as-equal-to-the-rich. And where all are equal, there are no distinctions to be made. The existence of the poor, then, is the existence of something previously unrecognized by the police order. Before democratic action, there were poor people, but no such thing as a poor-as-equalto-the-rich. That collective subject or better, collective subjectification, since we should think less in terms of a thing than a process is one that operates not by adding a new police category, but by undercutting the police categories (ex. poor people as less

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

deserving) that are in play. The difference that political disorder inscribes in the police order, Rancire writes, can thus, at first glance, be expressed as the difference between subjectification and identification. It inscribes a subject name as being different from any identified part of the community (Rancire, 1999: 37). One might want to object here that a vibrant identity politics does exactly what Rancire has just claimed: it inscribes a subject name that is different from anything previously identified in a given police order. However, this would miss what Rancire is saying. He is not claiming that subjectification gives us merely a new name, a name that could be added to the names already on offer in a given police order. The name of a political subject works not to posit another category, but rather to subvert a set of categories that characterize a police order. The essence of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it with the controversial figures of division (Rancire, 1995: 32-3). A subjectification, then, regardless of what name is used, is subtended by the idea of equality, an idea that works not by distinguishing one group from another but instead by undercutting the distinctions posited by a particular police order. We will return to the distinction between subjectification and identity below, but before doing that it is perhaps worth seeing how the idea of a democratic politics as we have sketched it helps navigate through the trilemma that seems to face progressive politics today. Recall the character of the trilemma. If we want to avoid both the reductionism of much of received Marxism and the ghettoization of identity politics, we seem driven toward individualist liberalism. If we want to avoid liberalism and seek to create an across-group solidarity that eludes much of identity politics, we find ourselves pushed toward a reductionist Marxism. Finally, if we want to avoid liberalism and the reductionism characteristic of many Marxist struggles, we seem to land in identity politics, with all the attendant difficulties of creating an overarching progressive politics. Rancires democratic politics is capable of recognizing the important elements of each of these politics, taking them on board, and eluding their problems. His is a theory that, with liberalism, recognizes the importance of each individual without subsuming him or her into a larger in-group identity. And, with identity politics, his theory recognizes the irreducibility of political struggles. Finally, in accordance with Marxist tenets, he offers the basis for a larger solidarity among groups. The lynchpin for all of these is the role the presupposition of equality plays in his thought. Liberalism seeks to protect the integrity of each individual, and it does so by invoking the concept of equality. In liberal thought, particularly that of recent liberals like John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Amartya Sen, each individual is to be treated equally by the governing institutions of a society. There are differences, of course, in what that

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

equality consists in. For Rawls it is liberty and opportunity, for Nozick only liberty, and while for Sen it is capabilities as measured by functionings and freedoms to function. Like liberal thinkers, Rancire also appeals to equality. And, like them, his concept of equality protects individual integrity. Each speaking being is presupposed to be equal to every other speaking being. Nobody is inferior. Therefore, each person in a democratic politics is to be treated with equal respect. There is a common ethical root that binds both liberalism and the democratic politics we have sketched here. It lies in the Kantian idea that nobody is to be treated solely as a means. Rawls, Nozick, and Sen explicitly embrace this idea. Rancire does not appeal to Kant, but its influence shows in his writings. However, having said that, we should immediately note that for liberal thought the Kantian idea issues out directly into some form of individualist liberalism. That is where Rancires thought breaks from liberal thought. Equality does not arise at the same point in his thought as in that of liberalism. For liberals, equality is what must be granted and/or preserved by state institutions with regard to citizens. For Rancire, equality is what is presupposed by those who act. Otherwise put, while for liberalism equality is a constraint on government in its relation to individuals, for a Rancirean democratic politics, it is a presupposition of those in political struggle. If we can put the point quickly, equality is bottom-up rather than top-down. It is because of the role that equality plays in Rancires thought that it can escape the individualism of liberal theory. Equality arises within the arena of collective struggle. It structures that struggle, at least when the struggle is democratic. Therefore, equality, rather than being offered to individuals as individuals, is instead an element of a struggle from below. People act collectively out of the presupposition of their equality, both to one another and to those in the police order that are said to be superior those who have a part, those who count. They press equality upon the police order, which, one hopes, has the effect of declassifying its terms, those terms that hold the hierarchical order in place. Equality, then, cuts against individualism and toward solidarity. In that way, it is closer to Marxism at least the reductionist Marxism we have invoked here rather than to liberalism. Consonant with this type of Marxism, Rancires thought recognizes that political struggle cannot be ghettoized into particular noncommunicating identities. What reductionist Marxism hoped to accomplish and, for a time and to a certain extent, succeeded was to align large swaths of oppressed people under a single banner, that of the proletariat. One might ask how accurate the term proletariat was for certain groups of people, but nonetheless it served to unite many of those who have no part, who do not count, in the capitalist order. In Rancires framework, the term equality performs the same function. Regardless of the specific struggle that one is engaged in, one is equal to everyone else, everyone who struggles and everyone

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

against whom one struggles. People involved in labor organizing, for instance, can see their immediate solidarity with those engaged in gay and lesbian rights work, as long as they are both committed to a democratic politics. They share a common presupposition of equality that subtends their particular issues, a presupposition that crosses the boundaries of those issues. I would argue, in fact, that the term equality works better than the term proletariat for creating solidarity. This is for two reasons. The first is that it is unclear who is and who is not among the proletariat. The term proletariat refers to those who work for those who own the means of production. Are housewives among the proletariat? For the autonomia movement in Italy they certainly were. It is unclear, however, how they work for those who own the means of production, except perhaps indirectly. On the other side of the coin, many highlevel managers, whose interests are aligned with large stockholders, do not actually own the means of production. They are aligned with the bourgeoisie, but are not technically owners (unless, of course, they also receive stock options as part of their compensation). What is it that aligns housewives with the proletariat and high-level managers with the bourgeoisie? We might say that if it is not precisely their relation to the ownership of the means of production, it is instead their place in the social order. Housewives are among the oppressed, highlevel managers among the oppressors. There is, however, another way to put this point. Housewives at least many of them do not count; they do not have a part. Unlike high-level managers, they are presupposed by the social order to be less than equal to those better placed in the police order. Equality, then, captures more accurately the issue at stake between various kinds of oppressors and various kinds of oppressed in a given police order. One might worry, however, that this way of putting things neglects what is crucial to Marxs analysis: the role capitalism plays in sustaining oppression. This, however, would misconceive the theoretical framework of a Rancirean politics. In the kind of democratic politics we have sketched here, there is certainly a role for the term proletariat to play. Those who own the means of production in a capitalist economic system indeed oppress those who work for them. And this form of oppression is neither marginal nor irrelevant. In our neoliberal world, it is crucial and inescapable. One might argue about whether the proletariat is exploited in the strict Marxist sense, for example whether exploitation requires Marxs labor theory of value and whether the labor theory of value is true. However, it is difficult to deny that large sections of the proletariat under neoliberal capitalism do not have a part to play other than to contribute their labor to sustaining it. Rancires political view does not deny any of this. His goal, rather, is to point out that while all forms of oppression are inegalitarian, not all forms can be given the specific economic inflection implied by the distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie. High-level managers,

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

while technically among the proletariat, are complicit along a variety of registers with a police order that denies various groups, including particular subgroups of the proletariat, a part to play in that order. And this is the second reason that the term equality works better than proletariat to ground solidarity among oppressed groups. What identity politics understood is that there are a variety of oppressions that, while often related, are irreducible. It could be argued that this is the founding insight of identity politics. Historically, if we see identity politics as emerging from the lefts rejection of traditional Marxist reductionism and the consequent turn to feminism, gay and lesbian politics, and African-American political expression, then it is precisely the lefts rejection of a solely class-based politics that grounds it. By invoking the concept of equality, Rancires democratic politics allows one to preserve this insight while, as we saw, retaining the solidarity identity politics has found so elusive. Why can it do this? The concept of equality is not only a different concept from that of the proletariat. It is also a different kind of concept. The proletariat is generally used referentially. It refers to a class of people. Sometimes, it is utilized to refer to a class in the making; that is, it might be composed of people to come as well as people already existent. And, once in his writings, Rancire refers to the historical example of Auguste Blanquis invocation of the concept as a form of subjectification (Rancire, 1999: 37).[7] However, he maintains that that invocation does not refer to a specific class of people defined by their place in the capitalist order. In a recent interview, he says, I have in fact always insisted on the difference between worker or proletarian subjectivation and all forms of economic, social or cultural identification of the worker which seek to make a subversive potential coincide with a certain place in a certain type of productive apparatus (Rancire, 2008: 180). Equality is both a descriptive term and a normative one. When Rancire uses the term descriptively, he gives it minimal content. Roughly, the idea is that everyone is equal who can speak with and understand one another and conduct their lives with one another in ways that are meaningful to them. This does not refer to a given class of people, but to more or less everyone. As a normative concept, it refers to how people ought to interact with one another. The appeal to equality, then, is an appeal that has minimal referential content combined with a certain normative force. This allows it the plasticity to be invoked in a variety of political contexts while at the same time maintaining an undergirding solidarity across those contexts. Women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and others, can all struggle in the name of their equality, because all of them are capable of conducting meaningful lives with one another i.e. all are speaking beings and all ought to be accorded and to accord one another the respect founded on that capacity. Here we can see how Rancires democratic politics combines the insight of Marxism the need for a democratic politics to have

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

solidarity with that of identity politics the need for struggles to be irreducible. And because this politics does so at the collective level, it maintains the recognition of individual worth without falling into the individualism of liberalism. We can see these elements at work in Rancires concept of subjectification. Subjectification refers to a collective process in which each member acts with others on the presupposition of his or her equality. Subjectification, as we have seen Rancire insist, is not to be confused with identification. Identification imposes qualities, usually qualities associated with a particular police order. The order word of subjectification is not blackness, the feminine, queerness, or any other particular content. Whatever name subjectification goes by in a particular struggle, its underlying meaning is nothing more than equality. This is the force of Rancires declaration that, when demonstrators in the Paris of 1968 declared, against all police evidence, We are all German Jews, they exposed for all to see the gap between political subjectificationand any kind of identification (Rancire, 1999: 59). One might wonder here whether some of the terms of solidarity used in identity politics could be constructed as names of subjectification. There is no bar to this, as long as one recognizes that those names would no longer refer to identity characteristics within a particular group, but to everyone as a matter of equality. One can imagine, for instance, in the wake of the murder of Matthew Shepherd, buttons appearing that said, We are all gays and lesbians, or even, in an inversion of the title of this paper, We are all queer. In this context, however, the references of the nouns would be to equality, not to any particular characteristic that some had or constructed for themselves but others did not. One might further wonder, however, whether it would really be possible to engage in a democratic politics of this kind in particular conditions when the motivating concept is bereft of all but the barest content. Is the concept of equality, shorn from any identity, capable of supporting a politics directed at specific hierarchical conditions? Or, put another way, dont we need the specific content of an identity in order to struggle against the identity imposed upon a part that has no part by the police order? Rancires politics does not deny that people in struggle see themselves as having particular identities. What is at issue is how the politics defines itself, or at least how its unfolding reveals it to be. We might put the point this way: an identity may be motivating for political actors, and it may structure the way they act, but what is politically relevant for a democratic politics does not have to do with any of that. It only has to do with whether the presupposition of equality is in play: that is, whether the action taken is reasonably seen as an expression of that presupposition. In order to illustrate this point, we can refer briefly to an example I have discussed at length elsewhere: the Zapatista movement in

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

southern Mexico (May, 2010: Chapter 4). The Zapatistas have struggled for indigenous rights, particularly around the area of Chiapas. This struggle has emphasized the ways in which the Mexican government in particular, and neoliberalism in general, have marginalized the indigenous people of that region, both economically and politically. The struggle has focused on gaining recognition of the legitimacy of indigenous cultural practices and allowing for political respect for the indigenous groups of southern Mexico. Moreover, many of the leaders of the Zapatistas have commented on how their struggle has been structured by lessons taught to them by the indigenous groups, particularly that of communal decision-making rather than avant-garde politics. This would seem to be a classic sort of identity politics. However, it is not. One might refer to the various declarations issued by the Zapatistas, which see their struggle as part of a larger struggle against neoliberal capitalism, and state their solidarity with other oppressed groups, such as the following:
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation speaks: To all who struggle for human values of democracy, liberty, and justice. To all who force themselves to resist the world crime known as Neoliberalism and aim for humanity and hope to be better, be synonymous of future. To all individuals, groups, collectives, movements, social, civic, and political organizations, neighborhood associations, cooperatives, all the lefts known and to be known; non-governmental organizations, groups in solidarity with struggles of the world people, bands, tribes, intellectuals, indigenous people, students, musicians, workers, artists, teachers, peasants, cultural groups, youth movements, alternative communication media, ecologists, tenants, lesbians, homosexuals, feminists, pacifists. To all who, with no matter to colors, race or borders, make of hope a weapon and a shield. (La Journada, 1996)

Even more relevant, however, has been the Zapatistas attempt to promote equality within the indigenous population. This is seen especially with regard to women. In the indigenous societies of southern Mexico, as in many places, women are marginalized from participation in the community. The Zapatista movement has not accepted this marginalization, and has struggled within those communities for the recognition of women as equals. This struggle has been called the revolution within the revolution. Its significance for our discussion here is manifest. When an element of the identity of an indigenous group comes in conflict with the presupposition of equality, that element must be sacrificed if the movement is to remain

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

a democratic movement and not simply a movement of identity politics. What this example shows is that it is possible to construct a politics that is rooted in particular local practices and traditions while at the same time presupposing the equality of every speaking being. Otherwise put, the generality of the concept of equality does not prevent one from organizing against particular hierarchies of particular police orders. It remains only to ask how one might conceive a post-identity politics gay and lesbian movement on the basis of the democratic politics we have articulated here. I can only gesture at some elements of this politics, since its specific tasks will remain with those who struggle. What should be emphasized above all, however, is that a Rancirean politics offers a route between the alternatives of a liberal politics that would seek to bring gays and lesbians into the mainstream on the one hand and a politics arising solely out of gay and lesbian identity on the other. The first alternative, of course, is the one of making gays and lesbians just like everyone else. Allow gays and lesbians to marry, and theyll be just like your straight neighbors.[8] The second alternative seeks to impose particular identities on people in order to give them a unique (essential or constructed) character. It not only can be confining for gays and lesbians, but also serves to isolate their struggle from that of other oppressed groups, with consequences that we remarked on earlier. The alternative marked out by a democratic politics would not involve giving up practices that have been developed historically within and around gay and lesbian communities, but neither would it base a politics upon them. Rather, it would see the people involved in those practices as nothing more or less than equal to people in other practices. Whether there are particular gay and lesbian forms of sexuality, whether there is or is not a gay gene, whether there are differences in the brains of homosexuals from heterosexuals: all of this is politically irrelevant. It is also irrelevant whether gays and lesbians are just like straight people, whether, as some t-shirts say, the gay lifestyle involves doing laundry, going to work, and cooking dinner. The question is solely one of presupposing the equality of every speaking being, and of resisting the police order at the points at which it denies that equality. That gays and lesbians should have equal rights seems obvious, not because they are gays and lesbians (as the right-wing critics of special rights claim), but because they are equal. Beyond that obvious measure, however, there are likely numerous other struggles. Those struggles require confronting the historical legacy that sees gays and lesbians not only as other but as somehow damaged or inferior. That confrontation can be constructed in many ways. In the process of its construction, however, it must be kept in mind that what is at issue is not the preservation of an identity but the

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

equality of those who seek to live as they see fit. And within the gay and lesbian movements themselves, the subjectification they create must reflect that presupposition if it is to be able to address both those who are not involved in the subjectification process and those who are involved in other processes of subjectification. A gay and lesbian politics, if it is to be a democratic politics, will not be a politics of queers. It will instead, be a politics of those who, regardless of their sexual orientation and practices, see one another as fellow members of a police order that can incorporate and co-opt almost anything into its operation: anything, of course, except equality. Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University. He is the author of ten books of philosophy, including Contemporary Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He has been active in a variety of political movements over the past several decades, including the anti-apartheid movement, gay and lesbian rights, and Palestinian solidarity. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Diane Enns, Ladelle McWhorter, and Diane Perpich for sensitive readings and generous suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. Notes 1. Identity politics, particularly as a rejection of Marxist reductionism, manifested itself both in theory and on the ground in political practice. As for the latter, one might point not only to gay and lesbian politics but also to the rise of the black power movement and certain forms of difference politics within feminism. Theoretically, some of the touchstones would be the seminal article by Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women (1975), as well as, on very different registers, the works of Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Mary Daly, Gayatri Spivak, Iris Marion Young, and others. 2. This loss, and the more general difficulties associated with identity politics, are detailed in a number of works, for example Wendy Browns States of Injury (1995), Carol Goulds Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (2004), and Wendy Williams The Equality Crisis: Some Reflections on Culture, Courts, and Feminism (1991). 3. My claim here, and throughout, is not that Marxist theory is necessarily reductionist, but that the dominant trend Marxist tradition, represented by what came to be called the socialist states, has become reductionist in practice. 4. I discuss this idea more fully in the first chapter of The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality (2008).

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

5. For more on this issue, see the fourth chapter of The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire. 6. For Badious use of the term, see his Being and Event (2005), Meditation 35. 7. Rancire analyzes Blanquis use of the concept to illustrate the distinction between identity and subjectification cited above, footnote 10. However, Rancires own reservations about Marxism appear in fourth chapter of Disagreement, where he argues that Marxism is a metapolitics, a reduction of the political to something behind it, i.e. economics. Here the term proletariat, although Rancire does not use it in this context, would play a very different role. 8. For important discussion of issues in gay marriage, see, for instance, Judith Butlers Undoing Gender (2004) and Michael Warners The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999). Bibliography Badiou, A. (2005), Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham, London: Continuum. Brown, W. (1995), States of Injury, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (2004), Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge. Gould, C. (2004), Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. La Journada (1996), Declaration of La Realidad, 30 January, accessed 5 October 2009, http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~zapatistas/ declaration.html May, T. (forthcoming 2010), Contemporary Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancire: Equality in Action, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ---. (2008), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality, Edinburgh & University Park: Edinburgh University Press and Penn State Press. Rancire, J. (1999) [1995], Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (1995) [1992], On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso Press.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Rubin, G. (1975), The traffic in women, in R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review Press. Warner, M. (1999), The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Williams, W. (1991), The equality crisis: some reflections on culture, courts, and feminism, in K. Bartlett & R. Kennedy (eds), Feminist Legal Theory, Boulder: Westview Press.

borderlands ejournal 2009

17

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

A Queer Politics of the Democratic Miscount


Samuel A. Chambers
Johns Hopkins University

This paper uses Jacques Rancires thinking of politics particularly his distinction between la police and la politique in order to insist upon the difference between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity politics, on the one hand, and a queer politics of relationality, on the other. I argue that Rancires conception of the democratic miscount can be understood as a queering of democracy precisely because Rancires refusal to reduce le compte des incompts to the marginalized or excluded produces a queer politics. The essay opens with a reading of the well-known Queer Nation chant, links this to Rancires understanding of the wrong, and then combines both with a discussion of the parallels between Judith Butlers understanding of unintelligibility and Rancires conception of the democratic miscount. I therefore conclude that Rancires democratic miscount is a queer form of counting and a queer form of politics.

I called it the count of the uncounted, the part of those who have no part. It was sometimes misunderstood as the part of the excluded. Rancire, Misadventures of Critical Thinking (2008: 15, emphasis added)

Is it possible to be old-fashioned when it comes to queer theory and queer politics? This seems an odd question to ask of two entities whose history is still less than two decades long, but I pose it at the start of this essay because I fear that my arguments here might be critically construed as insisting on a set of positions, relations, and analytical distinctions that many feel have already been surpassed. Of course, queer has been surpassing itself from the beginning: in an early essay within what we now might call the history of queer theory an essay that paradoxically helped to instantiate queer theory as a term and concept Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner suggested that queer was a fad that had already run its course (Berlant and Warner, 1995). Today, of course, queer is not just hot (as Berlant

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

and Warner described it so many years ago) in certain segments of academic and activist communities; queer is now completely mainstream. It shows up not only in the titles of television programmes, but also in just about every place imaginable within academia. Indeed, just because queer appears in the title of an academic paper, one should not necessarily expect to hear anything about queer theory la Sedgwick, Warner, or Butler; nor should one expect a discussion of queer politics or activism. Now it is becoming clearer why I may sound old-fashioned. So let me go ahead and lay my cards on the table. In this essay I wish to do more than maintain, I wish to insist upon a distinction between lesbian and gay identities, on the one hand, and a queer relation to norms, on the other. Noreen Giffney makes the point powerfully by putting it so succinctly: lesbian and gay studies does not equal queer theory (Giffney, 2004: 73). Today, however, in addition to a continuing tendency to falsely equate lesbian and gay with queer, we find a new trend to include queer within LGBT identity, i.e. to literally add it on. I reject as a rather monstrous construction this new trend of using LGBTQ (not to mention LGBTQQ) as a catch-all to describe the identity of any and every individual who somehow is not now, or someday will not be, heterosexual.[1] This means, most significantly, that I depart fundamentally from the idea that, over recent years, seems to have grown popular in implicit and subtle ways. This is the notion that queer is a term of inclusivity that what queer designates is an overcoming of everything that might divide lesbian women, gay men, transgender and transsexual individuals, bisexual men and women, and all of those who are unsure about their sexual orientation. Queer has become the etc. that used to appear in feminist analysis when authors often still working within a secondwave epistemological frame committed to and presupposing a certain universality of womens experience wanted to avoid leaving anyone out.[2] I contend, however, that queer does not and should not name an attempt to include anyone and everyone. I use queer here in a way that I think is consistent with the argument of those thinkers in the early 1990s who now often serve as the canon for queer theory (we could add de Lauretis, Halperin, and others to the list started above). In doing so, I am not merely rejecting the idea that queer designates a politics of inclusiveness. Much more than this, I wish to argue that queer politics is a politics that both identifies and remains committed to the impossibility of inclusivity. To put it in overly stark terms: LGBT politics is a politics of inclusiveness of diverse categories of gender and sexuality[3]; queer politics is a challenge and resistance to dominant and debilitating norms of gender and sexuality. This does not mean that the aims and goals of LGBT politics do not often intersect, overlap, and remain intermeshed with those of queer politics. It does mean, however, that we cannot collapse queer theory and politics into the frame of LGBT politics and identity-based liberal political theory. It means that the acronym LGBTQ must be refused, not arbitrarily or pedantically, but precisely because it serves to enervate queer theory and activism.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

To make the case for this particular approach to queer theory and politics, I attempt in this paper to map some queer dimensions in the thought of a writer who certainly has no place now, nor even in the future, in that queer theory canon. To trace this queer conjunction, I bring together the seemingly unrelated resources of a Queer Nation political chant, on the one hand, and Jacques Rancires conception of democratic political speech, on the other. Andrew Parker (2007) has already spotted, but not elaborated on, this connection. While I call the weaving together of Rancires logic of politics with the Queer Nation political chant a queer conjunction, Parker calls it ironic given Rancires own too-easy dismissal of sexual politics that one of the best approximations of what Rancire defines as properly political is the emergent Anglo-American model of queer politics (Parker, 2007: 75). Parker goes on to conclude his short essay with two provocative claims: first, that queer politics is anti-identitarian, anti-statist, [and] anti-normative to the extent that it resists the language and logic of LGBT politics, and second, that to understand Were here, were queer, get used to it [as] something other than a claim on behalf of an identity queer theorists ought to turn to Rancire as a resource for such thinking. By way of a much fuller explication of the logic of the chant (mapped onto a reading of Rancires work) and in an effort to thwart the move toward inclusiveness, this essay implicitly argues for the limits of any politics of representation or inclusion; thus, it articulates the limits of representation itself. The idea of that which cannot be included or represented proves to be a slippery one; every attempt to name it seems to make it representable and therefore to exceed or transcend the very limits being argued for. The danger of performative contradiction emerges at every turn. For this reason, the names vary: Davide Panagia (2006) calls it a politics of unrepresentability and I sometimes refer to it as a politics of unrecognisability or a politics of inaudibility.[4] Primarily, however, I develop this idea through the resources provided by Rancire and queer theory analysing, in particular, some dimensions of Judith Butlers thought. I focus most closely on Rancires understanding of democracy as the fundamental miscount of politics, complemented by Butlers concept of unintelligibility. Taken on their own, I would suggest, each conception is easily misunderstood. Just as queer resistance can be subsumed by lesbian and gay identity politics, so Butlers notion of unintelligibility is quickly reduced to a call for liberal inclusion. And like much of queer theory, Rancires conception of democracy is hastily dismissed as out of touch or simply too abstract. In this essay, to the contrary, I demonstrate that each conception can productively illuminate the other. Thinking these terms together, and thereby bringing to the surface the queer intersection that I mentioned above, not only produces a trenchant critique of interest-group liberal pluralism but also articulates a powerful vision of a queer politics a politics irreducible to either identity-politics or the call for inclusiveness.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

I. Queer Relationality, Queer Resistance


Were here! Were queer! Get used to it.[5]

How do we read this slogan and chant, popularised first by Queer Nation and used widely throughout the 1990s during marches, protests, demonstrations, and other events? How can we hear the words and what might they tell us about so-called queer theory today? Could the best-known slogan of queer activism actually offer some genuine insight into the possibilities for queer theory and politics? It would be easy enough to dismiss any such suggestion.[6] The logic is simple enough: rallies and marches need slogans and chants, and Queer Nation came up with a catchy one easy to remember, easy to yell, and offering a nice combination of political force and humour. But, this logic continues, there is no need to go much beyond this analysis, since the Queer Nation chant resonates closely with the most popular protest chant of them all the one that takes the formula, What do we want? ____! When do we want it? ____! The first blank can be filled by all sorts of demands: peace, equality, freedom, equal-pay, shorter hours, health care, etc. The second blank, almost invariably, is filled by the word now, which serves to intensify and add urgency to the demand.[7] Completing the logic, then, is also easy: just as women and blacks demanded their rights, so gays and lesbians demand theirs. There is a seductive simplicity to this analysis, but, I will argue, it does not do justice to the chant. While the logic that links the Queer Nation chant to What do we want? proves compelling, it proceeds only on the basis of an almost complete disregard for the content of the chant. For, if we look closely at the Queer Nation chant we must notice the stark difference between the two. Most importantly, we find no demand here. There is nothing that these queers want and thus no timeline for their wanting it. There are no specific claims whatsoever being made in this chant. This is not, in short, a claim for inclusion (Jagose, 1997: 112). The chant does identify some hard-to-describe subject were queer. And it gives it a geo-temporal location were here, where here denotes both the geographical and political space (at this march, on these streets, in this polity) and also echoes the temporal now of earlier protest chants. But the last line does not fit the script. Rather than, were here; were queer; give us our rights, rather than were here; were queer; we demand equality, we find nothing at all claimed by this queer subject, and nothing at all demanded from the other. Get used to it.[8]

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

I think that we can creatively and productively read the Queer Nation slogan as tapping into a number of the most crucial elements of the conceptualisation of queer as it emerged in the literature of the early 1990s. At the time, the importance of queer pivoted on the difference between it and a fixed, given (gay) identity. I place gay in parentheses here because one of the texts that played a crucial role in establishing queer theory was Judith Butlers Gender Trouble, a work that did not address itself directly to a lesbian and gay audience or subject, and that made no explicit effort to reconsider sexual identity. Moreover, Butlers work, like the similarly-influential books by Sedgwick and Halperin all of which were published in the same year, 1990 made no use of the term queer. Butler wrote as a feminist, but she did so in order to challenge the heterosexist assumptions built into second-wave feminisms commitment to the universal(isable) experience of women. And her argument proceeded by way of a deconstruction of the sex/gender distinction. To be clear, a deconstruction does not level or erase the distinction; it is not a destruction that would tear down what has been built. Rather, the deconstruction shows how the construction works. It reveals that there is construction going on in the first place. In the case of sex/gender, this means exploring the mechanism through which the distinction is produced and maintained. Thus, it was not that Butler wished to return to that pre-feminist time in which there was no difference between sex and gender (this is what a literal destruction or erasure of the sex/gender distinction would accomplish). Rather, she sought to challenge the idea that the difference between sex and gender mapped on to a difference between nature and culture. Butler countered - and she did so with great rhetorical force the typical narrative (it remained typical even if it often stayed in the background, implicit). This narrative tacitly attributed to sex the capacity to serve as a natural foundation from which (multiple) contingent gender would then develop a development carried out through politics, through culture, and through historical variation. Butlers most powerful set of rhetorical questions (as any reader of Butler knows, she loves rhetorical questions) took this form: how do we get at this idea of natural sex? Do we have any access to sex itself, or does sex only emerge within and through the discourses of gender? Thus, must we say not just that gender is socially constructed, but that the very distinction between sex and gender is itself constructed? Perhaps these questions beg one more: what does this have to do with queer? But this last question is not rhetorical: its answer lies in the content of Butlers deconstruction of sex/gender. The distinction between sex and gender is constructed, and the binary of gender difference is maintained, through a series of regulatory norms and mechanisms that Butler names the heterosexual matrix, and which today we might refer to as heteronormativity.[9] Binary gender only gets produced in the way that it does because of a primary presumption of heterosexual desire that lies at the centre of the matrix. And heteronormativity is just another name for heterosexuality

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

when it functions as a normative and normalising force (ORourke, 2005). Moreover, the problem of heteronormativity remains irreducible to the problem of homophobia. Putting the psychological problems of homophobia to one side, the political problems of homophobia can be dealt with just fine using a combination of identity-theory and liberal political theory. A theory of lesbian and gay identity would serve to locate and specify that minority group, i.e. lesbians and gay men, that would be subject to the threat of homophobia. Liberalism would offer a theory of minority rights and equality before the law designed to avert or lessen acts of discrimination or violence against such a minority group. But none of this would necessarily challenge or offer resistance to heteronormativity. Moreover, the effects of heteronormativity cannot be reduced to the idea of a homophobic discrimination against lesbians and gays. The entire liberal approach starts with the idea that there is a given and known subject of discrimination or oppression. But, I want to argue that it is precisely this assumption that a queer approach does, and must, challenge. And the recent writings of Rancire and Butler converge in their insistent thwarting of this liberal assumption and in their effort to theorise the remainder (that which can never be recuperated by interest groups) of the liberal, identitybased approach.[10] At this point in the analysis, however, the relevance of Butlers famous early work on sex/gender becomes clear, since she shows most powerfully in Gender Trouble that the category of woman cannot be presumed in advance. Therefore a feminist theory cannot stubbornly insist that politics only comes after the subject. If the category of woman and even the experience of woman only emerges within the terms of politics, then feminism must concern itself with the production of that category. Queer theory, I would insist, surely cannot be reduced to a mere analogy to feminism. Yet there can be no doubt that the third-wave feminist critique of second-wave feminism parallels and illuminates the queer critique of lesbian and gay identity politics. Whereas lesbian and gay (and also, in their own way, transgender and bisexual) both name identities based upon sexual orientation, queer points to no such fixed position. Lesbian and gay are identities; queer is a relationality. That is, queer describes a particular, relative, position in relation to norms of sexuality. There is therefore nothing fixed, nothing permanent about queerness; it is always context-dependent (although heteronormativity almost always makes up a significant part of the context in contemporary cases). On my reading, no one has stated this point more clearly yet forcefully than David Halperin. While Halperins formulation is almost 15 years old, it now seems more urgent to recall it and consider it with all seriousness, rather than move beyond it.[11] And it seems worth noting the context of Halperins definition of queer: it emerges most

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

strikingly not in his work on historiography or in his exploration of ancient Greek erotic practices, but rather in his explicitly political exegesis of Foucaults work. In articulating the queer politics of Foucault, Halperin argued for a thinking of queer in the following terms:
Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, queer does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. Queer, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis--vis the normative a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices. (Halperin, 1995: 62, emphasis in original)[12]

Working from this quote we can see that the question of queerness will depend upon the force of heteronormativity. Given the power and dominance of heterosexuality as a norm in contemporary European and North American societies, it seems safe to say that most lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender people find themselves in a queer position relative to the norm. But to see that many gay people are queer in this way is not to eliminate the difference between gay identity, on the one hand, and queer relationality, on the other. Let me enumerate just a few of the most important potential distinctions: 1. Even if being gay makes one queer, this does not reduce the dramatic difference between identifying oneself based upon the fixed, essential identity of gayness or identifying oneself with the non-essential positionality of queerness instead. Thus there remains a significant political difference between gay and queer precisely as a matter of political articulation, and even when a gay individual asserts or accepts his or her queerness (or vice versa). Some who are gay, may wish to deny their queerness. They may wish to reject the entire queer project precisely because what they seek is normalness itself to insist on the non-marginal (hence non-deviant) nature of their sexual identity. Here the debate between Andrew Sullivan and Michael Warner proves powerfully illustrative, since what Sullivan (a self-identified gay man) wants is a normalised gayness that eliminates queerness, while Warner (a self-identified queer) rejects normality and refuses fixed gay identity in favour of a radically politicised queerness.

2.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

3.

There are many who are queer, but not necessarily gay. Halperin lists married couples without children or married couples with naughty children (Halperin, 1995: 62, Halperins emphasis). But the list can obviously be extended to non-married couples (who are queer at least to the extent that they refuse the telos of marriage that is operative within heteronormativity). And Warner extends it to sex-workers, non-monogamists, and really to any sex that goes on outside the sanctity and politically-constructed privacy of heterosexual, state-sanctioned (and perhaps religiously-sanctioned pro-creative) marriage.[13] There can be no doubt that those who fit into this positional category will often not be subject to radical political disenfranchisement and will not be exposed to physical violence in the way that many LGBT individuals are. We must therefore be vigilant in refusing to diminish the danger of gay-bashing and homophobia, and in struggling against efforts to deny lesbian and gay men their civil rights. Nevertheless, it should also be clear that queer positionality is not a badge of victimisation to be claimed, and to insist upon both the importance of queerness and its difference from gayness, is as should be obvious not to equate the two nor to perversely privilege (as in the ranking of victimisations) one over the other. It is simply to maintain that the power of heteronormativity serves to render queer a variety of sexual practices, performances, and behaviours, not all of which are reducible to gay identity. And finally, the wrong of heteronormativity cannot be subsumed by the wrong of homophobia the latter simply cannot capture the effects of the former.

This elaboration of the difference between gay identity and queer relationality brings us back to the chant: were here! were queer! get used to it. I argue that the slogan makes most sense as an expression of a queer resistance to the norm. While it has surely, and quite often effectively, been used as a device of LGBT politics, the slogan itself conveys a queer struggle with the norm. It does not assert an identity and demand recognition or rights. Instead, it articulates a positionality with respect to dominant norms, and it expresses a certain defiant resistance to those norms. None of this should come as much of a surprise to those who know the history of Queer Nation, a group that emerged out of ACT-UP (the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power). ACT-UP still today describe themselves as a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals ... committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis (ACT-UP NY website). Queer activism surely preceded queer theory, as the response to the AIDS crisis quickly demanded a coalition, a diverse group who would act in the face of the challenges that AIDS posed challenges that affect a wide swath of the population far exceeding the communities of gay men who were most likely, especially early on in the epidemic, to be the direct victims of the syndrome.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Heteronormativity rendered the AIDS crisis invisible; ACT-UP therefore mobilised in reaction to the AIDS crisis, and this mobilisation required a resistance to heteronormativity (first and foremost, in the form of making the crisis visible). But ACT-UP did not seek any form of inclusion into a form of interestgroup politics.[14] Indeed, Warner would loudly insist that the choices, strategies and actions of national gay interest groups like the Human Rights Campaign have often been decidedly un-, if not anti-, queer (Warner, 1999). I want to stress here that the Queer Nation slogan, in continuing the politics of ACT-UP, cannot be reduced to a claim for equal inclusion. But this brings us back to the original question: how do we hear the chant? If it calls not for a liberal politics of demands for inclusion, then how can we elucidate the queer politics that it evocatively suggests? II. From Demands to Wrongs Rancire would be quick to point out that the question of what and how we hear a certain question of visibility as audibility is the original question of politics, at least according to Aristotle. Aristotle opens his discussion and founds his argument in the Politics with perhaps his most famous lines:
For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well ... but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from other animals. (Aristotle, 1996: 1253a)

On its face, and as traditionally read, this would seem to be an argument not about hearing, but about speaking. Aristotle says that we can distinguish anthropos (the human) from zoon (the animal), because the latter have only phone (mere voice), while the former are endowed with logos (reasoned speech). This looks on its surface like an ontological distinction, one which precedes politics; hence Aristotle completes his logic by showing that anthropos is precisely a political animal because his possession of the logos gives him the ability to deliberate and to judge fundamentally political acts. And Aristotle even links this argument to a certain anthropology: we always find the logos-possessing anthropos living not just in a social group (a family or a village) but in the polis, a political community. Unlike the beasts or gods, from which he is fundamentally distinguished and whom might be found in nature or the heavens anthropos lives in the polis. Rancire, however, contests the ontological argument by showing that the difference between phone and logos cannot be constituted prepolitically, and this, because the speaking animal must be heard. There is a politics of audibility that interrupts Aristotles neat distinction

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

between man and animal, between ontology and politics. Rancire disrupts the tidy Aristotelian logic by identifying a practical difficulty:
how one can be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths. (2001: par. 21)

The question of speech and voice cannot be determined by a prepolitical account. It can only be determined politically through the act of hearing, of recognition. This is a politics of (in)audibility (those that one hears and those that one does not hear); it is a politics of (in)visibility (those that one sees and those that one does not see), (Rancire, 1999: 22). Logos cannot be taken as that tool that makes politics possible, since it is precisely the logos that will provide a hearing for any political articulation. Rancire puts it this way: the speech that causes politics to exist is the same that gauges the very gap between speech and the account of it (Rancire, 1999: 26). Aristotles logos is thus not a ground, but a paradox. And Rancires politics, like a queer politics, proves to be both paradoxical and groundless. To draw out the substantive links between Rancires account and the project of queer theory and politics requires engaging and activating this paradox in Rancires argument. Rancires re-reading raises the question of where the account will come from? How do we read, hear, or see a creature as human or animal? If we cannot make the political/non-political distinction prior to politics, then the difference will only emerge within politics. And for Rancire, this means that the political account only comes about through disagreement, through the staging of a conflict, through the declaration of a wrong. Parties do not exist prior to the conflict they name and in which they are counted as parties (1999: 27, emphasis added). Only a political conflict can determine the parties to the conflict, but this means that there are no parties prior to the conflict. Rancire does not resolve this paradox.[15] Rather, he repeatedly restates and re-animates the paradox itself by demonstrating the ultimately contingent basis of politics: politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society (1999: 16). This oft-quoted passage from Disagreement is echoed in both earlier and later writings where Rancire explains, through a reading of Platos Laws, the difference between democracy and all other political forms. In that canonised text, Plato lists seven different titles to rule. Rancire focuses his reading on the seventh, final, and apparently extra title: a title that is not a title, and that ... is nevertheless considered to be the most just. It is the drawing of lots, the principle of randomness as the principle of rule (Rancire, 2006: 40). This final claim to rule has no basis in a principle at all. It is not an

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

arkhe (a principle of rule), but a kratos (a mere prevailing) (Rancire, 1995: 94). Rancires argument here crosses with Butlers queer deconstruction of sex/gender, discussed above. Just as Butler refuses to allow the contingency of gender to be grounded in the solidity of sex, so Rancire resists the temptation to give politics any ontological grounding. At bottom, we find nothing but sheer contingency. Yet for both Rancire and Butler this is not a nihilistic conclusion, but one which demands responsible action since social orders contingent though they may be are also hierarchical, exclusionary, and often violent. And Rancire also exposes the full force of such a paradoxical politics by insisting that politics is not the articulation of demands, not the claims of interest groups. Politics is not the announcement or claim of identities (LGBT, or any other) by pre-given parties. Politics is the declaration of wrongs, the staging of disagreements that serve to constitute the very parties of politics. This is why he can write, as he does in the quote above, and then later in the text, that parties do not exist prior to the declaration of wrong (Rancire, 1999: 39). Logically, the declaration of the wrong must precede those parties who would declare it. The declaration comes before they exist. This is not mere double-speak. Rancire uses this paradoxical language in order to insist upon his deconstructive reading of Aristotle. We will only know if the chant we hear is the slogan of a political group, if we hear that chant as a political articulation and not as mere babbling. And the slogan itself, that which declares the wrong, will also constitute the party to the wrong. But the process cannot be guaranteed in advance, and Rancires politics leaves ample room for the possibility of failure. This means that sometimes, perhaps often, a slogan or chant constitutes nothing more than mere noise (phone). Sometimes, however, a claim is heard as a political claim (as logos), and it thereby serves to articulate a wrong. When this occurs, at precisely this political moment, we have the miscount that, for Rancire, defines democratic politics. In the next and final section I will use Rancires understanding of democracy as a miscount in order to argue not only for the specificity of queer theory, but also for queer politics as a democratic politics in Rancires sense. II. The Queer Miscount Rancires approach resonates most strongly with queer theory on precisely the question of identity. If, as Rancire insists, the wrong is itself that which constitutes the party that would declare it and if both the constitution of the party and the declaration of the wrong come about through the action of politics then the politics involved here can never be based on identity. Identity, and with it interests, demands and claims, can never precede the political declaration of a wrong. Identity is therefore relational for Rancire, just as it is in queer theory. Whereas queer identity must always be grasped in relation to norms, Rancire thinks identity in relation to the political moment. And just as queer theory can easily accept and account for a lesbian and

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

gay identity as articulated on a model of fixed sexual orientation, so Rancires understanding of the police makes space for a conception of social identity as given, fixed, and hierarchical. As is well-known and much discussed in the literature, Rancire calls this order in which identities, roles, and positions are distributed, a police order (Rancire, 1999: 28; cf. Rancire, 2001: pars. 1921). Rancire defines politics in contrast to all that the police order subsumes, and this includes legislation, policy-making, and all of interest-group competition and compromise. Politics is the interruption of the police order through a declaration of a wrong; politics occurs when a logic of domination is confronted by a logic of equality. And the presumption of equality that is demonstrated through political action amounts to a queering of the police order. The political moment, in Rancire, is a queer moment. Rancires radical and polemical rendering of the original Aristotelian political scene can thereby be used to throw into stark relief the distinction between a lesbian and gay identity politics, on the one hand, and a queer politics, on the other. As I have argued previously, a gay identity can be established through an expressive act the declaration of coming out, literally saying, I am gay. But a queer identity can only be articulated within the context of particular norms, particular sets of power relations that is, within a specific political context.[16] Rancires argument also highlights the difference between a (mis)reading of the Queer Nation chant as a set of demands by a given interest group, and an interpretation of this slogan as a queer political articulation a declaration of wrong that brings into existence the queer party to politics. The Queer Nation chant must be seen as the articulation of political voice by the voiceless a declaration of a wrong that brings about a party that does not exist beforehand. The slogan must therefore be heard as a resistance to heteronormativity, given that heteronormativity would, on first reading, render queerness invisible or impossible. Were here! Were queer! makes the invisible or impossible queers, visible. But it does not bring out the visibility of this new human animal with logos merely to have that animal articulate a demand; rather, it insists on a certain distance from the norm get used to it and thereby refuses to be absorbed within the terms of that norm.[17] Of course, one could plausibly argue that getting used to it names precisely a process of normalisation, wherein that which was once at odds with the normal becomes less so precisely because we are used to it. But I would insist that, when chanted on the streets, the illocutionary force of the phrase resists this process of normalisation. Get used to it is not a call for recognition as normal, but rather an insistence that deviation from the normal will persist. After all, what we, as those who hear the chant, are supposed to get used to is precisely the fact that they are queer not that they are like us but that they never will be. What we, who yell get used to it, are announcing is our deviance from the normal, our distance from them, who hear the chant and who are thought to occupy a place closer to the median point on the normal curve. If queer is that which resists

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

normativity,[18] then getting used to it must mean not normalisation but a persistence of queerness. There is therefore something about the Queer Nation chant that does not add up. It introduces a new term into the equation, but without balancing out the equation; indeed, it establishes the new variable precisely so as to throw the equation out of balance. For Rancire, such fuzzy math is the very stuff of democracy. Democracy, we might say, is the regime that cant count properly. This is precisely what makes democracy a space or moment of impropriety, and it is also why democracy, in truth, is not a regime at all (Rancire, 2006: 6973). Rancire describes the democratic subject (thus, the political subject par excellence) as le compte des incompts the count of the unaccounted-for. Democracy is a miscount because democratic politics only comes about when those who have no part in the social order stake a claim, and take a part, within it. There is politics argues Rancire, only when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor (Rancire, 1999: 11, with a different translation of le compte des incompts). I have previously glossed this argument of Rancires by referring to democratic politics as the taking-part of those who have no part (Chambers, 2005: par. 1). This translation has the benefit of expressing the point in its properly paradoxical form (those who have no part, take part), but it flirts with the danger of overstating the willed participation of a party prior to politics. In other words, it runs the risk of returning us to the liberal interest-group politics that I have been at pains throughout this essay to distinguish from Rancirean politics. And as Rancire stresses, the party of the poor that has a part only when there is politics does not initiate political action but rather is brought about by political action. In other words it is only politics that causes the poor to exist as an entity (Rancire, 1999: 11, emphasis added). And this paradoxical formulation can be elaborated (if never quite explained) when we see that unlike any other political system, democracy involves a form of rule in which there is no title to rule. It is not aristocracy, rule by the best; it is not oligarchy, rule by the rich; instead, democracy is rule by anyone at all. The title to rule in democracy is the lack of any title whatsoever (Rancire, 2006: 41; cf. Rancire, 1995: 94). But this is why democracy always involves a miscount, since it always amounts to counting those who do not, who ought not, count inscribing the part of those who have no part (Rancire, 2007: 99). As Rancire stresses in the epigraph to this article, the part that has no part must not be misunderstood as the part of the excluded (2008: 15, emphasis added). To include the excluded would be merely to count differently; it would not amount to a fundamental miscount (Rancire, 1999: 6). For this reason, Rancire describes the proletariat the excluded, the poor as the class of the uncounted that only exists in the very declaration [account] in which they are counted as those of no account (Rancire, 1999: 38). This miscount

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

is therefore not a failure to count properly, and it surely is not that which calls for a recount. The miscount names an irreducible remainder; it points to a persistent unaccounted-for within any count.[19] Like Butlers theory of unintelligibility, the miscount demands a more rigorous understanding of the problems of democracy. Democracy cannot solve all problems merely through inclusion or recognition (cf. Deranty, 2003). The struggle against oppression will surely be an important one, but democratic politics both precedes and exceeds the problem of oppression. In line with the thinking of queer that I articulated in the opening section, Butler frames the issue in terms of norms. Norms, Butler shows, render some lives (some genders, some sexualities, some races, some nationalities) legible and intelligible. And certain norms create a zone of indiscernibility that goes beyond a question of recognition. Butler calls this unintelligibility. She writes:
To be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as a visible and oppressed other for the master subject ... To be oppressed you must first become intelligible. To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and language find you to be an impossibility) is to find that you have not yet achieved access to the human, to find yourself speaking only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not. (Butler, 2004: 30, emphasis added)

And we can easily draw the connection that Butler leaves implicit here: to find yourself rendered unintelligible, is surely to find yourself in a queer relation to dominant norms. To be unintelligible means to exist in a zone of inaudible, invisible marginality, such that norms of gender and sexuality make one illegible. Butlers own theory of unintelligibility emerges within the specific concept of theorising marginalised genders and sexualities, particularly trans-genderism. But it seems to me that Butlers specific arguments here fit well with the broader and more abstract frame in which Rancire theorises politics, and Butler herself has recently expanded her theory to think about rogue viewpoints that are rendered unthinkable and unspeakable by norms of legitimacy as well as by governmental policy (Butler, 2009: 795). When politics occurs and Rancire consistently reminds his readers that such occurrences are infrequent the conflictual conjunction of the logic of equality with the logic of domination serves, on the one hand, to render that order of domination visible and, on the other, to expose (as intelligible) the very subject of politics that had previously remained unintelligible (cf. Butler on dissent). But, put in the language of queer theory, this means that politics both exposes the norm and questions its dominance in the name of that which it would make queer. Thus, as Rancire says, politics occurs through the democratic miscount. We can add: politics occurs when the unintelligible make themselves intelligible.

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

It is precisely his insistence on the miscount that makes Rancires a very queer thinking of politics. By refusing any conflation of le compte des incompts with the excluded, the marginalised, or the victimised, Rancire consistently queers democracy. What I mean by this is that in maintaining a fidelity to dissensus, to the possibility of disagreement a situation of conflict not over the object of speech but over what speaking means (Rancire, 1999: xi) Rancire also maintains a fidelity to queerness, to a marginality that cannot merely be included within the dominant frame of the current police order.[20] The democratic miscount is a queer form of counting and a queer form of politics. These claims can make sense, of course, only if we maintain the distinction for which I argued at the outset: between a lesbian and gay identity politics, and a queer theory of both relational identity, and it would now seem, also politics itself. But just as the argument for queering Rancires arguments, for reading them with and through the lens of this queer understanding of norms and relational identity, just as this approach depends upon the distinction between LGBT and queer, so too does the reading offer further independent support for holding on to such a distinction. This is the case to exactly the extent that LGBT politics can and should, from Rancires perspective, be subsumed under the category of the police. And there can be no doubt that much of what travels today under the name of mainstream LGBT politics, especially in the USA through the institutions of Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal, fits Rancires definition of police perfectly. This serves as neither an explicit nor an implicit critique of these groups in particular, or of LGBT politics in general; instead it serves, again, to remind us of the importance of maintaining a space for a potential moment of politics that might disrupt and thereby rearrange the police order. Such is the promise, even if often (and necessarily so) unrealised, of queer politics. Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He has recently published The Queer Politics of Television (IB Tauris, 2009). His previous publications include the monographs Untimely Politics (NYU 2003) and Judith Butler and Political Theory (with Terrell Carver, Routledge 2008), edited volumes on William Connolly and Judith Butler, respectively, and numerous journal articles. He is currently writing a book on the politics of social orders. Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to Michael ORourke, not only for thinking up the idea for this special issue in the first place but also for his tireless work and ceaseless intellectual generosity; I hope very much to meet him one day. I thank both anonymous reviewers for their careful readings and patient, critical engagements, and I owe a large debt to one reviewer for insisting I push my argument further in the direction it was already headed and for locating a mis-reading (my own) that I

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

had somehow transformed into a mis-translation (of Rancire). Early versions of arguments that found their way into this essay were first tried out on audiences at the University of Essex in 2006 and at Johns Hopkins University in 2007. My spring 2009 graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins provided an excellent atmosphere to think through the conclusions of this argument; my thanks to all members of the seminar for their hard work and vibrant intellectual energy. I am, as always, in debt to Rebecca Brown for reading various drafts along the way. Notes 1. For just one prominent example from current work, see Carolyn Dinshaw (2006) The History of GLQ, Volume 1: LGBTQ Studies, Censorship, and Other Transnational Problems, GLQ 12.1: 526. I cite Dinshaw not as an object of critical scrutiny, but simply as a banal instance of the normalised usage of LGBTQ. For those unfamiliar with the term, LGBTQQ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning. While this extended acronym has yet to appear regularly in academic literature within lesbian and gay studies, it has grown in usage and popularity among lesbian and gay support groups. As of 22 January, 2009, a Google search for lgbtqq turns up 8,780 hits; compare with 483,000 for lgbtq and 10,700,000 for lgbt. For spurring me to think about this acronym, I thank Kathryn Trevenen (Trevenen, 2009). 2. The feminist etc. appears in a variety of works in the 1990s, but it seems most prominent within the theory of intersectionality, which posits the intersection of gender and gender oppression with race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, etc. (see Collins, 1990, 1992, 2000). I do not believe the phrase feminist etc. used to identify and criticise the epistemology of this approach is mine, but my concerted search for the original source has come up empty. 3. Indeed, LGBT needs the etc. that queer has recently come to stand in for it needs to become the ungainly LGBTQ precisely to achieve the goal of including everyone. 4. The project developed here has important affinities with, and therefore takes shape against the background of, a significant body of recent work in contemporary political theory that converges on a critique of liberalism. For example, both Wendy Browns interrogation of the discourse of tolerance and Benjamin Arditis engagement with populism develop important critiques of interest-group pluralism (Brown, 2006; Arditi, 2007). My argument operates in parallel with works such as these, but it emphasises a dimension that has been overlooked: the crucial contribution that queer theory and politics can play in this broader project. 5. From here on I offer an extended reading of these seven words, but I am certainly not the first to analyse this slogan. Duttman (1997)

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

provides a detailed and lengthy exegesis in the context of theorising the politics of recognition, while Arditi and Valentine (1999) draw from Duttmans own work to help them render their crucial distinction between polemic and polemicisation. Both texts offer rich accounts from which I see no need to take a critical distance. Nonetheless, my emphasis remains very much distinct; Arditi and Valentine interpret Duttman (rightly, I think) as arguing that on the surface, this is a demand for recognition (Arditi and Valentine, 1999: 1). But I would contend that even on the surface the Queer Nation chant resists this reading. Duttman explores a certain negative dialectics of recognition through his extended meditations on the chant, but on my account the slogan itself refuses the dialectical game of recognition in the first place. To read it otherwise is to run the risk of reducing it to the standard formula of minority identity politics, as I discuss in detail in the text below. 6. Some would argue, and many more would implicitly assume or tacitly imply, that the realms of academic theory and direct action on the street remain irreconcilably distant. Their proof for this position often appears to amount to the evident fact that essays and arguments published in journals and books are not the same as the passing of legislation, the signing of laws, the issuing of executive orders, or the judgement of judges. That, of course, is true. But what Id like to call the academic political lament the enunciation of the worry that writing and argument never changes anything always seems to constrict the realm of the political and to severely constrain the concept of change. After all, who wants to cede politics to politicians? If they are our only hope, then theres not much hope at all. Moreover, arent the best politicians the ones who refuse precisely this move, the ones who think that politics does have something to do with the people? From JFKs ask not what your country can do for you... to the slogan that ran for over a year on candidate Barack Obamas website, which tells its visitors that it is they who hold the power of change, we see in certain political leaders a vision of politics as something that greatly exceeds the actions and decisions of those in power. Thought from the other side of the equation, we might also recall the unscientific study conducted by Halperin of ACT-UP activists who unanimously reported the inspiration and argument provided to their politics by the writings of Foucault (Halperin 1995: 15-16). In either case, and in other words, if those doing the politics can refuse a radical theory/practice dichotomy, shouldnt we theorists be able to resist it as well? 7. For an interesting, hands-on illustration of the tactical uses of this slogan, see the Rolling Earth, Movement Education website, and its blog post on What do we want? When do we want it (accessed 29 October 2008, http://www.re.rollingearth.org/?q=node/131). The strategic arguments about using the chant provide good evidence for my reading of its politics in the form of demands for equal rights and inclusion.

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

8. However, this is surely not to say that the statement get used to it does nothing. Indeed, I would argue that it does a great deal more than to assert the claims or demands of interest-group liberalism. Rather than making a claim of inclusion, rather than requesting something of the dominant power structure, get used to it declares a powerful distance between those who occupy the dominant position and those who chant the slogan, and it refuses an opportunity to close down that difference. It signals a refusal by those on the margins to move to the centre. Get used to it is also, notably, an imperative sentence; it tells others what they have to do. And the changes within the norms that are announced by the imperative must be brought about by those who occupy the centre of the norm. It asserts that those on the margins will continue to be who they are namely, queer and argues that any alterations will have to come about by way of broader changes to the norm. This is therefore a potentially subversive claim, since it refuses to reify or even respect heteronormativity. 9. In previous work I have made the full case for reading Butlers concept of the heterosexual matrix through the later-developed language of heteronormativity. In Gender Trouble Butler shows that it is the heterosexual matrix that binds together sex, gender, and sexual desire, and she articulates the workings of this matrix through the complementary concepts of regulatory practices and gender intelligibility. I argue that these concepts can be fleshed out with the language of heteronormativity, as coined by Warner (1993). See Chambers (2007); cf. Chambers and Carver (2008). 10. For a great deal more on the remainder, especially as it distinguishes distinct approaches to the political within the field of political theory, see Honig (1993). 11. This serves as a partial explanation for why I myself return again and again to this now-famous Halperin quote. For some of my earlier explications, in distinct contexts, see Chambers (2003) and Chambers (2009). 12. In a potentially tangential line of inquiry, I would ask directly at this moment: how, then, could the positionality of queer be included within the identity space of LGBT? I would argue that the Q in LBGTQ functions in an utterly antithetical manner to the Q in the journal title, GLQ. As Dinshaw explains when discussing their decision not to call the journal Queer Quarterly: we did hang on to one Q in the title, GLQ, to let queerness do whatever work it could. The name of the journal, then, is not an acronym. The G and the L do stand for gay and lesbian, but the Q is a sliding signifier (Dinshaw, 2006: 9). It slides, as Halperin and Dinshaw explain in their original editorial statement, between quarterly and queer (Dinshaw and Halperin, 1993: iiiiv). And one might go on to argue that in letting the Q slide, Halperin and Dinshaw make it queer in a more significant way: by refusing to let its position be fixed, by refusing to make it correspond

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

to any particular name. But rather than queering what comes before, as is the case with the sliding Q of GLQ, the Q in LGBTQ serves as an all-inclusive remainder. It is a broad and loose category, a placeholder for everything else, but in becoming a placeholder it loses its positionality. It cannot queer anything. Dinshaws own article illustrates this point, since she carefully explicates the sliding signifier in GLQ while repeatedly, consistently, and always unproblematically using LGBTQ as an identity category. 13. And well before folks like Warner and Halperin helped to make the distinction in this language, Gayle Rubin laid the groundwork for it in her pioneering work on normalisation and/of sexuality (Rubin, 1999 [1984]). 14. As Arditi and Valentine argue, any reliance on a topography of minorities and majorities as the referent of the dispute becomes counterproductive. It simply reduces the incommensurability of the opening to a common measure, and thus eradicates it (Arditi and Valentine, 1999: 23, emphasis added). 15. The insistence on resolving the paradox always diminishes any effort to think beyond inclusion; it reduces it to a politics of inclusion. Butler and Rancire converge at exactly the paradoxical formulation of politics that animates Spivaks famous, and broadly misread, essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak, 1988) Spivak was formulating a critique of the politics of inclusion (within the context of postcolonialism), but her question and answer title and essay led to a misreading of her work within the terms of a politics of inclusion. Butler and Rancire formulate their own paradoxes. For Rancire, we might say that the paradox amounts to counting those who do not count; or better, it means, in Rancires own words conceptualis[ing] democratic practice as the inscription of the part of those who have no part (Rancire, 2007: 99). For Butler, it means coherently discussing the unintelligible (i.e. without thereby rendering them simply intelligible). 16. For a much more detailed account of this distinction, particularly as it relates to theories of language, see Chambers (2003). 17. As an anonymous Borderlands reviewer has insightfully and helpfully pointed out to me, the case of queer/LBGT poses in specific form an important general question to Rancires work: is the effect of politics merely to constitute a new police order? I see such a question as crucial to any exploration of Rancires work on politics, and I would elaborate it as follows: does the irruption of politics into the police order the emergence of parties to a wrong, of the part that has no part simply lead to a new police order that can now count those who were previously of no account? And, as the reviewer also asks, havent Rancires own privileged examples of parties that declared a wrong (workers and women) simply become part of the police order? In this light I would suggest that my own effort in this

19

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

essay to maintain a distinction between queer politics as a Rancirean disruption of the police order, on the one hand, and LGBT identity politics (the phrase is a contradiction in terms when thought through Rancires political logic), on the other, can therefore be thought as an attempt to prevent consolidation of a new police order to keep the possibility of queer politics alive. 18. Here it should be noted that queer resists not just heteronormativity but all normativity, and in many contexts this means that queer stands opposed to homonormativity as well - perhaps even more so. Thanks go to an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this important point. 19. For pointing me toward these passages in Rancire and for insisting on the unassimilable nature of the unaccounted, I again thank an anonymous reviewer. 20. Here my language echoes the title to a conference on Rancires work, held in London in 2003, Fidelity to the Disagreement. The name for this conference offered more than a placeholder for various academic engagements with Rancires writings; it attempted to articulate an element of Rancires writing in which he not only describes politics as dissensus, but himself attempts to honour, and maintain space for, such dissensus. The argument contained within the conference title and blurb can probably be attributed to Benjamin Arditi. Bibliography Andersen, M.L. & Hill Collins, P. (1992), Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, New York: Wadsworth. Arditi, B. & Valentine, J. (1999), Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arditi, B. (2007), Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aristotle. A. & Everson, S. (1996), The Politics, and the Constitution of Athens, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Berlant, L. & Warner, M. (1995), What does queer theory teach us about x?, PMLA, vol. 110, no. 3, pp. 343-9. Brown, W. (2006), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (1999), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edn, London & New York: Routledge.

20

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Butler, J. (2004), Undoing gender, London & New York: Routledge. Carver, T. & Chambers, S.A. (2008), Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, New York: Routledge. Chambers, S. (2005), The politics of literarity, Theory and Event, vol. 8, no. 3. Chambers, S.A. & Carver, T. (2008), Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, London & New York: Routledge. Chambers, S.A. (2003), Untimely Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chambers, S.A. (2007), Normative violence after 9/11: rereading the politics of gender trouble, New Political Science, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 43-60. Chambers, S.A. (2009), The Queer Politics of Television, London: I. B. Tauris. Deranty, J.P. (2003), Jacques Rancire's contribution to the ethics of recognition, Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 1, p. 136. Dinshaw, C. & Halperin, D.H. (1993), From the editors, GLQ, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. iii-v. Dinshaw, C. (2006), The history of GLQ, volume 1: LGBTQ studies, censorship, and other transnational problems, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 5-26. Garcia Duttmann, A. (1997), The culture of polemic: misrecognizing recognition, Radical Philosophy, no. 81, pp. 27-34. Giffney, N. (2004), Denormatizing queer theory: more than (simply) lesbian and gay studies, Feminist Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 73. Gunoun, S., Kavanagh, J.H. & Lapidus, R. (2000), Jacques Rancire: literature, politics, aesthetics: approaches to democratic disagreement, SubStance, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 3-24. Halperin, D.M. (1995), Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, USA: Oxford University Press. Halperin, D.M. (1990), One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love, illustrated edn, New York: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. (1990), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Boston: Unwin Hyman.

21

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Hill Collins, P. (1998), Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honig, B. (1993), Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Jagose, A. (1996), Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. May, T. (2008), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. O'Rourke, M. (2005), On the eve of a queer-straight future: notes toward an antinormative heteroerotic, Feminism & Psychology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 111-16. Panagia, D. (2006), The Poetics of political Thinking, Durham: Duke University Press. Parker, A. (2007), Impossible Speech Acts, in M. McQuillan (ed.), The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, London: Pluto Press. Pocock, J.G.A. (2003), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ---. (2009), Queer Cosmopolitanism: Rights? unpublished manuscript. From Hip Hop to Human

Rancire, J. & Corcoran, S. (2006), Hatred of Democracy, London: Verso. Rancire, J. & Panagia, D. (2000), Dissenting words: a conversation with Jacques Rancire, Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 113-26. Rancire, J. (2007), Does Democray Mean Something, in Douzinas (ed), Adieu Derrida, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 84-100. ---. (1995), On the Shores of Politics, New York: Verso. ---. (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2001), 10 theses on politics, Theory & Event, vol. 5, no. 3. ---. (2004), Who is the subject of the rights of man? South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2-3, pp. 297-310. ---. (2008), Misadventures in Critical Thinking, unpublished

22

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

manuscript. Rubin, G. (1999), Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality, in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 143-79. Sedgwick, E.K. (1990), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Spivak, G.C. (1988), Can the subaltern speak? in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 271-313. Warner, M. (1993), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warner, M. (1999), The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, New York: Harvard University Press. What do we want? When do we want it? (2008). Rolling Earth, Movement Education, 16 June, accessed 29 October 2008, http://www.re.rollingearth.org/?q=node/131

borderlands ejournal 2009

23

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Difference, Disagreement and the Thinking of Queerness


Chas. Phillips
Johns Hopkins University

This article uses the work of Jacque Rancire and Gilles Deleuze as resources for reorienting the theoretical underpinnings of queerness as a political idea. Specifically, I use Deleuzes understanding of difference and Rancires description of disagreement to describe queerness as contingent, creative, and averse to certain modes of identity politics. I begin by looking at Rancires notion of disagreement as stemming from the (mis)counting of parts in a political order. A group that is not counted (and therefore does not exist as a political entity) comes to be through the declaration of a wrong. As this group emerges or actualizes, it fundamentally changes the overall constitution of the police order. Deleuzes conception of pure difference coming from the creative realm of the virtual helps provide a genetic principle for the unanticipated inception of these groups. By placing it under this Rancire-Deleuzian lens, I distinguish queerness from competing neoliberal attempts to deal with sexuality.

Despite the prevalence of the term queer in academic and activist circles, its meaning remains unclear. At one point, it was thought to stand in for the lengthier phrase lesbian and gay. This phrase was later expanded to include both bisexuals and transgenders, resulting in the acronym LGBT. As additional identities become more solidified and recognized, they are added to the end of the growing acronym. Sometimes a Q is tacked on the end to refer to any other identities that the term may have neglected under the umbrella queer. From this perspective, the term queer vaguely refers to any individuals whose identities fall outside the heterosexual norm, broadly construed. If this is the full extent to which queer will refer in the future, then there is no need to theorize queer its meaning is and will continue to be readily available. It is simply shorthand for a general category of identities that stand apart from the sexual norm. If, however, there is something politically salient to queerness as a concept that deserves theorizing, it must stand apart from this mode

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

of LGBT politics. It must be something more than, and most likely opposed to, the way mainstream gay and lesbian movements have defined non-normative sexualities via their own usage of the term queer. If queer does signify something more substantive, just what its meaning is remains a question that has not been answered with any specificity. This ambiguity has been detrimental to locating what it is that is politically salient about the concept of queerness. The fuzziness associated with the term is a problem it has left the term susceptible to broad interpretation, including a regression back to queer as a substitute for LGBT. I contend that there is something more to queerness that warrants theorizing, and that more work needs to be done to understand queerness in specific terms. Here I describe a more nuanced understanding of normativity and I offer a more complex and mobile approach to the way that lived experiences are positioned with relation to norms. This analysis will not only delineate queerness from LGBT, but also show why queerness is important to us politically. Queerness both exceeds and challenges the limits of LGBT politics, and more generally, neoliberal identity politics. Thus, I turn to the work of Jacques Rancire and Gilles Deleuze in order to theorize queerness as difference and disagreement, an articulation that views queerness as distinct from neo-liberal or interest group approaches. This paper does not treat queerness as if it is an already existent concept that needs modification, and it does not take Rancire or Deleuze to be queer thinkers per se. Rather, I argue that Rancire and Deleuze provide valuable resources for conceptualizing queerness anew (See ORourke, 2005; Nigianni/Storr, 2009). This conceptualization understands queerness as something uniquely political, a mode of politics that is otherwise unavailable. It is also important to admit and preserve the substantial differences between Rancire and Deleuzes work before attempting to work across these differences. In many cases, they approach different questions from different metaphysical standpoints. There is, however, substantial overlap in several areas that I find productive for thinking about queerness as a political idea. Their differences however significant do not preclude using these two thinkers in tandem for this project. Queerness emerges from their work with a turbulent creativity, and it does so in part because it does not yield to the cries for tolerance, recognition, and inclusion coming from the neo-liberal camp. (See Brown, 1995; Duggan, 2003) By combining Deleuzes analysis of actualization stemming from pure difference with Rancires description of an infra-groups declaration of wrong (and the ensuing reconstitution of the societal order), we can begin to think about queerness as being distinct from a traditional conferral of rights or privileges to those who fall outside a sexual norm. Deleuzes work helps fill in the gaps before a group comes to be in Rancires work, and Rancires work articulates the way an order is ruptured and reconstituted in a rare moment of politics. In both cases, identity politics appears insufficient, because both thinkers believe that groups emerge as the recognizable result of a process which started with that

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

which we could not recognize. When read through the lens of Rancires miscount and Deleuzes conception of virtuality, queerness retains a creative and contingent characteristic that is critical to its political operation. After working through their works more specifically, I want to show how a queer politics looks and feels different from the LGBT politics that we often see today. Disagreement Politics occurs very little or rarely (Rancire, 1999: 17) because, contrary to many schools of thought, politics does not denote that realm in which subjects pursue interests, negotiate over resources, and engage with the system of distribution in order to obtain more of that in which they are interested (see Gibson, 2006). This realm is what Rancire calls the order, the count, or the police. Politics is used instead to indicate the radical disruption of this order by those who have no place in it, something that may not happen often. A political moment is witnessed only when a discrepancy arises between, on the one hand, the counting of different parts in the order and, on the other hand, the existence of those parts. This discrepancy results in a confrontation between a party or order that exists, and one that does not exist. The discrepancy built into the order escapes the ordinary measurement of things and comes to a head at a particular moment, exposing this miscalculation of parts equaling a whole. This is the rare political moment for Rancire. Political order is thus a contradiction in terms, because order is antithetical to politics. Order, like those who are part of the order, relies on one fundamental claim that is the negation of politics: there is no part of those who have no part (Rancire, 1999:14). Order is the background from which politics emerges, reconstituting the ruptured arrangement of parts. The moment of disruption is what interests Rancire. The part of those who have no part that is nothing and everything (Rancire, 1999: 15) is the political paradox around which Disagreement turns. Politics (and, as I will argue, queerness) is misunderstood if it is confined or relegated to the recognized order of a given polity, rather than rooted specifically in the incommensurable conflict over the count. Policing is the attempt to eliminate this conflict. This is both the mode that politics takes and the way in which something new becomes included in the count where before it simply did not exist. The miscount is the major wrong that points out the existence of a non-existent part, whereas a minor wrong may be the inequality that is inevitably reflected within the count. Only the former can cause a true breach of the order a political moment. The minor wrong occurs upon a common stage, while the major wrong occurs when an unfounded claim that there is a common stage is made by a party that does not exist on that stage until after this claim is made. It must first be established that the stage exists for the use of an interlocutor who cant see it and for good reason because it doesnt exist (Rancire, 1999: 27). It is on this suddenly-shared stage

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

that the miscount is revealed as a major wrong, reconstituting the order in which the parts are counted on a common stage. Each subsequent count is inevitably another miscount, though it may include additional parts that previously had no part. Those that are included as a result of the disagreement may then begin to negotiate for common goods within that order (a negotiation that may be successful or unsuccessful). Rancire is very clear that this is not a situation in which the order realizes that it had inadvertently overlooked a subject or group, and then rectifies this situation. Such a correction, however beneficial for those it would include in the order, is not a political moment. Nor is it a political moment when subjects place their interests in common (Rancire, 1999: 27) in order to correct a miscount. Rather,
Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation, the contradiction of two worlds in a single world. (Rancire, 1999: 27)

Paradoxically, the burden rests on those who do not exist: those with no part must declare the wrong that is the miscount and, in so doing, bring themselves into existence by making themselves of some account in the emerging order. The uncounted do not ask to be counted, because the ability to ask would indicate that they are somehow already part of the count, however minimally. Making such a request would require not only mutual acknowledgement of the existence of parts without a part, but also a shared language between those non-parts and the dominant order. Rancire is also not discussing situations where the powers that be (the police order) are intentionally excluding certain groups or subjects. This type of intentionality would indicate that the excluded are to some degree within the order from which they are being excluded; if they truly had no part, then the order would have no way of knowing who to exclude. For Rancire, the count is everyone who exists, not everyone who is included. That is to say, there can be radical inequality in the system of distribution between the haves and the have-nots (and this may be unjust), but this does not equate to those that are of some account and those that are of no account. Both the haves and have-nots are within the count; the type of disagreement between them is of a different nature. Rancire explains that the inequality that exists in a given community is a result of the mutual acknowledgement that all parties have for each other as part of their participation in the community. In fact, inequality within the count is a result of a more fundamental equality: everyone who is in the order is equally existent. Certain distributions are certainly more favorable than others, but this is again irrelevant to politics as such. For Rancire, there can be nothing between those with a part and those without a part, and so those without must forcibly make a

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

declaration even though they have no business doing so. As they make this declaration, they surge into existence. This new emergence forces a recomposition of the order that had failed to acknowledge the existence of those without a part. Subjectification is the term that Rancire chooses for this process of coming to be on the political stage. Rancire describes politics as a determined activity that appears in utter conflict with the police order. Therefore, politics names:
whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration that of the part of those who have no part. (Rancire, 1999: 29-30)

Two important points are made here: first, the configuration (the order) is tangible. It can be sensed as part of the distribution of the perceptible, a phrase Rancire uses to describe that which can be sensed and that which falls beneath the realm of the perceptible (Rancire, 2004). This distribution reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community (Rancire, 2004: 12). Second, the political moment requires the part that has no part to make a presupposition that they are not supposed to be capable of making: they must posit that they have a place in the order in spite of the fact that they do not. In a political moment, this presupposition is selffulfilling. Difference Gilles Deleuze, in his 1968 work Difference and Repetition, offers a philosophical analysis of pure difference and complex repetition that problematizes the notion of identity. His understanding of difference lends itself to this project because it moves beyond a politics of recognition and diversity, and thus away from the elements upon which a politics of identity relies. For Deleuze, difference does not emerge amongst different parties (e.g. the way gays are often described as different from straights); rather, it appears immanently from the actualizing party itself. Difference is not diversity, (Deleuze, 1994: 222) because diversity describes only the already-existing; diversity describes difference from, rather than difference in itself. Difference from is reducible to a model of recognition, in which the number of sexualities, for instance, are contained within definable range of (diverse) distinct identities. Difference in itself views sexuality in terms of a pure continuity, in which newness can emerge unexpectedly from unanticipated places in unforeseen ways (Deleuze, 1994: 250).[1] This emergence is exemplified by Deleuzes description of the way in which the virtual that realm of Ideas and pure differences becomes actualized into realizable and manifest beings. This political operation is valuable for understanding the way in which new political groups emerge, particularly because it does so without appealing to the universal and without fitting into a traditional description of the liberal distribution of groups.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Deleuzes work on difference is important because I believe that a queer encounter is one that is, to use his term of art, purely differentiated, in which something novel unexpectedly emerges as queer. In order to better specify what Deleuze means by difference, he makes a delineation between the two different types of difference described above. Differentiated is difference that is pure difference that comes from the realm of the virtual. It is this difference in which he is most interested. The term differenciated is used to describe those differences that show up in the realm of extensity they are the qualities and quantities that cover over pure differences, (Deleuze, 2000: 207-12). These differenciated objects are what we are most accustomed to encountering. By extending Deleuzes logic to this discussion of queerness and LGBT politics (something he does not do), a differenciated encounter is one in which agents and groups remain relegated to a politics of recognition; such an encounter cannot accommodate the emergence of the new. And, while Deleuze does not refer to this process as queer (a term that would be coined many years after Difference and Repetition is published), this is indeed the meaning of queer that I am conceptualizing. Toward this end, I turn again to Deleuzes understanding of the way in which ideas become manifested in the world. He refers to this as a process of actualization: the realm of the virtual moving into the realm of actuality. Actualization is not a process of becoming in which something that has yet to be, comes to be. Rather, it is a creative process stemming from pure difference that can often yield unexpected results. Pure difference is not immediately accessible in the sensible world; it is that which precedes the realm of the sensible (Deleuze, 2000: 140). It is not the given but that by which the given is given (Deleuze, 2000: 140). Difference in its pure form yields what will become sensible once it is actualized. The sensible is the result of a relation of different intensities that have at some point joined the realm of the actual. Intensities are the elements or forces that bridge the gap between the virtual and the actual (that which can potentially become actual, and that which is incarnated and can be perceived and experienced), though they exist on neither side. Deleuze is looking for a genetic principle for that which exists a principle that moves beyond already-existing objects and their perceptible qualities or quantities, but not as far as a Kantian transcendentalism. On this point, Rancires work is not so distant. They both work toward the emergence of something perceptible Deleuze through a philosophy of actualization and Rancire through political irruption. Deleuze argues that we experience intensities indirectly through that which they yield as extension. Intensities come from the differential elements on the side of the virtual, and render something perceptible on the side of the actual. we know intensity only as already developed within an extensity, and as covered over by qualities (Deleuze, 2000: 223). Intensities are catalysts of sorts they are the lit fuses that impel something from the virtual to burst into the actual but they remain unidentifiable, or sub-identifiable. We identify and sense the qualities that we perceive in extension, but we do not sense

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

the genetic nature of those objects. Deleuze argues that underneath each actualization lie the intensities from which it was actualized. Deleuze divides this process of actualization into four overlapping categories, moving from differentiation the realm of Ideas and the virtual toward differenciation the realm of actualized extension. Each of the four stages is critical to Deleuzes understanding of how something is actualized in the world. In the first, the realm of differentiation, virtual relations of differential elements swirl around each other. They have what Deleuze (following Leibniz) calls distinct relations, because they are completely and utterly differentiated from each other. But, they are obscure because they have yet to incarnate in the realm of the actual (Deleuze, 2000: 165, 213). The realm of the virtual is rich terrain (far richer than the realm of the actual) because there exists an ever-present potential for something to actualize in creative and unexpected ways. This virtual realm of ideas has to be the place from which queerness comes to be. Queer politics as I am describing it here is related to this creative emergence of newness from the rich terrain of the virtual. Queerness is not synonymous with actualization, but creative actualization is a productive tool for thinking queerness. The second stage of the process of actualization is what Deleuze calls Individuation. Here, intensities play their most integral role, as objects move closer to the threshold of being actualized. (Deleuze, 2000: 246). Individuation is the process in which differential elements from the virtual begin to produce singular beings or singular objects. It is important for Deleuze that this process precede any general notions or concepts e.g. that of species, categories, or universals (Deleuze, 2000: 247). Applied to the realm of thinking queerness, individuation occurs prior to the categorization that is devised for identity politics. If queerness is to reflect the new and growing forms of relations between people, it has to think prior to these stale, strict, and artificial categories (Foucault, 1978; Chambers and Carver, 2008). Individuation exposes the rights-based liberal model of LGBT politics as insufficient for the form of queer politics that I am advocating here, because it remains confined to the space of the count in the already-actualized realm of differenciation. One cannot think queerness through the world of the recognizable and categorizable identities because these identities are precisely what queerness is upending. Deleuze describes the process of individuation as the drawing together of a certain number of points that make up a series. The points are derived from the realm of the virtual; they are the differential elements that are clearly defined, but not yet actualized into existence. The constellation of these different points, as they constitute a complex curve or structure, emerges with a totally unique perspective. The individual points may not be unique when isolated, but the specific combination of these elements provides a perspective unlike any other. This is much like a finite number of letters coming

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

together in combination to form words, sentences, paragraphs, and eventually new and unique ideas complexity arising from simplicity. Something begins to come together without us being able to recognize or identify it this is intensive emergence. Deleuze reiterates that the sensible qualities or individual characteristics of those beings that have already been incarnated are not primary. Rather, they are imprisoned in individuals as though in a crystal (Deleuze, 1994: 247); or, put differently, it is always a question of pre-individual singularities distributed within the Idea. It is unaware of the individual (Deleuze, 1994: 246). The third stage bridges the gap between the virtual and the actual. It is the process of dramatization, or what Deleuze sometimes calls Spatial Temporal Dynamism. Dramatization is the trigger stage for the individuated virtual structure (Deleuze, 1994: 245-6). Some thing becomes incarnated as a result of a certain trigger; an extensive element or being comes to be in a moment of crystallization. The constellation that was purely virtual begins to actualize. This process is again unpredictable and creative that which is produced is more than or different from the sum of its elemental points. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate (Deleuze, 1994: 212) The timing is also unpredictable. Because dramatization begins in the realm of the virtual, it cannot be sensed or recognized. Even if it could, dramatization would remain impossible to predict or control, because it is not merely the unfolding of the yet-to-be. Sub-sensual intensities begin to bubble to the surface, until they finally condense into an actualized, extensive object at a particular moment. This is a moment of crystallization or coagulation (Deleuze, 1994: 189), in which a certain combination of disparities comes to be and form the conditions of possibilities for something actual to emerge. The fourth stage is one of actualization or Differenciation, in which the actual can be sensed as such. Elements in this stage have now become incarnated and can be differenciated from one other (different from) rather than differentiated (pure difference). These manifested objects are the result of pure difference and intensity, but they are no longer in a realm that involves pure difference in any direct way. Deleuze (again borrowing from and then revising Leibnizs formulation) explains that their differences have moved from the distinct and obscure distinct because their relations had been totally determinable in the virtual, but obscure because they had yet to be incarnated to clear and confused. They are clear because they are now sensed in actuality, yet they remain confused because their relations are no longer defined, determined, and purely differentiated. Deleuze uses the example (also from Leibniz) of a wave crashing on a beach. The noise made by the crashing wave is constituted by a myriad of individual and particular particles, each with their own singular principles. But, we do not recognize clearly each particle; what we hear is the overall sense of their sound in concert. And, we would not be able to hear the wave at all if it were not for the individual particles making their imperceptible noise. The wave is clear and confused: we can clearly hear the wave, but the relations

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

that constitute the wave are confused. The individuated elements that exist prior to the actualized wave exist in pure difference: their relations are differential until they emerge in combination as the actualized wave. Pure difference cannot be identified and determined in actualized elements, but the actualization cannot occur without the realm of virtual ideas that are purely differentiated (Deleuze, 1994: 252, 253). This is why Deleuze sometimes says that pure difference is cancelled once it is actualized, or drawn outside of itself into extensity (Deleuze, 1994: 228, 233, 238, 266). Difference-Disagreement As mentioned above, there are substantial differences between Rancire and Deleuzes metaphysics, politics, and thinking. But the gap is not insurmountable. With some work, one can make their separate vocabularies and approaches fit tenuously together long enough to serve as a resource for thinking queerness as a contingent, creative, and unstable process. For instance, when the process of Deleuzian actualization is applied to the way a group comes to be, it looks much like Rancires description of subjectification. Rancire writes:
By subjectification I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience. (Rancire, 1999: 35, emphasis added)

And Deleuze claims:


The object of the encounter is the imperceptiblefrom the point of view of recognition. (Deleuze, 1994: 140) For it is not figures already mediated and related to representation that are capable of carrying the faculties to their respective limits but, on the contrary, free or untamed states of difference in itself; not qualitative opposition within the sensible, but an element which is in itself differenceThis element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself (Deleuze, 1994: 144)

Both thinkers are critical of approaches to philosophy and politics that focus solely on the already-constituted, and this is why their work can be used to rebut neoliberal identity politics. Both Rancire and Deleuze formulate productive critiques of neo-liberal strategies in their separate ways. They expose how traditional models are incapable of doing the innovative and creative work that is required for a vibrant and pluralizing form of democratic politics (Chambers and Carver, 2008; Connolly, 2004, 2006). In order to adequately specify queerness as a unique and important political operation, both Rancire and Deleuze are needed. It is unclear as to whether Rancire believes there is something prior to

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

the sensible emergence of a group; it is clear that he does not write about it at any length. However, this might just conform to Rancires approach: nothing sensible exists prior to the declaration of the wrong from the perspective of the police. But, the irruption would not be political if it did not originate from a sub-perceptible level. I argue that the rupture that reconfigures the entirety of the order would not exist if it were not for something like the Deleuzian virtual.[2] With a little coaxing, we can view Deleuzian virtuality as simply the world that preexists the recognizable count that Rancire describes (Deleuze, 1994: 236-7). It is prior even to the stage in which groups are struggling to come to be. Understood accordingly, virtuality is the realm that is responsible for all that becomes actualized and recognizable without itself being recognizable or sensed (Deleuze, 1994: 228, 229). Deleuze believes that everything that is required for a group to exist is already present in the immanent field from which it emerges. For Deleuze, it is necessary to explore the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the new, but these conditions do not arise from something external or transcendental. They grow from the object itself from the group in itself (Deleuze, 1994: 169). The virtual is the resource upon which actuality draws in order for an infra-group to emerge as a group from this virtuality. If this is the case, then a discussion of group inequality, while important and interesting, is literally apolitical for Rancire. Adjusting the distribution of rights, privileges, or resources, as many neoliberals advocate, is antithetical to this understanding of politics and to this understanding of queerness. Next, in Deleuzes stage of individuation, each series of points begin to consolidate into infra-groups with unique perspectives derived from the realm of the virtual. Individuation is essentially intensive, and intensive quantities are individuating factors (Deleuze, 1994: 246). Borrowing from Simondon, Deleuze explains that individuation arises from metastable systems, in which there is no secure unity or static environment. It is a realm in flux, with a fluid distribution of elements of different degrees of disparity on different orders providing a heterogeneous climate from which intensive potentialities will actualize (Deleuze, 1994: 246). From this tumultuous and fluctuating environment, certain resonances may develop involving one or more of the disparities between certain elements. If the disparities are of a certain degree, and if the right combinations of elements are involved, the actualization of a potential and the establishing of communication between disparates (Deleuze, 1994: 246) may occur. Deleuze explains that
Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualized, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates. (Deleuze, 1994: 246)

Rancire notes that individuation occurs before the individual is actualized prior to subjectification. [Individuation] is unaware of the individual (Deleuze, 1994: 246), just as the declaration of a wrong

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

occurs without a subject to declare it. Individuation develops from the array of ordinary and distinctive points, when a certain unique combination will resonate together to form a particular perspective involving the necessary degree of internal difference (Deleuze, 1994: 246). When this happens, the potential for actualization grows more likely. Intensity is that which determines which relations of the many involved will be actualized and differenciated. While subjectification and individuation cannot simply be reduced to emergent queerness, this latter concept can be valuable for thinking about queer politics. Queerness is anti-identitarian because it occurs prior to the development of the individual. Queerness is the process of reconstituting the order around the emergence of a being or group of beings that actualize from unique perspectives perspectives that stem from the realm of the virtual. Queerness is founded around relationality rather than beings; the categories and generalities that are constructed to organize subjects emerge after subjectification. What will actualize from the world of virtual elements, as determined by intensity, is never known in advance. This is why identity politics is insufficient for theorizing the new. We cannot see or understand what groups will come to be, or around what issues they will organize; if we could, they would already be in the realm of the recognizable and therefore existent in the order (Chambers and Carver, 2008). Deleuzes discussion of how a process of actualization is unlike one of realization bolsters Rancires position. Realization is the process in which that which does not yet exist, comes into existence. As Deleuze notes, the only difference between the possible and the real is their status as existent which is not enough for Deleuze (or, I contend, for Rancire, or for queerness). The world of the possible arises from a world of linear causality and known quantities; the more we know about this causality, the more able we are to predict reductively what will exist in the future. A process of actualization, on the other hand, is one in which strict causality is insufficient for predicting what will emerge. The virtual conditions from which each actualized object arises are not only insufficient for predicting what will be incarnated, but also sub-perceptible until after their pure difference is cancelled and they are actualized. This is again why the virtual is so much richer than the actual (not to mention the possible or the real); it holds the potential for a myriad of different manifestations to appear in unexpected and creative ways. In a world of the real and the possible, only the possible can emerge from the real, and only the real can emerge from the possible. The only difference between the two is whether it exists yet. By drawing upon both Rancire and Deleuzes work, emerging subjectivities must be described after they emerge from the creative and rich potentiality that is contained in the process of actualization. When groups are actualized in unanticipated ways, they join a count that had previously not recognized them as existing. As this happens, the existing order is radically disrupted and then reconfigured (Rancire, 1999: 11-12, 35, 18, 33). This disruption and reconstitution would never occur if groups are merely realized from their already-recognized possibility. The latter is the logic of the police,

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

while the former is the logic that disrupts that police order, i.e. politics (Rancire, 1999: 33). Dramatization is the Deleuzian stage that is most relevant to Rancires work. Rancires declaration of a wrong is the trigger that moves an infra-group from the realm of the virtual to the realm of the actual. The declaration might be incited from one or more of the following shifts stemming from intensive differences: the environmental conditions surrounding a group, several groups, or the count shifts suddenly or over time; the addition or subtraction of certain elements within the infra-group or within the count that the infra-group joins; changes made within the count make the potential for an infra-group to incarnate more likely. In addition, the shift may develop from a set of circumstances that appear to be inexplicable. The differential elements that constitute what will become a group after the declaration crystallize in such a way that they make themselves of some account in the order. This crystallization is the bridge from the unrecognizable to the recognizable the same one that Deleuze describes as a crisis point (Deleuze, 1994: 189). Both Rancire and Deleuze understand this moment as one of radical theatre or drama, and not one of simple representation. Deleuze explains that it is theatre that does not leave the identity of the thing, the spectator, the author, or the character intact (Deleuze, 1994: 192). Finally in the fourth stage, Rancires groups become actualized immediately after the declaration of the wrong. This group can now be differenciated from other groups based on its now-actualized constitution. Its pure difference is cancelled, but its actualization would have been impossible without the pure differential relations found in the realm of the virtual. The now-actual group joins the count, and its interests are in some way reflected in the way that the order distributes common resources to identifiable parts. The revised count that now includes the newly recognized group is inevitably a miscount of another set of parts that have no part, and the creative process of actualization occurs again and again. As soon as groups are differenciated in the count, Rancires moment of politics is over. Difference for Deleuze, like disagreement for Rancire, is a mode of bringing something new into being (becoming). The two in tandem can be used to (re-)orient the theoretical underpinnings of queerness, because (despite their differences) they resist recognition-based identity politics as the source of political natality and offer a vision of subjectivity that preserves the creativity latent in queerness. Deleuze draws on Nietzsches image of the eternal return to recast this understanding of newness. Rather than understanding the eternal return as a cycle of repetition, or the repetition of the same, Deleuze understands Nietzsche to mean the eternal return of difference pure difference. The eternal return is the ever-present chance that something innovative will be creatively actualized. The political moment, though rare, may occur at any time. In order for this to be the

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

case, becoming must be emphasized over identity and a politics of recognition.


Eternal return cannot mean the return of the identical because it presupposes a world in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. The eternal return does not bring back the same but returning constitutes the only same of that which becomes. (Deleuze, 1994: 41)

Identity presupposes a world of relations that is already being in a stable mode of the count (instability in the world would prevent these identities from coagulating). The return of these identities is thus the return of the identical, and, if understood through this ethos, politics would become mired in the return of the same (something Rancire believes is anti-political). If the eternal return is the return of difference, then all that returns is the pluri-potentiality for becoming. Deleuze pushes Nietzsche in this direction because he believes that pure intensities make up the will to power, and it is these mobile individuating factors that are unwilling to allow themselves to be contained within the factitious limits of this or that individual (Deleuze, 1994: 41, emphasis added). Because they are not confined to the individual, the potential remains for something new to emerge from an encounter with the unrecognizable. The encounter is a moment in which intensities jostle certain individuating factors to contract into something unique and new; a new complex curve of different relations of points forming a unique perspective. Newness emerges immanently that is, from elements that already exist but are joined anew under different conditions or in different combination. But, these points are not exhausted by this new becoming because they are not limited to a single deployment. They will, in another moment of drama, be pulled apart and rearranged in a different curve with the addition and subtraction of any given number of individuating factors. This ever-present potentiality is how Deleuze reads Nietzsches eternal return. It is critical to locate a way of thinking about queerness (of thinking queerness) that not only avoids the artificial stability and stale intransigence of that which already exists, but one that destabilizes the foundations upon which identity and sexuality are constructed (Halperin, 1995). Such an analysis provides the difference between on the one hand including same sex couples (who abide by heteronormative terms of relationships) in the rights/privileges of marriage, and on the other, interrogating the very nature and composition of sexuality itself (Jagose, 1996). When it is exposed as a powerfully organized recognition-based matrix of categorized identities framed in relation to reproduction-based relationships and structures, then this norm (and many others) can be creatively rejected by acknowledging those lived experiences that do not fit cleanly within this matrix (as well as those that are yet to creatively develop). Such a rejection destabilizes norms based on sexualidentity and allows for the creation of new cultural forms and new ways of becoming. Destabilization at this level is not a purely negative

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

development reacting against the norm it is positive and dynamic and creative (Halperin, 1995: 66). Warner refers to this creative potentiality as the possibility for world-making (Warner, 1999). It is for this reason that Warner is critical of the official gay movement, which has chosen to articulate the politics of identity rather than to become a broader movement targeting the politics of sexual shame (Warner, 1999: 31). One alternative to this politics of identity is found in the Deleuzian-Rancirean analysis above: queer politics as a moment of creative rupture in which something new comes to be (becomes). We might be able to develop new and important strategies for this type of world-making if we draw from Rancire and Deleuzes framework. When sexuality is investigated under the Deleuzian-Rancirean matrix, it appears very different than when it is viewed as a natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal practice of reproductive coupling. This is why Rancire and Deleuzes work can lend itself to queer thinking. In response to the argument that reproduction is a natural evolutionary norm that is in place to ensure the survival of the human species, Warner argues that even if this was the case for early humans, it remains the case that health lies not in repetition of those functions for all persons or for all time, but in the ability to create new functions, new adaptations, new conditions (Warner, 1999: 59). Nietzsches eternal return as read by Deleuze is a productive approach to dealing with sexual practices as they emerge in lived experience. Practices are and have always been invigorated by difference and by becoming in fluctuating contexts.
The problem of comparison between animal and human sexuality consists of finding out how sexuality ceases to be a function and breaks its attachments to reproduction. (Deleuze, 1994: 250)

The excesses of sexual practice overwhelm the categories that seek to compartmentalize their varieties into identity-based claims located in proximity to the norm. Only the eternal return of pure difference can sufficiently deal with sexuality as a multiplicity. Queerness, drafted from the mobility of differentiation, cannot simply be a substitute term for gay and lesbian because it undermines the type of sexual identity those words describe (Jagose, 1996: 74). Thinking sexuality requires remaining within the politics of recognition and identity; thinking queerness requires leaving them behind in favor of a politics of difference-disagreement. Queerness understood as difference-disagreement propels us toward new and creative pluri-potentialities (in our thinking and our becoming), rather than confining ourselves to the pre-determined limits of the already-recognizable (and therefore, un-queer). This is also how queerness serves a broader set of objectives that are important for political theory. Understanding the manner by which newness unexpectedly comes to be in a political arena can help us develop new political strategies that are more suitable to a less stable world. It will be difficult to identify these strategies in advance. But, by exposing categories via identity politics as constructed (though

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

powerful) groupings, we can trace the genesis of these groups back to the creative singularities that propelled them toward recognition in the first place. Deleuze explains that we tend to treat other groups as if they are able to integrate the individuating factors and pre-individual singularities into the limits of their group as it is perceived in a field of representation (Deleuze, 1994: 281). But this is only the end of a long series of events, a series that can be followed in reverse. By moving beyond the recognizable group and its counterpart subjects, beyond the Other as a definable entity, we reach those regions where the Other-structure no longer functions, a place where singularities are free to be deployed or distributed within pure Ideas, and individuating factors to be distributed in pure intensity (Deleuze, 1994: 281-2). At the end of this retracing of crumbs, there is only difference the space in which tiny elements combine in unique structures to provide creative new perspectives, as they congeal into subjectivities. Rancire would describe this realm as prior to the declaration of the wrong the moments prior to a group making itself of account in the recognizable arena of the order. Without these imperceptible areas of difference-disagreement, nothing new nor anything political would ever occur. It may seem difficult to include in our thinking groups, ideas, and things that do not yet reveal themselves within our perceptible range. It can feel uncomfortable and risky to try to attend to intensities that are still beneath the level of being; this sort of challenge can impinge on some of our most basic existential commitments (Connolly, 2005). But this is exactly what I read Rancire to be insisting upon: we must respond to the call that these rare political moments issue, the call to see a relationship between two worlds that cannot relate to each other (Rancire, 1999: 42). Queerness becomes important for thinking about politics, identity, and being/becoming when it draws its theoretical substance from Rancire and Deleuzes work. Difference and disagreement impel us to realign our thinking toward the level of the virtual the moment just before the rupture in the count and to be sensitive to its arrival. It encourages us to theorize from a position of contingency rather than from the security that comes from apodictic claims about stable identities or a monolithic and univocal norm. When we invest in this queer ethos as theorists, our thinking is invigorated and vitalized. Theoretical analyses that do not attend to these elusive spaces are not merely incomplete: they sometimes smother the creative life of becoming out of the political world. For Rancire, these analyses neglect politics entirely. And, while it is difficult to outline concrete tactics that might stem from difference-disagreement, it is possible to suggest some experimental approaches that might foster this sort of thinking. By using difference-disagreement as a provisional space for theorizing, thinkers might find themselves more sensitive to emerging forms of political subjectivities. By acknowledging that subjectification can and does occur in places that we cannot see, we might encourage fragility within Rancires order, making the count more susceptible to the creative emergence of a new group. An order that

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

operates on the presupposition that its count is mistaken could increase the likelihood of a group surging into being from just below the perceptible surface, shattering the order, and reconstituting it again in contingent, fragile terms. This could be a good or bad thing and it will not necessarily be queer. But queerness cannot persist without this level of contingent creativity. Difference-disagreement means we must include the realm of the virtual in our understanding of the way groups come to be; we have to plan on the unexpected, and affirm the incomprehensible path that ideas take on their way toward actualization. It will undoubtedly mean that emphasis must be placed on those creative processes that emerge in a world of volatile becoming. Charles Phillips is a PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Political Science, where he studies Political Theory. His dissertation focuses on queer theory and pluralism, and his broader research interests include materialism, subjectivity/agency, and media studies. Notes 1. Actualization is not, by definition a good thing; fascism can creatively and unexpectedly actualize as easily as queerness. But, I argue the movement from the virtual to the actual is important for this understanding of queerness, and ought not to be neglected simply because not every actualization is a queer actualization. 2. It is also possible that Rancire does not believe that there is anything we can know about a group before it comes to be. Even if this is the case, Deleuzes work can provide a useful and resonating addendum to Rancires description of politics I do not find the two to be incompatible. Bibliography Chambers, S. & Carver, T. (2008), Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, London & New York: Routledge. Connolly, W. (2002), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, Theory out of bounds, v. 23, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2005), Pluralism, Durham: Duke University Press. ---. (2008), Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994) [1968], Difference & Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Duggan, L. (2003), The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, Boston: Beacon Press Books. Foucault, M. (1990), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage Books. Gibson, A. (2006), Beckett and Badiou: the Pathos of Intermittency, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halperin, D. (1995), Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York: Oxford University Press. Jagose, A. (1996), Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. Nigiani, C. & Storr, H. (2009), Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ORourke, M. (2005), Queer theory's loss and the work of mourning Jacques Derrida, Rhizomes, vol. 10, Spring. Ranciere, J. (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill, London: Continuum. Warner, M. (1999), The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

borderlands ejournal 2009

17

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Rancire and Queer Theory


On irritable attachment Oliver Davis
Warwick University, UK

The article begins by examining the obstacles to an encounter between Rancires work and queer theory, Foucault and psychoanalysis, and by questioning Rancires own view of queer theory. The article then argues that Rancires formalist account of political subjectivation is open to a queering which allows his assumptions about queer theory to be set aside. It goes on to outline a Rancirian queer theory which is methodologically egalitarian in its commitment to taking seriously the self-understandings of ordinary queer subjects and which remains true to Rancires scepticism about theoreticism and his critical perspective on disciplinary formation. It finds in Rancires critique of progressivism and the value he places on singularizing self-realization in the present the sources of a queer understanding of futurity and kinship in certain respects consonant with Lee Edelmans. The article concludes that the affective disposition and relational mode implicit in Rancires practice of irritable attachment offer queer theory the vision of a less fraught and more liveable response to ambient heteronormativity.

[I]n our examination of left-wing politics today we have been superficial or, so to speak, epidermic [pidermiques]. For it is in the touchiness of our skins sensitivity [la sensibilit des pidermes] that we are perhaps most confident of having preserved, amid the daily round of compromises and the carnival of modish transgressions, something of what changed in 68. (Rancire et al, 1978: 5)[1]

In this opening presentation, by Rancire and the other members of the Rvoltes Logiques collective, of a special issue of the journal commemorating the tenth anniversary of May 1968, the intriguing suggestion is that in the susceptibility of the epidermic surface to irritation is to be found both something essential about May 68 and

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

the basis of an enduring attachment to its notoriously elusive spirit: their task, self-appointed, is to remain epidermically sensitive [pidermiquement sensible] to hierarchy and authority and to see past the temptation of unspecified forms of modish transgression (Rancire et al, 1978: 6, 5).[2] Superficiality is salvaged from ordinary language and tentatively advanced as a methodological principle; irritability or touchiness is reclaimed from the conventional archive of negative affect as the basis of a new epistemology, an emotional disposition capable of bearing historical and political meaning. Before le sensible becomes synonymous in Rancires work with the sensory, with that which is available to perception, and before, in the expression le partage du sensible, it features in the key connecting term of his new politics of aesthetics, perception stood in an essential relation to the touchiness of the skins surface [la sensibilit des pidermes]. Before le sensible, the sensory, occupies its pivotal position in the seamless assertoric formulations of Rancires mature politico-aesthetic thought, its close adjectival relative denoting sensitivity first figures a susceptibility to irritation, an allergic awareness, a raw exposure to potentially excoriating trauma and also a mode of transmission or filiation: in our irritability lies our fidelity to May 1968. Irritable attachment, I shall argue, is at once a distinctively queer and a characteristically Rancirian form of relationality and one which better captures the nature of much of our affect-laden and embodied social and political experience than disagreement and dissensus, the more detached and rationalistic conceptions which prevail in Rancires mature work. As well as being premised on and generated by irritable attachment, the Rancirian queer theory I shall go on to elaborate will have the following characteristics: it will start by demonstrating that the logic of Rancires own formalist account of political subjectivation allows some of his more problematic assumptions about queer theory to be set aside; it will argue that his account of the radical contingency of existing political structures necessarily includes the array of practices, structures and modes of kinship known to queer theory as heteronormativity; it will offer a critique of the progressive as a concept central to heteronormativity, as well as to certain forms of gay and lesbian identity politics; it will seek to elaborate distinctively queer forms of filiation and influence which work beyond heteronormative conceptions of parenting; it will be radically egalitarian in its assumption that, just as everyone thinks, all queer subjects, without exception, are queer theorists in the making; it will seek to explore and foster the complex self-understandings of non-academics and non-specialists while avoiding deterministic and sociological modes of inquiry; it will challenge established academic disciplinary formations, specializations and cases of theoreticism, including those of queer theory itself; it will, naturally, defy consensus within and beyond the university, yet it will also trust the surface. Some of these traits are already established within queer theory, independently of Rancire, and they will be identified.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Before elaborating this Rancirian queer theory, however, I want to explain why any encounter between Rancires work and queer theory is destined to be fraught with a certain amount of mutual irritation. For, despite the striking resonance of his formalist account of political subjectivation with the moment in the history of gay and lesbian liberation for which the US symbolic shorthand is Stonewall, this is a single isolated point of congruence; this one similarity aside, at first sight Rancire may seem irrelevant to queer theory and vice versa. Indeed it would be difficult to find a contemporary French thinker less overtly interested, in his work, in either sexuality or indeed sex. So incongruous may the pairing of Rancire with queer theory seem that it looks not unlike the guessing game he plays in The Surface of Design, in which he begins by asking the apparently idiotic question of what Mallarms Un coup de ds has in common with the work of the German industrial designer, engineer and architect Peter Behrens, who conceived the clean Modernist lines of AEGs domestic appliances, buildings and advertisements of the early twentieth century (Rancire, 2007 [2003]: 92). There is something methodologically queer about the marrying, or partnering, of both of these unlikely pairs. Before closing the distance between Rancire and queer theory, I want first to try to account for the apparent incongruity and spell out what I take to be the risks inherent in any such encounter. The obstacles: Foucault and psychoanalysis There is plenty for a queer theorist to find irritating in Rancires work and Rancire, for his part, has expressed openly what it is only fair to describe as irritation with queer theory and specifically with the use allegedly made of Foucault by US queer theory, in a short journalistic article marking the twentieth anniversary of Foucaults death, entitled The Difficult Legacy of Michel Foucault [Lhritage difficile de Michel Foucault] (Rancire, 2005a: 183-7).[3] The piece is notable because it constitutes one of few direct engagements by Rancire, albeit at twenty years distance, with a thinker whose intellectual preoccupations and some of whose political sympathies lay very close to his own. Rancires work tends to navigate very carefully around territory already marked out as Foucauldian. Indeed, for an earlier example of so direct and sustained an engagement with Foucault we must return, again, to the 1970s.[4] The fourth issue of Rvoltes Logiques contains a written interview with Foucault in which he presents an overview of his theory of power as productive and multiple, a theory elements of which are already present in earlier work but which is most fully elaborated in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, published that same year (Rancire et al, 1976a: 89-97; translated in Gordon, 1980: 134-45 and in Morris and Patton, 1979: 49-58). In the interview Foucault argues for the superiority of his account of power over a binary and unidirectional model of oppressors dominating the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

oppressed. In the opening editorial of the journals next issue, the collective begs to differ:
However great the multiplicity of the power relations may be which hold captive the woman who asserts her rights, the worker who is made to work for the state or the Communist local councillor, does this very play of multiplicities not itself depend on the overriding relationships of oppression which operate, in the final analysis, in one direction only: oppression of women by men, of individuals by the state and of labour by capital? (Rancire et al, 1977: 6)

The editorial is remarkable for its refusal even to register the specific context of this theory of power in a history of sexuality. The collectives triple reassertion of the primacy of unidirectional patriarchal, state and capitalist oppression goes hand in hand with its reluctance even to mention, let alone engage with, the specific object of Foucaults inquiry in the first volume of his history of sexuality.[5] While it should be said that this rejection of Foucaults theory of power is not attributable simply and solely to Rancire but expresses the view of a collective of which he was a leading member, its interest is nonetheless more than merely historical: for it would appear that, in some respects, little has changed in his view of Foucault by the 2004 article. This article, marking the anniversary of Foucaults death, can no longer plausibly just ignore the specific object of Foucaults last works, sexuality, and does mention the uptake of Foucaults work by queer theorists. Yet it does so in order roundly to contest the legitimacy of their endeavours, first by pointing to what Rancire takes to be, in my view mistakenly, the opposing uses to which his theorization of the repressive hypothesis have been put in the US:
It has readily been used to draw the conclusion, especially in the United States, that minoritarian sexual identity politics are invalid. Conversely [ linverse], with David Halperins Saint Foucault, the philosopher has found himself beatified as the patron saint of the queer movement [mouvement queer], denouncing the play of sexual identities constructed by homophobic tradition. (Rancire, 2005a: 183-4, underlining added)

The conversely [ linverse], which I have underlined, betrays what I respectfully submit is a misunderstanding of Anglo-American queer theorys engagement with Foucault: in fact, the possibility of a critique of minoritarian identity politics premised narrowly on sexual object choice was precisely what Foucault, as interpreted by Halperin and notably by the surprisingly unmentioned Judith Butler, brought to queer theory. Foucaults saintly patronage of le mouvement queer and the role his work has played in critiquing minoritarian sexuality identity politics are continuous, all of a piece. Later in the article, Rancire tries a different approach. He suggests that queer theory has relied unduly on late interviews and has this to say about Foucaults answers:
All his answers, we clearly sense [nous le sentons bien], are just so many traps [autant de leurres] which reintroduce the position of

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

mastery his work had entirely discredited. The same can be said of all those rationalisations which draw from his work the principle of the queer revolution [le principe de la rvolution queer], or that of the emancipation of the masses or a new ethics of the individual. Foucaults thought cannot form the basis of a new politics or ethics. (Rancire, 2005a: 187)

No argument is offered in support of these assertions but how could anyone be so sure that all of Foucaults answers in these late interviews were just so many traps, illusions, lures or decoys? These interviews, like his other work, are so enormously wide-ranging: how could the two contradict one another as straightforwardly as Rancire pretends here? What exactly is the basis for our strong intuition (we clearly sense) about the unreliability of these interviews and what assumptions are being made about those capable of sharing in this intuition and the subject position it presupposes? If it were true that these late interviews had generally been used naively by queer theorists in the US either as a substitute for a careful reading of the work, or as an authoritative extra-textual interpretation of that work in terms of authorial intention, then Rancire would certainly have a point.[6] Yet as far as Halperin, Butler and numerous other prominent queer theorists are concerned, this is manifestly not the case. Rancires treatment of Foucaults legacy in France is no less perplexing. He singles out one of the two principal editors of Foucaults posthumously published Dits et crits, Franois Ewald, and describes him as the official theorist of the employers confederation [le thoricien attitr du syndicat des patrons] (Rancire, 2005a: 184). While Ewalds subsequent activities are used to insinuate that Foucaults intellectual legacy lends itself to reactionary political projects, the other principal editor, Daniel Defert, is not even mentioned. Yet not only was Defert Foucaults lover but the founder, in 1984 no less, of the French HIV-AIDS charity AIDES (Martel, 1996: 252). Rancires silence about Defert is all the more surprising given the discussion in this article of the GIP (le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons), a radical prison campaign group founded by Foucault and others, which may have been short-lived (1971-2) but nonetheless constituted a critical moment in the history of political activism by French intellectuals. The GIP was in part a radical political formation, intended to rehouse former members of a banned gauchiste revolutionary party, La Gauche Proltarienne (GP), and in part a group campaigning for prison reform; it was a response to the authoritarian crackdown which followed May 68, in the course of which hundreds of GP activists had their first experience of imprisonment. The significance of the GIP for the history of intellectual activism lies in its unprecedentedly egalitarian conception of the role of intellectuals and other experts and their relationship to those on whose behalf they were campaigning: rather than the haranguing conscience of the nation or the spokespeople of a particular class, as Sartre had often been, the GIP marshalled relatively non-hierarchised networks of experts and specialists whose objective was not to speak on behalf of prisoners but to exploit their own prestige as recognized

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

public figures, their own cultural capital and institutional connections, in order to let prisoners themselves speak and be heard (Artires et al, 2003; Mauger, 1996; Rancire, D., 1998). Given his evident sympathy for the GIP and his familiarity with the group, he might have mentioned that a prominent member of the GIP was Defert. There was, moreover, a Foucauldian continuity between the GIP and AIDES, to which Defert himself draws attention:
When, with Michel Foucault, we founded [] the Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons (GIP), he drew my attention to the fact that the I was there to mark the iota of difference which intellectuals were to introduce into the practice of the Gauche Proltarienne []. As a gesture of recognition, I forced myself to find a name which could have two meanings. This is how AIDES came into being, a word which contains both the French word aide (assistance) and AIDS. (Martel, 1996: 252; Artires et al, 2003: 320)

This anecdote does not, in itself, suffice to overturn Rancires assertion in the article that there is a basic disjunction between Foucaults thought and his activism. I disagree with this characterization and would argue instead that their relationship is more plausibly construed as one of mutual implication but this is not a discussion I can pursue further here. The point I do want to make is that Rancires article on Foucaults difficult legacy is problematic. Admittedly it is only a short journalistic piece and such a format does not lend itself to complete or, arguably, to especially probing coverage. Nonetheless, the impression it would have conveyed to its Brazilian readership both of Foucaults legacy in France and in US queer theory was misleading: not only is the characterization of US queer theorys use of Foucault inaccurate but also, given that he mentions Ewald and the GIP but not Defert and AIDES, the piece is one-sided. Moreover, in projecting the queerness of Foucaults legacy outside French national and linguistic borders and occluding his relation to the struggle against HIV-AIDS, the article recalls the same tendency identified by Murray Pratt (Pratt, 1999) in mainstream French discourse on AIDS of the 1980s and early 90s. So much so that the reader is left wondering for whom exactly Foucaults legacy is difficult. After Foucault, the second potential obstacle to an encounter between Rancire and queer theory lies in psychoanalysis, or more precisely the prominence of references to it in the work of most queer theory and the success of new queer Lacanianism in recent theoretical debate (Dean, 2000; Edelman, 2004). Psychoanalysis is not at all prominent in Rancires work, though nor is it excluded or viewed with especial hostility. Even where he engages most directly with psychoanalysis, in LInconscient Esthtique, Rancires interest lies principally with aesthetics as he argues that the aesthetic revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century paved the way for the Freudian unconscious (Rancire, 2001a). While Rancire is indeed reading Freud in this superficially unassuming but actually rather

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

provocative essay, he concentrates mainly on the writings on art. Although he denies that the essay is intended to be a contribution to work on the prehistory of psychoanalysis, it is difficult to see how it could not be read as such and moreover as an attempt implicitly to downplay the originality and significance of Freuds new discourse. In the rest of Rancires work, however, psychoanalysis is only ever briefly referenced. One potential advantage for queer theory of Rancires relative detachment from psychoanalysis is discernible in the context of ongoing French public debate over the right of gay and lesbian parents to adopt (the issue known in French as homoparentalit). One of the intriguing things about this discussion is the way it has drawn out the ultimately heteronormative bearing of some superficially radical psychoanalytic thinking: left-leaning psychoanalysts for whom there is no sexual relation might have been expected to support the extension of adoption rights to gay and lesbian parents yet many have come out with spurious but superficially sophisticated homophobic arguments in favour of heteronormative family and kinship structures. Put simply, but not inaccurately, in these psychoanalytic fantasies the Symbolic dictates that children must be brought up by a daddy and a mummy. As French sociologist Eric Fassin has argued, the susceptibility of the educated urban elite in France, on the right and particularly the left, to psychoanalytic discourse has given such arguments unduly strong purchase on political decision-making (Fassin, 2008: 86-7). Queering Rancires radical egalitarian politics One advantage of the formalism of Rancires account of political subjectivation, with its restrained treatment of thin examples, is that its analytical frame can readily be applied to a wide range of concrete egalitarian political projects.[7] Its formalism leaves it open to a queer turning, irrespective of whether Rancire himself envisaged such a move. In the sixth of his Ten Theses on Politics he states that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics (Rancire, 2001b: 17). Heteronormativity depends for its existence on the assumption that the norms which constitute it are not political and are therefore not open to political reconfiguration. Yet, as Eric Fassin has argued persuasively in the case of France, since the late 1990s sex and sexuality have been increasingly politicized in debates about prostitution, pornography, sexual harassment, the pacs (civil partnership) and gay and lesbian parenting, debates which have demonstrated that some of the well-established norms of heterosexist society are in fact open to political interrogation (Fassin, 2003, 2008). Fassin calls this sexual democracy and argues, not unlike Rancire in Thesis Six, that the battle being fought is over the extent of the political sphere (Fassin, 2008: 14). Let me now show in more detail how Rancires politics are open to queering.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

In the essay Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization, the heterologous character of Rancires politics of radical equality consists in the way it involves otherness in three different ways: first, political subjectivation is never simply the assertion of an identity but involves the repudiation of an identity assigned by others, by the police order.[8] Second, it involves the construction of a common theatrical space, not of consensus or necessarily of dialogue, but rather a polemical common space for the processing of the wrong and the demonstration of equality, a space in which the rational and performative demonstration of equality can be enacted in front of others (Rancire, 1992: 62, adapted).[9] Finally, Rancire asserts, political subjectivation always involves an impossible identification (Rancire, 1992: 64, adapted). Neither of the first two conditions is remotely problematic for queer theory: the very term queer, as Butler (1993) notes, is an exemplary case of a word which is a sign of the refusal of the others negative identification, an assertion of an identity which simultaneously repudiates a pathologizing and insulting identity assigned by others, by what Rancire would term the police order (Butler, 1993: 228; Rancire, 1999: 28-9). And as for the second condition, it need hardly be said that queer theory and queer activism have always been attuned to the theatrical and the performative. Not only is performativity central to one of the founding texts of queer theory (Butler, 1989), but an acute sense of the theatricality of political protest has been integral to countless examples of queer activism: politics is theatre, as Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) is heard to remark in the recent film (Dir. Van Sant, 2008).[10] There are, moreover, accounts of queer politics which simultaneously address Rancires first and second conditions: for example, Jos Muozs theorization of queer political performativity by queers of color in terms precisely of what he calls disidentification (Muoz, 1999), an expression also used by Rancire in Disagreement (Rancire, 1999: 36).[11] The third condition in Rancires account of political subjectivation is more complex and may be harder for queer politics to satisfy. In the first of two relatively thinly treated examples he gives of political subjectivation in the aforementioned essay, the impossible identification is the politically formative identification of his generation of left-wing activists, in the France of the 1960s, with the bodies of the Algerian French demonstrators massacred in the name of the French people in Paris in October 1961 (Rancire, 1992: 61).[12] This involved a disidentification, or the repudiation of an identity (satisfying condition one), namely that of the French citizens in whose name the massacre had been perpetrated; it involved a theatrical element (condition two), not just in the marches and other actions to demonstrate solidarity at the time but also in the way that a political consciousness of the extremes to which police repression was prepared to go in 1961 led to the anticipation and strategic incitement of the police response in May 68, through such performative provocations as the slogan CRS=SS (Ross, 2002: 107). The object of the impossible identification (condition three) in this case is clear, namely the dead Algerian demonstrators. The second example of political subjectivation in the essay is potentially more problematic:

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

that signalled by the May 68 slogan, We are all German Jews (Rancire, 1992: 63). Conditions one and two are satisfied (they are French and they are demonstrators) yet this example seems to imply that political subjectivation, for any given group, must involve establishing a connection with the incommensurable oppression of a different group. I would argue that queer politics, however much it seeks to embrace, or look outward to, other forms of oppression, will always involve an irreducible element of identitarian self-assertion; otherwise it dissolves into a sea of undifferentiated altruistic ethical concern. Although Rancire never makes clear precisely how important this third condition is and what exactly the criteria are for its being met, it looks as though, in his account of politics as heterology in this essay, its residual investment in identity means that queer politics risks being subsumed under the police order. If the account in Politics, Identification, Subjectivization emphasises an undoing of socially-given identity positions, then in Disagreement the emphasis falls more on the wrong (what Aristotle calls the blaberon). It is in the name of this wrong that the disadvantaged make their claim for equality; this is consistent with a queer politics which retains a provisional investment in identity in so far as identity is formed by the repeated social and psychic wrongs of a heteronormative police order. This continued attachment to identityas-wrong would only be provisional because politics needs to attend to these wrongs if it is to accomplish the role Rancire reserves for it, namely to process [traiter] them (Rancire, 1999: 39). So if the account of the third condition, impossible identification, in the earlier essay implied a potentially problematic overemphasis on hybridity and mixity, consonant with post-structuralist critiques of identity and, surprisingly, with the widespread mistrust of minoritarian politics in mainstream French political discourse, in Disagreement the assertion of the need to attend to the grievance of the disadvantaged in order to process it is consistent with any queer politics which has a critical understanding of identity and no more than a provisional investment in it.[13] An outline of Rancirian queer theory The starting point must be Rancires assertion of the absolute contingency of the social and political order. The possibility of politics in his sense of the term is coextensive with this anti-foundationalism: [t]he foundation of politics is not in fact more a matter of convention than of nature: it is the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of the social order (Rancire, 1999: 16). The scandal of democracy, in Rancires account, which has made it difficult to accept for social theorists since Plato, is that the act of governing appears to be entirely contingent, not based on any entitlement of birth, age, knowledge or any other obvious superior quality (Rancire, 2005a: 180).[14] Even though Rancires work, as I have noted, including his more recent political writing (Rancire, 2005b), gives no specific encouragement to do so, it is vital we insist that Rancires assertion

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

of the an-archic contingency of the social order include recognition of the contingency of heteronormativity. If Rancirian queer theory will posit the absolute contingency of the heteronormative social order, it will also seek to honour the commitment to radical methodological egalitarianism which emerges from Rancires disagreements with Althusser and Bourdieu on the nature of pedagogy, as well as from his key work on Jacotot (Rancire, 1991).[15] Just as Jacotots method of intellectual emancipation starts out from a presumption of intellectual equality which it seeks to demonstrate, Rancirian queer theory will take seriously the complex self-understandings of ordinary queer subjects and seek to investigate what follows from these. This implies a rejection of theoreticism and an enduring scepticism about the status and value of professionalized academic, disciplinary, knowledge. I do mean scepticism rather than nihilism. A Rancirian queer theory must remain true to the resistance his work embodies to the political selflegitimation of knowledge-based elites, to his democratic and egalitarian questioning of authority rooted in technocratic claims to specialist expertise. Some of this is already happening in queer theory. Judith Halberstams work, for example, has already questioned the usefulness of queer theorys analytical frame in a manner which recalls Rancires critique of Bourdieus sociological determinism, as well as the alienating effects of queer theorys theoreticism (Halberstam, 2005: 4). Moreover, while Halberstams work takes seriously the radical intellectual equality of non-academic queer subjects and expresses a scepticism of theoreticism and a critical awareness of disciplinary history which is relatively rare within queer (and gay and lesbian) studies, her approach is far from flatly sociological in the narrow, deterministic, sense that would be problematic for Rancire.[16] Halberstams investigation of what she refers to as archives of queer subcultures in In A Queer Time and Place is attentive to the way in which queer subcultural practices aspire to modify the space and especially the time of heteronormativity by giving prominence to forms of immediate gratification and exploring ways of lending non-pathologizing significance to the ephemeral. This may include dancing (as opposed to dance), slam poetry, drug-taking and relentless sexual experimentation. These are all activities which can imply and assert a new vision of what Rancire calls le partage du sensible: queer subcultures, as Halberstam analyzes them, are capable of being egalitarian laboratories of a certain kind of political subjectivation, are capable of exploring a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience (Rancire, 2004: 13). Such projects are political because politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time (Rancire, 2004: 14).

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

There is undoubtedly a risk of complacency here and I make no attempt to conceal the fact that my sketch of the political potential in queer subcultural experience is an optimistic one. I am not suggesting, by any means, that every dance- or sex-club, or every slam poetry competition, or every piece of self-described queer performance art, still less every instance of drug-taking, or every addict, is political in Rancires terms and for Rancire, in any case, politics is rare but rather that some of what already takes place in queer subcultures is already Rancirian in a meaningful sense. I am also asserting that the methodologically Rancirian approach to queer experience is to start with the complex selfunderstandings of ordinary queer people, assume their equality, and ask What follows? By its very nature there can be no overarching general or theoretical answer to this question of What follows? and the form of these investigations, though they need not be flatly empirical, may well resemble the sort of fascinating, careful, highly particularized, analyses which fill the pages of Rvoltes Logiques. Futurity and the progressive are problematized by Rancire and have always been difficult categories for queer theory, bound up as they usually are in their prominent socio-cultural expressions with heteronormative patterns of reproductive inheritance. Lee Edelman (2004) launches a blistering attack on what he calls reproductive futurism, an assault which seeks to identify and reflect back the excoriating violence of a heteronormative society organized around a sacralization of the figure of The Child, yet which paradoxically inflicts on its flesh-and-blood children a near-universal queer-baiting intended to effect the scarification (in a program of social engineering whose outcome might well be labeled Scared Straight) of each and every child by way of antigay immunization (Edelman, 2004: 49). Edelmans challenge in No Future is to imagine forms of political arrangement which are free of the heteronormative focus on the child. One question which this anti-social turn in queer theory raises is whether the repudiation of reproductive futurism inevitably leads to queer subjects being marooned on an island of self-fulfilling selfsatisfaction, immured in a pristine, angry and arguably masculinist homoness.[17] Can we look to Rancire for an alternative to heteronormative modes of thinking the future, filiation and kinship which take a different path from Edelmans declaration of narcissistic self-sufficiency? Rancires ventriloquizing reanimation of the maverick nineteenthcentury pedagogue, Joseph Jacotot, envisages a form of kinship between student and teacher which is radically egalitarian rather than subordinating. It also presents a conception of futurity which shares some of Edelmans scepticism about the value of deferral, while also offering an understanding of the affective disposition necessary for self-realization in the present which is less fraught and more liveable (Rancire, 1991 [1987]).[18] Jacotot proceeds on the basis of the presupposition that all, including the students and their teacher, are intellectually equal; he rejects a prominent traditional model of pedagogy as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

in favour of one in which the students intellectual equality is presupposed from the outset, declared and verified. Most institutional education, Jacotot/Rancire argue, even when its explicit purpose is the socially progressive one of bringing about greater equality in the end, serves in practice to reinforce and legitimate inequality. Jacotots egalitarian model of intellectual emancipation as something which takes place most readily outside established educational institutions supposedly dedicated to the transmission of knowledge is a major challenge to the connection between power, knowledge and pedagogy, a connection which goes back as far as Platos account of the elite of philosopher-guardians who, as well as ruling over the entire city, educate and select their successors. By suggesting that any individual is capable of intellectually emancipating another, Jacotot, as interpreted by Rancire, disturbs the dominant model of the transmission of knowledge and power and points to an egalitarian rather than a subordinating kinship between student and teacher. The critique of reproductive futurism mounted by Edelman, who refuses to conceive of the future in terms of heteronormative filiation, echoes an important but undervalued aspect of Rancires work. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that there is an unresolved, productive, tension in Rancires thought between a future-oriented, collective, conception of emancipatory politics and an emphasis on singular self-realization by individuals. While those who want to argue for Rancires usefulness for a range of emancipatory political projects tend to stress the collective side (Chambers, 2005; May, 2008; Davis, 2010a), as indeed do those who are disappointed that it does not lend itself more readily to such projects (Hallward, 2005; Hewlett, 2007), this tends to mean that its countervailing movement towards singularization is neglected. If the future-oriented collective mode is consonant with a heteronormative understanding of filiation and kinship, the singularizing tendency towards self-realization in the present can be thought of as queer. Rancire often stresses that political subjectivation is the realization of singularity (Rancire, 1999: 99, 123; Rancire, 2005a: 118). While sometimes this singularizing movement describes the self-realization of collectivities, in the case of Jacotot and his students, as with many of the extraordinary workerpoets discussed in The Nights of Labor (Rancire, 1989 [1981]), the emphasis is on the extent to which individuals are capable in the present of an emancipatory self-realization which sets them apart and, only in so far as it sets them apart, unites them. This productive tension between the collective and the singular surfaces in Rancires description, in The Emancipated Spectator, of the power of the declaration of intellectual equality as,
the power each man and woman has to translate in his or her own fashion what he or she perceives, to connect it to the singular intellectual adventure which makes that man or that woman resemble every other to the extent that this adventure is unlike any other. (Rancire, 2008: 23, my translation)

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

And the affective disposition of the Jacototian pedagogue who seeks to exploit the power of the declaration of intellectual equality may fairly be described as irritability: he or she is enjoined to be intractable [intraitable] and to manifest unconditional exigency (Rancire, 1991: 38). The attachment of the Rancirian teacher to the student is thus an irritable attachment: an attachment in which the distance and the friction between the parties is part of their bond. Indeed, once the transmission of knowledge has ceased to be part of the teachers role, in his or her uncompromising irritability lies the substance of the teaching, the stimulus to the students realization of his or her potential for intellectual singularity. While there is no doubt that Rancire is often concerned with the logic of collective political projects, his work also articulates the demand for what I take to be a queer form of non-progressive self-realization in the present. His work, like Edelmans, has a narcissistic dimension in the strict rather than the pejorative sense. Yet whereas in Edelmans case the associated affective disposition is one of angry self-detachment, what the concept and practice of irritable attachment in Rancires work suggests is a less fraught and perhaps therefore more liveable queer relational mode. Rancires own intellectual trajectory, especially in his formative engagements with Althusser and Bourdieu (as well as Plato, Marx and Sartre), is unsurprisingly marked by numerous examples of irritable attachment. For while Platos account of politics in the Republic is rejected by Rancire, as is Althussers view of the primacy of theory and the importance of pedagogy, Sartres vision of the role of the intellectual and Bourdieus suspicious analysis of art, literature and education, these rejected positions are not simply discarded or repudiated. The tenacity with which Rancires work retains an attachment to these rejected accounts which, although rejected, are frequently rehearsed and serve as the negative foundation of Rancires own positive account of radical equality, is suggestive of the methodological or epistemological possibilities of irritable attachment for queer theory. Looking back at May 68 after ten years, Rancire and the other members of the Rvoltes Logiques collective dared not only to admit that their sensitivity to authority was excessive and their political analyses were superficial but to reclaim this sensitivity to and of the surface as both a methodological virtue and a form of political filiation. Just as a gauchiste consciousness of the mid-70s would have found manifold occasions for irritation (for where is there not evidence of authority and hierarchy?), so queer theory and queer subjects today cannot readily escape the irritations of heteronormativity. Irritability can signify the affective and cognitive expectation of disagreement, a propensity to take offence but not the excoriated woundedness of victimhood or the curse of paranoid anticipation. If all that heteronormativity is is irritating then, in historical and global terms, this may well count as an achievement. Queer subjects will always be surrounded by and variously attached to the heteronormative so it may be better in the long run to want the irritation which this

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

predicament implies. Perhaps it is preferable to be attached to irritability, at the risk of appearing oversensitive, self-dramatizing, selfpitying and over-emphatic. For all that touchiness implies a propensity to take offence, it can be distinguished from paranoid knowing which, as Sedgwick (2003) has observed, always has to anticipate the worst and in so doing fails to see anything but that. Irritability, unlike paranoid hyperaesthesia, or the suspicious analyses of Bourdieu and Althusser, works on the surface and is not incompatible with trust, though nor is it navely optimistic. If Sedgwick is right that life in heteronormative society predisposes queer subjects to paranoid forms of knowing and feeling then perhaps it may even be time to aspire to irritability and its attachment to the surface. Irritable attachment must be part of the experience of reading Rancires work for a reader with attachments both to queerness and to Rancires thought. As a form of filiation and a mode of relating to other people and other ideas, irritable attachment is, I would suggest, a productive and distinctively queer way of thinking about the human propensity to form attachments to even the most problematic of influences, one which moves outside more heteronormativelyinflected models such as inheritance, polemic, struggle and the Oedipal drama. It is a queer mode well established in Rancires work, particularly in its relationship to the intellectual influences which form the negative bedrock of his account of radical equality, but also in the often underplayed singularizing tendency which emphasises individual self-elaboration in the present at the expense of what can be bequeathed to class or community, to the struggle, or to the future. Oliver Davis is currently writing a critical introduction to the work of Jacques Rancire, which is scheduled to appear with Polity Press in their Key Contemporary Thinkers series early in 2010. The book will present a reconstruction and comprehensive critical analysis of Rancires work from 1965 to the present. He has published on modern and contemporary French fiction, literary-critical methodology (in particular la critique gntique and issues in psychoanalytic criticism) and queer literary politics in France. He teaches in the Department of French Studies at Warwick University. Acknowledgements With thanks to the editors and anonymous readers of this special issue and to Emma Campbell for comments on earlier drafts. Notes 1. This and all subsequent translations where no published translation is cited are my own. 2. The members of the collective are also committing themselves here to being oversensitive to hierarchy: pidermiquement sensible

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

refers literally to the sensitivity of the skin and figuratively to excessive sensitivity, or touchiness. 3. The articles collected in Rancire (2005a) originally appeared in the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de So Paulo. 4. I am leaving aside, in the intervening period, a glancing acknowledgement in the context of Rancires elaboration of his theory of the police order (Rancire, 1999 [1995]: 28, 32) and a passing objection to Foucaults analysis of the prison (Rancire, 1989 [1981]: 90-1). 5. Kristin Ross offers a rather different interpretation of this same interview and the collectives response (Ross, 2002: 127-8). 6. Foucault famously denied the relevance of authorial intention to interpretation. See Burke (2008). 7. For examples see Chambers (2005) and May (2008). 8. I shall render Rancires subjectivation (French) with the English subjectivation. 9. The adaptation of this and the next citation are to bring them in line with the French text of this talk in Rancire (1998). 10. In the French context another good, indeed foundational, example would be the sudden interruption by queer activists of a television talk show entitled Lhomosexualit, ce douloureux problme, the inaugural performance-protest of the activist group le FHAR, le Front Homosexuel dAction Rvolutionnaire (Martel, 1996: 24-5). 11. Muozs understanding of disidentification is derived from Althussers later work (after Rancires break with him), as mediated both by linguist Michel Pcheux and subsequently by Judith Butler (Muoz, 1999: 11-13). 12. The definitive account of the massacre is now House and MacMaster (2006). For their discussion of Rancires analysis of it see 200-201. 13. Consistent, although Rancire remains committed to a different understanding of the role of power in subject-formation from that of much queer theory. Queer theory tends to adopt the Foucauldian conception of what Butler usually calls subjection (her rendering of his assujetissement), which is simultaneously both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection (Butler, 1997: 83). Yet subjection in Butlers sense credits power with the productive role Rancire and his collaborators denied to it in their abovementioned response to Foucaults interview in Rvoltes Logiques. Butlerian subjection is therefore markedly different from what Rancire, in

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

French, terms subjectivation and what I am calling, in English, subjectivation. This is not primarily a question of how to render his term in English, although this can and has been done in a number of different ways (see Chambers, 2005: n. 2), but rather of distinguishing conceptually between two understandings of subject-formation which involve very different understandings of the role of power in that process. Political subjectivation, in Rancires sense, is the intermittent, precarious and readily reassimilable breaking away from power by way of the presumption, assertion and demonstration of equality. 14. As Todd May has indicated, Rancires anti-foundationalism, his emphasis on the absolute contingency of the socio-political order, aligns aspects of his political thought with elements within the communist anarchist tradition (May, 2008: 78-99). I identify and explore other affinities between this tradition and Rancires work in the field of pedagogy in Davis (2010a) and (2010b, ch. 1). 15. See Nordmann for Bourdieu (2006) and Davis (2010b) for Bourdieu and Althusser. 16. Indeed Halberstams approach to the subcultural archive has certain striking similarities with the archival practice of the Rvoltes Logiques collective. For a fuller discussion of the former see Davis (2009). For more on the latter see Davis (2010b, ch. 2). I am grateful to have had the opportunity to discuss the work of the collective and some of the other issues raised in this article with Judith Halberstam, who led a workshop entitled New Trends in Queer Theory at Warwick University (17 February 2009). 17. The expression anti-social turn is taken from Dean et al (2006) and Halberstam (2008). Halberstam is troubled by the masculinist overtones of Edelmans work and claims furthermore that it coincides uncomfortably with a fascist sensibility (Halberstam, 2008: 143). I am not persuaded by Halberstams argument for the second of these claims. 18. See also Davis (2009) and Davis (2010b, ch. 1). Bibliography Artires, P., Quro, L. & Zancarini-Fournel, M. (2003), Le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons: archives dune lutte, 1970-72, Paris: IMEC. Burke, S. (2008), The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 3rd edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, J. (1989), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (1993), Critically queer, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London: Routledge, pp. 223-42. ---. (1997), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chambers, S. (2005), The politics of literarity, Theory & Event, vol. 8, no. 3. Davis, O. (2009), Is there room for trash in the queer subcultural archive? in H. Vassallo, & P. Cooke (eds), Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 59-76. ---. (forthcoming as 2010a), The radical pedagogies of Franois Bon and Jacques Rancire, French Studies. ---. (forthcoming as 2010b), Jacques Rancire: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity. Dean, T. (2000), Beyond Sexuality, Chicago IL: Chicago University Press. Dean, T., Caserio, R., Halberstam, J., Muoz, J. & Edelman, L. (2006), The antisocial thesis in queer theory, PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, May, pp. 819-28. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fassin, E. & Fabre, C. (2003), Libert, galit, sexualits, Paris: Belfond. Fassin, E. (2008), LInversion de la question homosexuelle, 2nd edn, Paris: Amsterdam. Foucault, M. (1994), Dits et crits, ed. F. Ewald, D. Defert & J. Lagrange, vol. 2 (1970-75), Paris: Gallimard. Gordon, C. (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, New York: Pantheon. Halberstam, J. (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York, NY: New York University Press. ---. (2008), The anti-social turn in queer studies, Graduate Journal of Social Science, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 140-56. Hallward, P. (2005), Jacques Rancire and the subversion of mastery, Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 26-45.

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Halperin, D. (1995), Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hewlett, N. (2007), Badiou, Balibar, Emancipation, London: Continuum. Rancire: Rethinking

House, J. & MacMaster, N. (2006), Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martel, F. (1996), Le Rose et le noir: les homosexuels en France depuis 1968, Paris: Seuil. Mauger, G. (1996), Un nouveau Reprsentations, no. 3, pp. 51-77. militantisme, Socits et

May, T. (2008), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morris, M. & Patton, P. (1979), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy. Sydney: Feral Publications. Muoz, J. (1999), Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nordmann, C. (2006), Bourdieu/Rancire: la politique entre sociologie et philosophie, Paris: Amsterdam. Pratt, M. (1999), The defence of the straight state: heteronormativity, AIDS in France, and the space of the nation, French Cultural Studies, no. ix, pp. 263-80. Rancire, D. (1998), Brve histoire du Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons (GIP), 1971-1972, MANA, revue de sociologie et danthropologie, no. 5. Rancire, J., Borreil, J., Fraisse, G., Saint-Germain, P., Souletie, M., Vauday, P. & Vermeren, P. (1976a), Les Rvoltes Logiques, issue 2, Spring-Summer. ---. (1976b), Les Rvoltes Logiques, issue 4, Winter. ---. (1977), Les Rvoltes Logiques, issue 5, Spring-Summer. ---. (1978), Les Lauriers de Mai ou les chemins du pouvoir 1968-1978, special issue of Les Rvoltes Logiques, February. Rancire, J. (1989) [1981], The Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. J. Drury, Philadephia PA: Temple University Press.

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. K. Ross, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. ---. (1992), Politics, identification, and subjectivization, October, vol. 61, pp. 58-64. ---. (1998), Aux Bords Fabrique/Gallimard. du politique, 2nd edn, Paris: La

---. (1999) [1995], Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2001a), LInconscient esthtique, Paris: Galile. ---. (2001b), Ten theses on politics, Theory & Event, vol. 5, no. 3. ---. (2004) [2000], The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill, London: Continuum. ---. (2005a), Chroniques des temps consensuels, Paris: Seuil. ---. (2005b), La Haine de la dmocratie, Paris: La Fabrique. ---. (2007) [2003], The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliot, London: Verso. ---. (2008), Le Spectateur mancip, Paris: La Fabrique. Ross, K. (2002), May 68 and Its Afterlives, Chicago IL: Chicago University Press. Sedgwick, E. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Van Sant, G., dir. (2008), Milk. Pedagogy,

borderlands ejournal 2009

19

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Words, Bodies, Times


Queer theory before and after itself Sudeep Dasgupta
University of Amsterdam

Both queer theory and Jacques Rancires work have articulated critiques of identity. These critiques however, have taken place in very different institutional and disciplinary contexts, and are also marked by very specific histories. In this essay, close readings of specific essays (Edelman, Bersani, Dean, Butler) in queer theory are related to arguments developed by Rancire in order to bring out clearly the very different modes through which critiques of identity have been developed. In particular, the themes of language and representation, and ethics, provide the two perspectives through which both the conjunctions and disjunctions between queer theory and Rancires work are explored. Representation and ethics in both bodies of work, the essay argues, provide for a comparative and mutually illuminating perspective on the articulation of words, bodies and images.

A lesbian and gay population...is defined by multiple boundaries that make the question who is and who is not one of them not merely ambiguous but rather a perpetually and necessarily contested issue. (Warner, 1993: xxv) The demos is forever drawing away from itself, dispersing itself in the multiplicity of ecstatic and sporadic pleasures. (Rancire, 1995: 15)

Conjoining Rancires understanding of politics with Warners definition of sexual borders might open one to the charge of constructing superficial connections and tenuous homologies. For the demos and the queer cannot be simplistically linked through the discourse of ecstacies, pleasures and multiplicities. To do so would be to ignore the crucial differences between Rancires discussion of, and queer theorys relation to, politics. On the other hand, framing the one through the other might productively enable thinking a

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

relationality between Rancires understanding of politics and queer theorys critique of identity. Both share, minimally, a critique of the stabilization of identity through hegemonic discourses: in Rancires case, through a powerful archival reading of workers intellectual and political practices (Rancire, 1989), for queer theory, through a critique of the assumed essentialist notions of identity of the gay and lesbian liberation movement (Seidman, 1997). Michael Warners commentary in Fear of a Queer Planet sees belonging, based on sexual orientation, as necessarily contested and always subject to dislocation, while Rancire, in On the Shores of Politics argues that the demos is forever drawing away from itself (emphasis added). Warners multiple boundaries and Rancires shores, call attention to the crucial instability of identity and the motility of borders. However, the fields of knowledge within which both critiques take place, their specific modes of argumentation, and the conceptual resources furnished to substantiate their respective arguments are not the same. By marking the differences between them, and at the same time, producing points of contact, the essay connects specific arguments in Rancires uvre to crucial developments in queer theory. In particular, by weaving the two into and out of each others specific arguments around representation and language, and ethics, I will argue for Rancires relevance for a politically productive revisioning of queer theory, whose substance is being questioned in some quarters (Halperin, 2003). At the same time, if Eve Sedgwick is right that queer is the unstable solvent that dissolves all stable identities (1990: 85), then the disruptive instability that much queer theory articulates might bear a specific relation to Rancires resolutely anticonsensual understanding of politics. To think queer theory before itself, is to argue that Rancires writings, both prior to and after, queer theorys emergence, position us in the double sense of evaluating queer theorys presence, and ours before it, and constellating a nexus of temporalities of a before and after, which might provide new insights around representation, language and ethics. Rancires relevance then, lies not just in an asynchronous relation to, and before queer theory (Nights of Labour was translated into English in 1989). His in-disciplinary interventions were also formulating a politics before the subject, including the queer subject (Rifkin, 2005), whose deconstruction by queer theory in the academy came after the subject had been consolidated politically and intellectually. Constellating the time of the subject, and the times of its theorizations reveals productive disjunctures and conjunctions in thinking the relation between bodies, words and times. Language and representation Foucaults History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (1978, original French publication in 1976) was experienced by many, particularly in the U.S. (see Rubin and Butler, 1997) as making

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

possible a theoretical critique of the naturalness of homosexual identity. His theorization of the discursive production of subjectivity moved the terms of the gathering internal debate in gay and lesbian studies in the early 1980s away from the expression of an innate identity to a recognition that the very language and expression of sexed subjectivity was solicited by a power-knowledge nexus deployed through discourse. The argument that an incitement to discourse (Foucault, 1990: 17) produced an identity caught within the power relations it sought to resist, suggested a shift from theorizing or positing homosexual identity to analyzing its mode of production. The shift from the language of homosexual identity and experience, to a focus on how same-sex sex acts have different cultural meanings in different historical contexts (Jagose, 1996: 9, emphasis added) however, shifted the focus from the discursive construction of homosexuality toward a theoretization of meaning, language and representation. The post-Saussurean critique of the sign came to figure prominently in the shift from identity to identification. Thus the Foucauldian influence in U.S. queer theory coincided with the rising influence of Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which on the surface at least, could not be easily reconciled with Foucaults work (Davidson, 2001). I am not arguing that reconciliation of different theoretical interventions (Foucault, Derrida, Lacan) is necessary or desirable. It is important to note this nexus however, since it relates to the ex-centric relation of Rancire to queer theory, as we shall see. Both Rancire and Foucault are indebted to a Kantian understanding of the reduction of the multiplicities of experience to categories, and despite their differences of focus, how they analyzed the effects of this categorical imperative, I would argue, were significantly distinct from the Derridean and Lacanian influence that came to mark much queer theory. Queer theory developed what I am tempted to consider a paradigmatic discourse, where the destabilization of the sexed and sexually-desiring subject, was theorized through a Derridean understanding of criture and a Lacanian reading of Freud. At issue was the inadequacy of representation, the inability of language to fix the subject, which instead gets spoken through a language which destabilizes it. The discursive production of the homosexual subject, queer theory argues, is marked by incompleteness, ambivalence and instability precisely because of the inability of representation either to adequate the object it refers to, or to control the discourse-effect it engenders. Most, though not all the essays in Inside/Out: Lesbian theories, Gay theories (Fuss, 1994), for example, problematise the stability of identity through deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In Seeing things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex, Lee Edelman (1994: 173-91) intricately explicates Freud and Derrida by deranging the equalization, through ocular proof, of sexual identity with sexual acts. Edelmans virtuoso reading figures the infectious indecency of sodomy backwards, as it were, to analyze the structural ambivalence of representational adequacy and scopic certainty. His argument is predicated on the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

centrality of doubt in Freuds understanding of the powerful ambivalent tendencies in the pre-genital phase, which from then on become attached to every pair of opposites (Freud, 1972: 77, qtd. in Edelman, 1994: 190). If same-sex sodomy is one defining character of homosexual identity, then pre-genital ambivalence infects the binaries generated by normative sexuality. The scene of gay male sex (sodomy) as the ocular proof of homosexual identity is destabilized by the indeterminacy of the primal scene (Edelman, 1994: 190). The turn to Freud, which suggests a description of the doubt-ridden ambivalence of binary sexual identity is immediately deliteralised by turning to Derrida who argues that turning ones back (to Plato) becomes a very amorous position (Derrida, 1987: 178, qtd in Edelman, 1994: 191). By bottoming up the P of Plato, Philosophy and phallogocentrism into the D of Derrida and deconstruction (1994: 190), Edelmans psychoanalytic deconstruction of sexual identity undermines the epistemological certainty of sight. He reveals seeing sodomy as just seeing things, and conceptualizes writing itself as sodomitical writing, performing a sodomitical reversal, gestures towards the persistence of a pre-genital indeterminacy that the law of castration would deny through institutional categories of present and not present (1994: 190). The figuration of sodomy rather than its self-evident transparency, replaces sodomy as cause and homosexuality as effect with the (il)logic of metalepsis that refutes the possibility of defining clear identities or establishing the security of fixed positions and discovers, instead...the sodomitical (il)logic of the primal scene that comes always both before and behind it (Edelman, 1994: 191). Sodomy as a bodily practice then, far from defining identity, embodies the essential figurality of sexual identity. This figurality undermines binaries of presence and absence, and writes indeterminacy into the text of sexual identity. At issue is both the critique of identity and the mode through which the critique was conducted. Despite the differences between Derrida and Lacan, a complicated and often reworked (Butler, 1997) conjunction of the two got deployed in queer theory. The night of light The relationship of bodily practices and identity was crucial to Rancires uvre, particularly since the 1981 publication of La nuit des proltaires (translated into English as Nights of Labour: The Workers dream in Nineteenth-century France in 1989). A decades worth of archival research into workers struggles in nineteenthcentury France reveals that worker-being is not found through an equation between labour as practice and worker as category. Questioning the overlap between the order of thought and the social order (2003 [1983]: xxv), Rancire sardonically observes that the historians heartfelt love for science and for the common people (1989: 11) assigns to the worker not words, [but] deeds; not heroism, the daily round; not impressions, numbers; not images, the real thing (ibid.). Nights of Labour demonstrates, that is, shows, that the worker was engaging precisely in what was not his/her preserve employing words, attempting heroism, registering impressions, producing

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

images. The French workers of the nineteenth century created newspapers or associations, wrote poems or joined utopian groups...claiming the status of fully speaking and thinking beings. Rather than the importation of scientific thought into the world of the worker or the affirmation of a workers culture, there was a transgressive will to appropriate the night of the poets and thinkers, to appropriate the language of the other (2003: 219). Rancires showing is not a depth-hermeneutic that plunges below the surface of deeds and daily drudgery to reveal the truth of worker consciousness. Rather, he announces [We] are not going to scratch images to bring truth to the surface, we are going to shove them aside so that other figures may come together and decompose there (1989: 10, emphases added). This mode of showing does three things at once. Firstly, if workers act as workers should not, and therefore undermine the categorical imperative of (identity as) juridical identification, this undermining coordinates a counter-commonality a coming together which destabilizes the social order by disrupting the border between self and other. This is a process of becoming-worker by becoming other, with others. It is a polemical configuration of the social precisely because it links together self-othering with community rather than common-selves with community. Secondly, and following from the first, these nocturnal figures produce a being-together before the subject (worker) is made. What is shown is not the completion of stable identity, but a before-identity in the process of being made (composed) and unmade (decomposed). The worker, assigned to incarnate the discourse of truth of the historian he who can know neither it [the discourse of truth] nor himself but who cannot help but manifest it in his words and his action (1989: 12) never arrives at such a conjunction of body, time and space on which this discourse is predicated. Hence, the historians strange fascination for the truth of the popular body, and hence also his condemnation of those unclassed intellectuals, petty bourgeois ideologists (ibid.), who by taking part in the work of perversion fail to incarnate on (their) proletarian bodies the truth concealed by the daily religion of commodity exchange and word exchange (ibid.). Thirdly, while for the historian, the theory of labour must coincide with the labour of his theory by coming together and decomposing, the flux generated by the proletarian (as pure production, pure unascribed and unassigned proliferation of bodies) is ungraspeable by the historians desire for the workers body in its stable purity as incarnation of the labour of his theory. What proletarian nights reveal is the coming-together and decomposition of the figures of worker-dreamers, prattlers, versifiers, reasoners, and indulgers in sophistry whose notebooks serve as a replacement screen in the mirror of reality granted and appearance withheld and whose falsetto voice creates dissonance in the duet of mute truth and contrite illusion. Perverted proletarians whose discourse is made up of borrowed words (1989: 15). By registering impressions and borrowing words and images, these workers produce a gap between their bodies and the discourse of truth which confers

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

on those bodies a mute intentionless speech unbekownst to the worker. The intellectual labour of these workers is not solicited, as a response to an official discourse; rather, they derange a discourse which assumes the incapacity of workers to do anything but work. This gap between incarnation and mute speech, which Rancire later in Linconscient esthtique will call the domain of the aesthetic unconscious, (2001: 44) is populated by shadowy figures whose making and unmaking undermine the lived experience of identity as self-embodiment, refiguring the community through antagonistic subjectivation (2003: 226). This process Rancire charts in 1983 parallels what Foucault in 1981 (English translation 1989) described as the radical threat that homosexuality poses not by asking the question Who am I? (1989: 308) but by exploiting the paradox of a social order traversed by affective intensities that both keep it going and shake it up (1989: 309, emphasis added). Askesis as the work that one performs on oneself but that one happilynever attains (1989a: 309) figures a self-in-the-making which shakes up a social order by redrawing the affective intensities traversing it. The unattainable stability of the self and the disruption of a social order are linked in the temporality of the present continuous. What are the consequences of this figuration of proletarian perversion for re-thinking queer theorys deconstruction of the sexual subject? Firstly, it is striking that the proliferation of discourse (words, speeches, images) by these proletarian subjects-in-the-making is not a response to an incitement to discourse but the manifestation of a transgressive will that violates the order of discourse. La parole ouvrire (Rancire and Faure, 1976) and Louis-Gabriel Gauny: Le philosophe plbien (Rancire, 1983) document the activities and words which interrupt the discursive production of a subject and manifest this transgression through the disordering of bodies, words and times. What is common to the community is made and unmade through the becoming-subject of the worker, not by a deconstructive reading of the subject as effect of the errant signifier but by the errancy of words traversing different bodies.
By stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space. (2004: 13)

Thus we have: the deployment of words by bodies then, rather than the movement of the signifier textualizing the body; the effects of language borrowed and circulated, rather than a linguistic paradigm destabilizing the subject; a counter-intuitive relation between bodies and words in the production of an antagonistic community-in-themaking, rather than the dissolution of identity through a textual reading of the body. If the textuality of sodomy writes the body as the site of the failure of representational adequacy, the meanderings of proletarian bodies and hybrid speech function less as figurations of representational failure; rather, the production of resistant nocturnal

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

bodies is figured through a play between words, bodies and the world, and their historically-specific conjunctions and disjunctions. Queer theorys turn from a critique of identity to identification as a process, poses the question what comes after the subject? Rancires historiography recovers an unstable present in the past where subjectivation is taking place in the temporality of a before-thesubject. Hence he argues that in that period (the early 1980s) I did not want to define natures of subjects but processes of subjectivization (2008a: 75). Subjectivization in queer theory is often related to Foucault. Judith Butlers Althusserian reworking of the concept in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997: 83-105) points out the paradoxical process by which the subject produced by a discourse is dependent on that very discourse to resist it. Asujettissement is the word that captures this dialectic of subjection and agency. Queer theory, like Rancire, clearly was not interested, in arriving at the nature of the (homosexual) subject, but its deconstruction of the subject posed the question of what came after the subject had been deconstructed. When Rancire uses the word subjectivation, the emphasis is not on how the subject is produced by discourse but on how subjectivation is the process of self-othering in the precarious temporality before any subject is stabilized. The temporal vectors of subjectiv(iz)ation move in opposite directions. Further, this process of subjectivization is not tied to any identity. However, if queer theory argues for a politics of difference based on the instability of a sexuality traversed by language, for Rancire the focus is on the polemical configuration of bodies, words and times through equality. In Politics, Identification and Subjectivization he argues:
The process of emancipation is the verification of the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking beingenacted in the name of a category denied either the principle or the consequences of that equality: workers, women, people of color, or others. But the enactment of equality is not the enactment of the self, of the attributes or properties of the community in question. The name of a community that invokes its rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone. (1992: 59-60, emphasis added)

Acts of emancipation equalize anyone with anyone else. They fissure the social yet produce a community of equals not by positing the equalization of identities but by producing polemical countercommonalities in the temporality of an always-arriving subject-in-themaking. Rancire focusses on the demonstration of acts of subjectivation rather than a theorization of the subjects pyschic structure or its citational capacity. The refusal to theorize the subject is integral to his critique of the politics of theory, which he developed in La leon dAlthusser (1974). Less the application of a theoretical paradigm from the Olympian distance of an intellectual vantage point (the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

labour of theory) Rancires early interventions were intimatelyinvolved with the material, sometimes producing a strange idiom (2008b: 174). In his book on Joseph Jacotot, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Emancipation Rancire conjoins different languages and epochs to produce ironic (2008b: 186) lessons rather than straightforward paradigms. This is not rhetorical flourish but a politically-motivated activation of the critique of intellectual mastery by blurring the boundary between one speaking subject (the theorist) and another (Jacotot). When compared with much of queer theorys deconstruction of the subject, the difference becomes very apparent: in the latter a fully-developed theoretical model often precedes or anchors a specific reading in the narrativization of the argument. Paradoxically then, where queer theory deconstructed identity as the subject-effect of discourse (Foucault), it went on to produce an imposing counter-discourse of subject-formation. Lee Edelmans Lacanian case for sinthomosexuality (2004: 33) is one of the most recent deployments of this theory-object relation. Rancire, particularly in his early work, explicitly rejects this temptation. If the historians love for the common people motivates the production of the workers body as incarnation of his truth, Rancires figuration of subjectivation ignores the traditional intellectual temptation of providing a theory of the subject. No theory of the subject emerges either aprs-coup or before the subject to be deconstructed. The subject is not a self theorized before-hand, but a before-the-subject in its (un)making. Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003) exemplifies best this dis-embodiment of the people from any discourse that produces it. One could argue, particularly in the readings of Wordsworth and Rosellinis Europa 51, that the writing matches the precise unfolding, overlap and disjunction between a moving subject-in-the-making and a world. This is also queer, a queerness not delineating a subject where the body incarnates an identity but the jeu-crois of bodies, words, images before-the-subject that happily never arrives. How do these subjects-in-the-making acting through emancipation in the name of an anonym relate to Sedgwicks understanding of queer as the solvent of all identities? If queer is the name for a critique of all identity, the resonances with Rancires interventions seem apparent since emancipation is the equalization of anyone with anyone. On the other hand, how might queer theorys critique of sexual normativity, partly through psychoanalysis, relate to Rancires anonymous subjectivations given that the sexual or any other dimension does not lend any substantive identity to the bodies of the anybodies? A short excursus around the psychoanalytic reading of the subject might suggest a relation between anonymous subjectivation in Rancire and sexual dis-identification in queer theory. The differences between them will tellingly figure the themes of ethics, community and commonality with which the essay closes.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Ex-cursus around the subject Queer theorys reading of Freud centralizes sexuality (particularly around desire), the drives and fantasy, as crucial to the formation and de-formation of the subject. This process is often read linguistically through the early Lacan of the Symbolic, and the later Lacans emphasis on the Real. In his Beyond Sexuality, Tim Dean (2000) develops a Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality ungrounded in sexual object-choice, similar at first glance to Foucaults argument for the desexualization of pleasure (1989b: 384), that is the delinking of pleasure from genital excitation. By linking the Freudian unconscious with the Lacanian real, Dean argues that queerness is always relational, oppositional in the subversive sense, rather than the substantive (2000: 231). This relationality is not substantive because the subject is ascribed neither a sexual identity nor a desire directed at a definite object. By distinguishing between two kinds of Other (1997: 910) Dean argues that sexuality does not lend a substantive core to the subjects being, but is a destabilizing structure which generates a drifting of the subject unanchored to any specific other. This reading of psychoanalysis, already emerging in Leo Bersanis Culture of Redemption as an ethical-erotic project (1990: 3), aims precisely at the dissolution of subjectivity without positing either gender, sexual object-choice or sex acts as determinant of sexuality. By taking sexuality beyond sexual object-choice, Dean also returns sexuality to a temporality of the past, of the uncoordinated sexual drives before becoming-infant, and whose polymorphous effects determine the future of all adult life (homosexual or otherwise). Reading Lacans concept of the real as a concept designating everything that resists adaptation (2000: 230, emphasis in original), Dean evacuates the subject of a specificity based on sexual intelligibility. Dean goes on to argue that precisely because the real has no positive content, it has more to do with sex and death [than the symbolic or imaginary] (2000: 230). By understanding sexuality beyond object-choice, and coupling it to the Lacanian real, which has no positive content, Deans Lacanian reading of the subject installs indeterminacy at its heart. Two points are important here. First, this rendition of sexuality makes psychoanalysis tell the truth of the nonsubstantive, relational drifting of the subject-that-never-arrives. In this sense, paradoxically, sexuality by forming the core of the psychic subject in the unconscious evacuates queerness of sexual content. This formulation comes close to my reading of queerness in Rancire, since no identity structures his subject-in-the-making either the acts of emancipation are not acts of the self but the enactment of an anonym. Non-identity, negativity as productivity and potential all these bear a relation to Rancires peculiarly non-substantive beforethe-subject. For Dean and Bersani this desexualization of sexuality generates a relation to the self as self- (un)making via the impersonality of the Other in the sense that neither the subject nor the Other is substantive but the site for the figuration of impersonal drives. Their arguments are routed via psychoanalysis through the subject and beyond sexuality, while Foucault does not take recourse to psychoanalysis, though like them he also underlines

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

desexualization as a potential practice of freedom. Rancires understanding of potentialities are based neither on sexuality nor its desexualization, and enable thinking queerness outside any reference to psychoanalysis. For Rancire the queer, in my reading, could be seen as the process of antagonistic subjectivation rather than a theory of the subjects dissolution as effect of an ambivalent psychic structure. Here the proximity to Foucaults account of S/M (1989c: 322-34) for example is evident. That is, no theory, psychoanalytic or otherwise, is depended on, or constructed, to explain the conditions of possibility for the subjects dissolution. Rancire deliberately skirts around the subject of subject. The transgressive will which activates subjects-in-themaking, however, is neither unmediated nor simply auto-affirmation. (Here, the relation with Foucault is more complex, as we will see below). Because no privileged subject-position is elaborated, the transgressive will is the possession of anybody, which does not mean the subject is substantively empty it means the subject is always before any substantialization into a self. If in queer theory the sexual subjectivation of the subject produces queerness by desexualizing the sexuality at its core (the primal scene), Rancires queer anybody is not based on any core, even a non-foundational core of sexuality without sex. Parenthetically, although Dean and Bersani also argue that sexuality destabilizes everyone and thus anybody, not just homosexuals, their examples privilege same-sex male sodomy, nonreproductive sex and the male particularly in relation to gay male barebacking. The unspecified bodys potential, for Rancire, is exercised only specifically, and in this sense, his arguments are not made by recourse to the signifier (Lacan/ Derrida for Edelman, 1994), or fantasy (Lacan/ iek for Dean, 2000) but in the present in which it equates two specific times the time of sleep with the time of dreaming, the time of labour with the time of times (see Dasgupta, 2009). Althussers reminder that there is no time of Capital, but invisible times (1977: 99), becomes relevant here. Rancires demonstration of the articulation of temporalities by the nineteenth-century French worker however, shows that the proletarian perverter of worker identity does not need the philosopher (Althussser) to uncover the errors of classical economics (1997: 91) through the concept of timeconstructed out of the reality of the different rhythms (1977: 99) of different types of capital. Rancires transgressive will is not uncovered through the right reading strategy (Althussers Reading Capital) or performance of writing (Edelmans Homographesis); neither is it an unmediated, ahistorical ontology of the subject (Nietzsche, Deleuze). It is a situated exercise of the potentiality of an always arriving subject-in-the-making. Here, again, the adjacency of Rancire and Foucault in thinking resistance is noticeable. As Butler (2002) argues, Foucaults ethics of the aesthetic stylization of the self is always situated. But it becomes unclear whether Foucault, like Deleuze, is arguing for an ontology of desire that approximates the Nietzschean will-to-poweror whether he is adequately depicting an

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

historically conditioned, un-precedented form of desire (Butler, 1999: 227). Is Foucaults plenitude of the possible (1983: 145) an ontological given of productive desire that manifests itself historically or is it a historically conditioned desire (Butler, 1999: 227-9)? And how does this relate to Rancires transgressive will? Ethics and figuration
The self is a practical convenience promoted to the status of an ethical ideal (Bersani, 1990: 4)

Rancire (1999) emphasizes that the very absence of an arche to the social order, of which the demos is the proof, enables a politics of the possible. The transgressions of perverted proletarians are both an effect and a manifestation of this fundamental an-archy of the social order. Similarly, Foucault argues for the paradoxical dependence of the social order on affective intensities traversing and undermining it. However, as Judith Butler astutely notices, the Nietzschean will-topower manifested in the self acting on itself in Foucaults argument is historically occasioned rather than determined (Butler, 2002: 228). In that sense Foucaults examples of transgressions, by being events in history rather than acts of resistance made possible by certain historical circumstances (Butlers point) lean toward an ontological argument, and like Deleuze, emphasize non-subjective productive desire as a constant, a pure potential shorn of historical specificity and its conditions of possibility. Rancires anarchy of the social order, theorized through a critique of Plato and Aristotle, for example, emphasizes the inability of philosophy to escape the de-structuring core of the polis rather than an ontological purity of the desiring becoming-subject. In Nietzschean vein then, Foucaults undermining of the subject is thinkable because at the root of sexuality (2000a: 72) is transgression, as the act that carries [all existences and values] to their limits and from there, to the Limit where an ontological decision achieves its end (2000a: 75). The end of the act is both a goal, and a death, the goal of transgression becoming the death of the subject which traces the great skeletal outline (2000a: 71) of the death of God. Ethics as a transgressive practice of freedom (Foucault, 1994: 281-301) is not the redrawing of the community through the dialectical negation of a social order but the pure transgression of a self which in transforming itself leaves all considerations of ethics as community behind. The light in the night Some two decades before Foucaults book made its presence felt, primarily in the U.S. academy, in an essay in honour of Bataille, he developed a nexus between the subject, sexuality and transgression, in which language was crucial. The deconstructive paradigm in queer theory largely by-passed this argument though it was engaged with by scholars like Leo Bersani and others some years later. In thinking transgression through literature (Sade, Blanchot, Bataille) Foucault

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

describes the singular experienceof transgression (2000a: 72) which affirms limited being affirms the limitlessness into which it [limited being] leaps (74). Subjective interiority, and language, explode in the non-referential sacrificiality of sexual activity. The singularity of transgression is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies (2000a: 74). In sexuality resides no truth of the subject to be released from (Christian) repression; rather, after the death of God, sexuality is a fissure not one that surrounds us as the basis of our isolation or individuality but one that marks the limit within us and designates us as limit (70). The language of sexuality after Sade, Foucault argues has lifted us into the night where God is absent, and where all our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation that ... dissipates it, exhausts itself in it, and restores it to the empty purity of its transgression (2000a: 70). Importantly, he argues that the experience of transgression is not opposed to anything, it is both so pure and so complicated, it must be detached from its questionable association to ethics, and a divided world. In other words, transgression is not arranged against anything, it does not negate any social ordering or ethical community, it is not the experience of contradictionfor dialectical thought (2000a: 72). Foucault affirms the need to resuscitate this non-discursive language of transgression, this language which is sometimes immobilised in scenes we call erotic, and suddenly volatilized in philosophical turbulence (2000a: 76). Foucault identifies the experience of dissipation and exhaustion with the spectacle of erotic deaths (2000a: 83) in Batailles Le bleu du ciel, which returns transformed through the desexualization of pleasure in S/M. The night is illuminated with lightning flashes of a transgressive language beyond the sovereign subject, turning the interiority of the subject wielding language as representation, into the exorbitant subject and a language appearing n a lightning flash, giving birth to an obscure but dominant figure where death, the mirror and the double enact their roles (2000b: 99). The enactment of death will appear again, in queer theory, where light and night, and the obscurity of a language that spews out a wavelike succession of words to infinity (99) will be linked to the self-relating subjects dissolution. Ethics, and the self, emerge as the disappearance of the self in the polymorphous profusion of languages without meaning, pure materiality devoid of sense (meaning). Art, and the aesthetic experience are located within this ethics of the self. Transgression, for Foucault, is the event of pure difference, the Kantian nonpositive affirmation, or in Blanchots terms contestation. Contestation is not a generalized negation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity (Foucault, 2000a: 75). This pulsional extimacy of language and transgressive experience that affirms nothing is crucial, for it returns in queer theorys coupling of ethics to sexuality. Sexuality, as we saw in Dean (2000), is not an affirmation of identity, whether it be sexual identity, gender identity, or any other form. Instead, sexuality is generalizable in its field of effects and experiences, not as the negation of anything but through the evacuation of meaning. In this

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

sense, the language of sexuality what Foucault describes with the notion of sexuality as a fissure in Deans psychoanalytic reading suggests an aesthetics and an ethics of the self working on itself through the play of dissipation and exhaustion, a pure transgression of any substantialization of the subject in identity. Bersanis ethicoerotic project, recently developed in intimacies (2008) is traceable to his critique of art as the agent of a culture of redemption. Art, like psychoanalysis, figures this pulsional dissipation of the subject, and the essential impersonality of sexuality. It is also through a reading of Batailles Le bleu du ciel, where sex, death and language are interrelated, that Bersani (1990) redeems culture from the positive futurity of redemption through the pulsional densities of Batailles Nietzschean language. An ethics of the self, then, is an acting on the self, which Foucault famously characterised as the use of pleasure beyond its normative sexualization. Bersani and Dean give this a decisively psychoanalytic cast, coupling the aesthetic and art in a subterranean world deprived of meaning (sens). Aesthetics and ethics are related to each other in Rancires work too. In the time of the night and candle-light, words, bodies and acts combine polemically. Instead of embodying a truth which it unknowingly manifests itself, the body produces in the candle-light of the night a language that establishes a commonality, a community, an ethnos and therefore an ethics, that disincarnates the truth it must unknowingly manifest. The worker who can know neither it [the discourse of truth] nor himself but who cannot help but manifest it in his words and his action (12), produces another body and the wrong kind of language. There is another body, of course, a paradigmatic one, which also manifests without knowing a truth it embodies, Sophocles Oedipus. For Rancire, psychoanalysis does not function as a clinical paradigm for establishing the truth of the subject. His reading of Oedipus in Freud produces psychoanalysis as one among many modes of thinking about thought, and art, that the aesthetic revolution (2002: 133) makes possible. He argues if it was possible for Freud to formulate the psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious, it was because an unconscious mode of thought had already been identified outside of the clinical domain as such, and the domain of works of art and literature can be defined as the privileged ground where this unconscious is at work (Rancire, 2009: 2). Through Vicos reading of Homers Odysseus, Rancire shows that Oedipus, like the true Homer, is readable according to an aesthetic regime in which art is defined by its being the identity of a conscious procedure and an unconscious production, of a willed action and an involuntary process. In short, the identity of logos and pathos will henceforth be what attests to the existence of art (2009: 14). What this refiguration of Oedipus provides us with is an understanding of aesthetics as the idea of art and of thinking through the identity of opposites. The first of this pair, attributed to Hegel and Schelling is a spirits odyssey outside of itself (2009: 14) in a to-and-fro with the specific materiality of arts it is opposed to, in a game of incomplete embodiments which

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Hegel argues culminates in Romantic poetry, that of Hlderlin. Opposed to this conjunction of pathos and logos is another odyssey, the Nietzschean/ Schopenhauerian movement which turns its back on the appearances and the lovely causal order of the world of representation in order to face the obscure, subterranean and nonsensical world of the thing-in-itself (2009: 15). The transgressive experience, and language of sexuality encountered in Foucaults Nietzschean reading of Sade, Bataille and Blanchot is clearly identifiable with this latter odyssey, propulsed by pulsions of joy and suffering, and of joy in suffering. This is the language of transgression, the pulsional force ex-orbiting the subject into figurality, that queer theorists picked up. The pure materiality of the language of sexuality intertwines sex and death producing figurality rather than representation. Rancire, on the other hand, will maintain the indefinite play between representation and figurality, the odyssey of imperfect embodiments between spirit and materiality (Hegel/ Schelling) and the Dionysian pulsions of pure will that affirm nothing but themselves (Nietzsche/Schopenhauer). Rancires understanding of the aesthetic, deeply indebted to Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, could be thought to fall between the two meanings of the term sense in English as the sensory and as meaning. Where the ethical turn in queer theory reads the aesthetic (literature primarily) as the evacuation of sense as meaning, Rancire figures ethics as community within the suspended moment of the impossible unity of form (sense as meaning) and matter (sense as pure, formless materiality). Schillers aesthetic state, Rancire argues by suspending the opposition between an active understanding and passive sensibility, aims at breaking down with an idea of art an idea of society based on the opposition between those who think and decide and those who are doomed to material tasks... this suspension of works negative value became the assertion of its positive value as the very form of the shared effectivity of thought and community (2004: 44, emphases added; Dasgupta, 2009). Art then is a production, the identification of a process of material execution with a communitys self-presentation of its meaning (2004: 44, emphasis in original). The self-presentation of a community establishes, as we saw in relation to the proletarians of 19th century France, a commonality, a community as a form of being together, that fissures the community where everyone is assigned their rightful place by philosophical discourse. A partage, as that which is shared and which divides, produces sensible configurations that derange the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience (2004: 13). The difference between ethics and aesthetics in queer theory, and in Rancires thought becomes evident here. While the former sees the aesthetic as the field of art, literature in particular, where the self dissipates itself through the language of sexuality pushing beyond representation into nonmeaning, Rancire sees the aesthetic as an idea of art where the suspended dialectic between passive materiality (non-meaning) and active subjectivity (producing meaning) produces a partage du

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

sensible, a conjunction of the sensible (meaningful) presentation of the community and its material execution. The difference between ethics as an acting on the self by the self in queer theory, and ethics as the formation and de-formation of community through a partage du sensible is identifiable in the relative emphases on sociality, or community in both formulations. The relational self in Bersanis argument is essentially one of narcissism, where self-jouissance ...dissolves the person and thereby, at least temporarily, erases the sacrosanct value of selfhood (1990: 4). An ethics of narcissism is based on a sexuality [that] is socially dysfunctional...[which] brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart (ibid.). Bersanis target is the sovereign subject, and his weapon the jouissance figured in writers such as...Baudelaire, Bataille and Flaubert. Rancires target, on the other hand, is less the subject, whose imperfect embodiment of truth he has already shown to be a convenient fiction. Rather, it is the ordering of bodies in space, and the distribution of words, time and spaces that his understanding of politics targets. Ethics is not the shattering of the self, or driving the people brought together apart. It is the political and aesthetic staging of community as a contentious being-together that produces a selfpresentation of community to itself. It is contentious not because it undermines a sovereign subject, but because it is the production, within a determined, sensible world, of a given that is heterogenous to it (2003: 226). It is the making visible of subjects previously consigned to the dark where the self emerges as other, transforming itself, as an equal participant in a redrawn community from which it was excluded. There is thus a motility of the subject in both queer theory and Rancire, but where one is dissolving in the aesthetic experience of jouissance, the other is transforming in the aesthetic and political presentation of community. Comparing some instances of these two forms of subjects-in-their(un)making illuminate the differences. Bersanis culture of narcissism which produces a self-shattering, turns into an impersonal narcissism through the ascestic sacrificiality of barebacking. In a reading of Tim Deans (2008) analysis of a Paul Morris film, Bersani (2008: 47-9) argues that breeding (ejaculation in a bottom) turns the rectum into the place for conceiving death (Bersani, 2008: 45), that is, a womb for breeding not life but the very unviability of life in its normative, egoconsolidating futurity. Bersani argues, reading a scene where semen collected from anonymous men is funnelled into the bottoms rectum, that this act establishes a community of viruses within the self (the bottom). Community becomes internal to the self, carried by the self as a time-bomb, that will dissipate the self. It is a sociality with strangers that produces a community within the self to be selfdestructed. Barebacking and breeding is thus a manifestation of a sexualized death drive (Bersani, 2008: 45). The porn video figures community without substantive relationality, impersonal narcissism rather than inter-personal sociality. Community destroys a substantive relationality through an act of the self on the self mediated by

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

unknown others. The annihilation of the ego in the Culture of Redemption becomes the self-expansion of the ego to the point of dissemination in intimacies (2008). He interprets barebacking as a mode of ascetic spirituality that implicitly critiques...the multiple forms of ego-driven intimacy (2008: 55). The impersonality of this narcissism is figural since the egos self-shattering plunges it into nonmeaning instead of social intelligibility. For Rancire, social intelligibility is precisely what is at stake in politics, for the presentation of the community and its meaning is based on comprehension, on the equalization of the intelligence of anybody with anyone else through the exercise of potentialities. The potency of words derives from the possibility of incarnating themselves in anybody and all bodies, and being understood as words rather than noise. Ethics is not the ascetic spirituality of egodissolution. It is the production of intimacy through a being-together by subjects constantly in-the-making. Perhaps Butlers (2004, 2008) understanding of ethical relationality and counter-intuitive alliances is closer to Rancire here. In Undoing Gender (2004), she interrogates the seeming opposition between feminist, queer, inter and trans-sex theory and politics, and the separatism they sometimes generate. Through a reading of New Gender Politics, Butler argues that commonalities can be forged by identifying their minimal points of intersection. Instead of dissolution of the self, then, the expansion of the contingent selfs relationality. Forging relationalities through alliance politics here however, is predicated on both the assertion of difference and the forging of a commonality. For Rancire, however, alliance-politics would still assume a minimal identity (recall that acts of emancipation by women, workers, people of color, and others are enactments of polemical equalization, not enactments of distinct communities). Further, Butler thinks sociality here, not through the figural destruction of meaning (the death drive, the conception of death in the rectum), but precisely through intelligibility and the dialectic of subjection and agency based on recognition (a term, and focus, which is missing in Dean and Bersanis theorization of a beyond to sexuality). Like Rancires subjects-in-the-making, the subject for Butler is continually negotiating (admittedly more in the Hegelian than the Kantian sense) with the spatial and temporal organization of bodies. However, where for Butler, dis-identification arises from the non-normative body citing the norm differently, for Rancire, community is formed by the wrong body citing the norm perfectly, through borrowed words spoken by improper bodies. Butlers sociality through imperfect citation and Rancires relationality through counter-intuitive equalization come together and apart around the representation of community. Queer theorys interrogation of identity toward an ethics of the self and community and Rancires argument of the subject-in-the-making through a disputive commonality spiral around each other. The distance between provides the space where the temporalities of the before and the after might further novel configurations of queerness.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and teaches media studies with a focus on the relation between politics and aesthetics, globalization, migration and critical theory. His publications include a critical introduction to the joint Dutch translation of Jacques Rancires Partage du sensible and Linconscient esthtique, Visual Culture and the Place of Modernity in Ackbar Abbas and John Erni (eds), Internationalizing Cultural Studies: A Reader (Blackwell: London, 2004) and is the editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2006). His most recent publication is Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement, in Parallax 52 (Special issue: Jacques Rancire: In Disagreement), 2009. Bibliography Althusser, L. (1977), The errors of classical economics, in E. Balibar and L. Althusser, Reading Capital, London: Verso, pp. 91-118. Bersani, L. (1990), The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press. ---. (2008), with Adam Phillips. Intimacies, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (1997), Against proper objects, in E. Weed & N. Schor (eds), Feminism meets Queer Theory, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-30. ---. (1999), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in TwentiethCentury France, New York: Columbia University Press. ---. (2004), Undoing Gender, London: Routledge. ---. (2008), Sexual politics, torture and secular time, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 1-23. Dasgupta, S. (2009), Conjunctive times, disjointed time: philosophy between enigma and disagreement, Parallax, Special Issue: Jacques Rancire: In Disagreement, vol. 52, pp. 3-19. ---. (Forthcoming 2009), Jacques Rancire, in F. Colman (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, New York: Acumen. Davidson, A.I. (2001), Foucault, psychoanalysis and pleasure, in T. Dean & C. Lane (eds), Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 43-50.

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Dean, T. (1997), Two kinds of Other and their consequences, Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 910-20. --. (2000), Beyond Sexuality, Chicago & London: University of Chicago. ---. (2008), Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1997), The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass, Chicago & London: University of Chicago. Edelman, L. (1994), Seeing things: representation, the scene of surveillance and the spectacle of gay male sex, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 173-91. ---. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1983), The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage. ---. (1989a), Friendship as a way of life, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth & J. Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 308-12. ---. (1989b), Sex, power and the politics of identity, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth & J. Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 382-90. ---. (1989c), Sexual choice, sexual act, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth & J. Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 322-34. ---. (1994), The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley & others, New York: New Press, pp. 281-301. ---. (2000a), A preface to transgression, Aesthetics: Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume Two, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley & others, London: Penguin, pp. 5368. ---. (2000b), Language to infinity, Aesthetics: Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume Two, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley & others, London: Penguin, pp. 6988.

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Freud, S. (1972), The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Lou AndreasSalom, ed. E. Pfeiffer, trans. W. & E. Robson-Scott, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Halperin, D. (2003), The normalization of queer, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, pp. 339-43. Jagose, A. (1996), Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. Rancire, J. (1974), La Leon dAlthusser, Paris: Gallimard. ---. (1976), La parole ouvrire: 1830-1851, with A. Faure (ed.), Paris: Union gnrale dditions. ---. (1983), Louis-Gabriel Gauny: Le philosophe plbien, ed. La Dcouverte/ Presses universitaires de Vincennes, Paris/ Saint-Denis. ---. (1989), Nights of Labour: The Workers Dream in NineteenthCentury France, trans. J. Drury, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ---. (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. K. Ross, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ---. (1992), Politics, identification and subjectivation, October, vol. 61, pp. 58-64. ---. (1995), On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso. ---. (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2001), Linconscient esthtique, Paris: Galile. ---. (2002), The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes: emplotments of autonomy and heteronomy, New Left Review, vol. 14, pp. 133-51. ---. (2003), The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. J. Drury, C. Oster & A. Parker, London & Durham: Duke University Press. ---. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill, London & New York: Continuum. ---. (2008a), Art is going elsewhere, politics must follow it: an interview with Sudeep Dasgupta, Krisis: Journal of Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 70-76.

19

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2008b), Aesthetics against incarnation: an interview by Anne Marie Olivier, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, pp. 172-90. ---. (Forthcoming 2009), The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. D. Keates & J. Swenson, Cambridge: Polity Press. Rifkin, A. (2005), Il y a des mots quon souhaiterait ne plus lire , Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 96-109. Rubin, G. with J. Butler (1997), Sexual traffic: an interview, in E. Weed & N. Schor (eds), Feminism meets Queer Theory, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 68-108. Sedgwick, E.K. (1990), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley & London: University of California Press. Seidman, S. (1997), Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warner, M. (1993), Introduction, in M. Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, pp. viixxxi.

borderlands ejournal 2009

20

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Non-Reproductive Futurism
Rancires rational equality against Edelmans body apolitic Nina Power
Roehampton University, UK

Lee Edelmans recent queer theory polemic against reproductive futurism seeks to align his project against all reason and against all politics. This paper argues that to write from the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive as Edelman puts it, involves deliberately superimposing various political categories with various non-political categories. Thus Edelman elides democracy with the Child, rationality with a nave concept of progress, and heterosexuality (straightforwardly) with reproduction in a bid to ward off the threat of collective organisation and action. Against Edelmans attempt to rid thought of all politics, Rancires conception of politics will be presented as capable of avoiding many of the main targets of Edelmans attack, as not being committed to a notion of politics that is based on reproduction, but is nevertheless rational in a specific way. The paper will also draw on empirical historical examples of certain left-wing and alternative political movements, such as early kibbutzim, collectives and groups that explicitly refused reproduction, but that nevertheless were most definitely political, and quite often queer.

Introduction Lee Edelmans attempt to subtract queer theory from any positive political project is both incredibly compelling and, at the same time, historically dispiriting. Compelling because, along with recent theorists of biopolitics, he isolates and critiques the idea that life is the central category of contemporary politics; dispiriting because Edelman thinks that we ultimately need less politics, not more, or, in his words, that the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

(Edelman, 2004: 2). The queer is thus anti-social, anti-society and above all anti-natal. The image of the child (the fascism of the babys face, Edelman, 2004: 75) symbolises, for Edelman, the concerns of politics as a whole. In fact, we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child (Edelman, 2004: 11). The main term of opprobrium that Edelman repeatedly uses, reproductive futurism, incorporates, according to him, all political thinking about the future, whilst queerness should and must redefine such notions as civil order through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity (Edelman, 2004: 16-17). The queer, on its own terms, disrupts the social and takes pleasure in its pleasure: to the threat of the death drive we figure with the violent rush of a jouissance (Edelman, 2004: 153). But, for all the talk of disruption and a paradoxical outside, there is something overly neat about Edelmans formulations. Is politics really exhausted by the formulations of the Christian right, the source of many of his examples of reproductive futurism? Is the only obvious alternative, the other side of this image as it were, an overly earnest, well-meaning and equally futurist left humanism? In other words, is the child-as-future really the only image of all political desire? Edelmans polemic, as welcome as it is within a certain (albeit highly American) context, is at the same time depressingly compatible with a general epochal turning away from politics, what Alain Badiou calls the imperative to live without ideas (Badiou, 2007: 117). In a very real sense, no future, far from being a rallying cry towards some subversive celebration of a pleasure that destabilises and yet subtends the political order, has been the very ordering principle of our recent political reality. Hedonism may not be exactly what Edelman means by jouissance, but it has certain structural similarities: a disregard for what comes next (the hangover, the come down, the mopping up), a certain self-satisfaction and insularity (jouissance cannot be universalised) and disruptive in a relatively containable way (it may have been subversive at various points to watch porn, take drugs and engage in risky sex, but most of these things have been relatively subsumed into a wider culture of permissiveness, what Marcuse called repressive desublimation (Marcuse, 2002: 59)). If there has in fact been a widespread feeling of no future it is because it has been impossible to imagine anything different; capitalism depends upon the reproduction of sameness in the guise of difference, the idea that there is no alternative, and no future (in the sense of new ways of living) is possible. This epochal de-politicisation of politics is also identified by Jacques Rancire in one of his major works, Disagreement, the main text examined here alongside Edelmans No Future. Against Edelmans powerful but overly general attack on politics, this paper will argue for forms of politics that are not predicated on the overlap of reproduction with the future, and for a kind of rationalism that escapes Edelmans equation of reason with futurity. Rancire will instead be invoked as thinker of a tentative queer rationalism, one predicated on subtraction and a non-futural power to disrupt (it is politics that disrupts, not jouissance, despite

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Edelmans argument that disruption is the most antithetical movement to politics as a whole). The paper will also draw on empirical historical examples of certain left-wing and alternative political movements, such as the early kibbutzim movement in Israel, which explicitly refused reproduction but were nevertheless most definitely political, and quite often queer from the standpoint of the norms of the social order. There are three main areas of argument here: the concept of rationality and anti-rationality at work in the politics of Rancire and the anti-politics of Edelman; a discussion of the anti-reproductive stance of various left-wing political movements and positions that complicate Edelmans claim that all politics is by definition reproductively futural and, finally, a more polemical and speculative claim that contemporary politics relation to the child is far less that of its future than of the mundane spectre of its always-dying. The final section will in a sense return to Edelmans claim that the defenders of futurity are indeed dependent on the threat of the death drive. Edelman makes this claim in the following way:
We, the sinthomosexuals who figure the death drive of the social, must accept that we will be vilified as the agents of that threat. But they, the defenders of futurity, buzzed by negating our negativity, are themselves, however unknowingly, its secret agents too, reacting, in the name of the future, in the name of humanity, in the name of life, to the threat of the death drive we figure with the violent rush of a jouissance, which only returns them, ironically, to the death drive in spite of themselves (Edelman, 2004: 153).

It is indeed the case that the death drive of the social is the truth of the they, but the real secret of contemporary politics is not that the death drive and its queer jouissance is its hidden truth, but that irrationality and repetition is the very stuff of political and social life: Rationality true politics is, as Rancire points out, extremely rare. 1. Rationality or anti-rationality? We are dealing with two very different notions of rationality in Edelman and Rancire. For Edelman, political rationality is always on the side of the future, is irreducibly associated with the image of the child and heteronormativity and haunted by that which it tries to repress, namely the queer. For Rancire, as we shall see below, properly political rationality must precisely address itself to the question of who gets to speak and how: rationality is thus to be understood beyond the narrow meaning we tend to associate with normal discourse. It points, ultimately, to something much more subversive. The definitions of reason and rationality, in their ideological and properly political definition, relate directly to the way in which states articulate the relation between their subjects (or citizens) as workers and as parents. But, first we will turn to Edelman, to understand the role the critique of political reason plays in his position. The logic of political hope, as Edelman describes it, depends upon desperately trying to exclude from the social order the negativity of the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

symbolic, or, as he puts it, the persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses (Edelman, 2004: 5). Political reason is thus characterised both by its relentless positivity and by an endless struggle to fight off the meaninglessness that Edelman characterises as queer. But what if, in practice, it is politics and reason that have become dislocated and that what is ideologically positioned as rational is, in fact, the very opposite? That is to say, Edelman presupposes that there is an intimate connection, a kind of structural isomorphism between the ideology of the family (and the child) and politics, and that politics will always represent itself via a certain image of the family as a war of warding off what it fears (the non-futural, the queer, the negative). But, we know that in practice politics, and the policies of elected governments, have extremely contradictory attitudes towards families, slashing budgets for crches here, permitting only the most minimal of paternity leave there, and so on. There are obvious imperatives behind these tendencies, of course, which explain why, for example, pregnant women are often picked out for redundancy over their childless co-workers (Gentleman, 2009). They concern far less the symbolic role of the family in the political imaginary and far more the contradictory relationship between economic demands and ideological pressures: if the image of the child and the fantasy of futurity are shared by both politics and the economy, it is not necessarily in the same way. Capitalism may in the long run need future workers, but in the short term, the conflict between paying for maternity leave, for example, and making a profit are frequently at odds. But these economic contradictions complicate Edelmans picture somewhat, as they point to something beyond the symbolic, and beyond the sheen of ideology. Whilst it is true that politics in the main presents itself as defender of the family (although this is perhaps less the case outside of the right-wing framing of some American discourses), it is clear that in practice the family is often badly treated by the very same governments who claim to defend it. Furthermore, against Edelmans opposition between the reproductively futural and the queer, there empirically exist extremely diverse kinds of family arrangements, and have done for a long time. As Barrett and McIntosh put it in The Anti-social Family:
If there were a direct correspondence between the imagery of the family represented in the media and the actual composition of households, we would find the majority of the population living in nuclear residences of children and their parents. Yet, if the 1971 census is to be believed, fewer than a third of Britains households were enmeshed in such an arrangement and only one in ten was organized in the normatively sanctioned pattern of paternal breadwinner and maternal full-time housewife (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982: 32-3).

Edelman could of course protest that his is not an empirical point, but a symbolic one, and there is certainly something enlightening about being able to spot, in the wake of Edelmans analysis, reproductive

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

futurism whenever it rears its smiling, big-eyed, irresistible head. But in the light of the relative empirical paucity of this normative notion of the family, and of the child taken care of by the fathers wage and the mothers domestic care, a question arises as to how far Edelmans notion of the queer extends. If queerness names the side of those not fighting for the children (Edelman, 2004: 3) it must by definition exclude any family arrangement, however non-child oriented. Can you have family arrangements of those who take care of children but nonetheless are not fighting for the children? Can one have a generic attitude towards children, or has the logic of reproductive futurism filtered all the way down such that it is impossible to think of children as anything other than special, as little angels? There are, however, plenty of children being raised in situations where very little was staked on their future, and plenty of family structures in which caring for young people is far more a question of pragmatics than of ideology. Edelman makes clear that he is not talking about really existing families and actual children, but it must be noted that Edelman sometimes slips from the figural to the literal, or at least certainly seems to position the woman on the side of the children in a rather dubious way. As Fraiman puts it in her reading of Edelman: Figurations of womens bodies are subtly de-eroticised and assimilated to the figurative child (Fraiman, 2003: 131). Does Edelman fall too far into the rhetoric of the Christian Right by associating women too quickly with childbirth and some sort of supposedly natural maternal desire that in turn is supposed to characterise reproductive futurism? Edelman seems to assimilate all notions of the family with notions of the future, and to reify families as solid, reactionary entities to be opposed by identity-shaking queer negativity. But what is the identity of the family as such? Its not a real one in the sense of being the majority composition of living arrangements (at least in the British case, as noted above). Its not a seamlessly ideological one either, seeing as the image of the family presented by (primarily right-wing) politicians is, in practice, rife with contradiction. It seems more likely the case that the ideology must be so extreme in order to cover over the real truth of the family as the economic support for an increasingly precarious labour market. In the 1950s, a male breadwinners wage was enough to support an entire classical family, now both partners must (in most cases) work to earn anywhere near the same amount. If women are now fully included in the workforce it is because mens wages have been depressed, even as women still fail to earn as much as their male counterparts. Who looks after the children is an increasingly complicated question, and neither the state nor the classical family seem able to do it effectively and affordably. Politics is so pro-child in theory because it is so anti-child (and anti-woman) in practice. The supposed futural reason of representative politics is in effect profoundly fractured and contradictory, not in the least bit reconciled to either its image of the child, or to its image of itself. Edelmans notion of the queer nevertheless seems to depend on an overly

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

homogenous picture of the social world. To write, as Edelman claims to, from the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive (Edelman, 2004: 3) involves deliberately superimposing various political categories onto various non-political categories. Thus, Edelman conflates democracy with the child, rationality with a nave concept of progress and heterosexuality with reproduction, sweeping away the possibility of collective organisation and action. As John Brenkman puts it: Edelman compounds his reductive concept of the political realm by in turn postulating an ironclad intermeshing of social reproduction and sexual reproduction (Brenkman, 2002: 176). By neglecting the contradictory economic imperatives at work in political conceptions of the family and fusing politics with reason Edelman leaves no room at all for what we could call a queer reason queer from the standpoint of representational politics, and neither committed to the child nor to sexual essentialism. It is here that Rancires ideas are relevant. If a queer reason is to make any sense, it is important to separate out two different kinds of rationalism, which Edelman refuses to do. In a section in Disagreement entitled The Rationality of Disagreement, Rancire states the following:
Political rationality is only thinkable precisely on the condition that it be freed from the alternative in which a certain rationalism would like to keep it reined in, either as exchange between partners putting their interests or standards up for discussion, or else the violence of the irrational (Rancire, 1999: 43).

Contemporary parliamentary politics is predicated on this notion of a certain rationalism, the realpolitik of the everyday whereby some order is better than no order at all, where the threat of real public violence hovers like a shadow over a pessimistic and jaded acceptance of the venality of public life. Against this notion of rationalism, which in essence is not rational at all (the idea that a vote every four or five years exhausts peoples political desires, for example), Rancire posits a far subtler understanding of rationalism and irrationalism, which he discusses in terms of the very equality of speaking beings:
For the idea that speaking beings are equal because of their common capacity for speech is a reasonable-unreasonable idea ... The assertion of a common world thus happens through a paradoxical mise-en-scne that brings the community and the noncommunity together. (Rancire, 1999: 55)

If, in fact, representational politics is only unreasonable, then it is to these moments of rational disruption, those events and occurrences that interrupt the everyday flow of a political discourse which thinks its being practical but is in essence incredibly unstable, that a true kind of queerness emerges Edelman is thus entirely right to highlight the importance of disruption against the existing order, but wrong to insist

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

that it must always be on the side of unreason or anti-reason. Rancire recognises instead the subversive and disruptive nature of politics: What makes politics an object of scandal is that it is that activity which has the rationality of disagreement as its own rationality (Rancire 1999: xii). From the standpoint of the supposedly rational state, this rationality of disagreement in other words the contention that politics, far from being a secure foundation, is predicated on a dissensus, the ability of speaking beings to disagree with one another appears as decidedly paradoxical and threatening. It is not merely that human beings can disagree with one another, but that some cannot even be heard, and that this is where secure identification of individuals comes undone:
For Rancire, if there are some invisible, nameless and disenfranchised people, it is because they do not participate in the public (political) life of the city (the mechanisms for dividing up legitimate shares, the police, etc.); it is because although they have an acknowledged place in society, that is to say a place viewed as useful, and are identified as such by sociology today, they are nevertheless excluded from legitimately speaking out (Dotte and Lapidus, 2004: 79).

Unlike Edelmans conception of the queer, which is purely negative, perhaps even individualistic, Rancire explicitly stresses the role that equality plays in his conception of politics. In the chapter entitled From Archipolitics to Metapolitics, Rancire argues that:
Politics only exists through the bringing off of the equality of anyone and everyone in a vacuous freedom of a part of the community that deregulates any count of parts. The equality that is the nonpolitical condition of politics does not show up here for what it is: it only appears as the figure of wrong. (Rancire, 1999: 61)

The figure of wrong (to be opposed to the right of classical political philosophy and jurisprudence) could, however, be understood as queer, even in some of Edelmans own senses: it is unwanted, negative, and not comprehensible from the standpoint of the existing order and the set demarcation of places. As Marx originally put it, the possibility of German emancipation could only arise:
[i]n the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class [Stand] which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. (Marx, 1974: 256)

This idea of wrong in general exceeds the description of civil society with its regulated classes and parts: Wrong does not refer to a group of people that have somehow been ill-treated but something structurally in excess of the very identity of groups or classes. As Rancire puts it: Politics ceases ... wherever the whole of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

(Rancire, 1999: 123). When Edelman talks about queerness as the site outside the consensus (Edelman, 2004: 3) he comes very close to Rancires conception of politics as exception. Except that for Edelman this site would somehow be radically opposed to politics as such. But Rancires position is less stark: there are two orders of politics and two orders of rationality. On the one hand, there is the politics that he associates with the police, classical political philosophy and consensus, on the other, there is politics as disruption, and disagreement (or dissensus). As Rancire states:
Politics, in its specificity, is rare. It is always local and occasional. Its actual eclipse is perfectly real and no political science exists that could map its future any more than a political ethics that would make its existence the object solely of will. (Rancire, 1999: 139)

Politics for Rancire literally has no future, or at least not one that is predictable. As Hallward puts it:
According to Rancire, equality is not the result of a fairer distribution of social functions or places so much as the immediate disruption of any such distribution; it refers not to place but to the placeless or out-of-place, not to class but to the unclassifiable or out-of-class. (Hallward, 2006: 110)

There are indeed, as Rancires work suggests, other ways of thinking about a politics that has no future, despite Edelmans insistence that all politics is futural (The Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics (Edelman, 2004: 3)). It may be the case that, historically, some ways of thinking about alternative conceptions of politics vis--vis the child have been cut off from us: in that sense, then, Edelmans work can be seen as registering the end of a sequence of political possibilities. His central implication is that politics, in its very nature, is conservative. Edelman argues that politics works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child (Edelman, 2004: 3). For him, it is clear that reproductive futurism has come to subsume all kinds of politics, both left and right. It places:
an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations. (Edelman, 2004: 2)

But the question of a queer (that is, non-futural) resistance to communal relations has in fact been an issue for various twentieth century political movements. There have been various kinds of queer resistance to the organising principle of heteronormativity, which have at the same time been explicitly political projects. In a sense they have been different responses to the very problem that Edelman identifies as reproductive futurism. The next section looks at one of these attempts to rethink both the child and politics using the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

examples of the early kibbutzim of the mid-twentieth century and historical discussions of abortion rights. Whilst the kibbutzim cannot be said to clearly express a Rancirean politics as such, they do provide a queer response to the problem that Edelman thinks can no longer be answered politically. Discussions of abortion can also be seen to have historically taken place in very different frameworks than Edelman allows, thus releasing a certain kind of rational politics from the vice-like grip of reproductive futurism. 2. Politics against reproduction As unusual as it might seem, especially on Edelmans reading, some politically motivated groupings are nevertheless not explicitly motivated by the desire for children (whether ideal or empirical). The following is a quote from Bruno Bettelheims The Children of the Dream, a study of child-raising and education in the early kibbutzim:
As Joseph Baratz (1954) tells the story of Degania, the first kibbutz, the original kibbutzniks (of whom he was one) wanted no children in their community. Most of the settlers did not even want to marry, because they were afraid that children would detach the family from the group, that ... comradeship would be less steadfast. Therefore it was seriously proposed that all members should oblige themselves not to marry for at least five years after joining the kibbutz, because living as we do ... how can we have children? (Bettelheim, 1969: 18-19)

Whilst these instances of the kibbutzim project are unusual (most of the other kibbutzim were embodiments of an openly reproductively futurist Zionism), and clearly self-defeating in the long-run (how would they replenish themselves without bringing in people from outside the community?), there is a clear indication that the very serious political project at stake (how to live and work collectively) is being addressed without positive reference to reproductive futurism of any kind. In fact, it is children who will get in the way of politics: they were afraid that comradeship would be less steadfast, living as we do ... how can we have children? The intimate link Edelman identifies between politics and futurism, the only politics were permitted to know (Edelman, 2004: 134) is undone here: politics is the untying of the break between collective life and reproduction. The project of these early kibbutzim is certainly not the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive (Edelman, 2004: 127), as Edelman characterises the queer, but it is not reproductively futural either. So what is it? The antichild kibbutzim nevertheless highlight the difficulty Edelman has in assimilating all politics to the image of the child. As Bettelheim goes onto explain, in the case of the anti-child kibbutzim, when children were eventually born there were serious questions to be answered, but they certainly didnt come from any natural desire for the child, or any special attention paid to the children:
When the first child was born in the kibbutz nobody knew what to do with him. Our women didnt know how to look after babies. But

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

eventually we saw it couldnt go on like this ... By the time there were four children in the settlement we decided something must be done. It was a difficult problem. How were women both to work and look after her children? Should each mother look after her own family and do nothing else? The men did not seem to feel strongly either way. But the women wouldnt hear of giving up their share of the communal work and life ... Somebody proposed that the kibbutz should hire a nurse ... we didnt hire a nurse, but we chose one girl to look after the lot of them and we put aside a house where they could spend the day while the mothers were at work. And so this system developed and was afterwards adopted in all the kibbutzim, with the difference that in most of them the children sleep in the childrens house, but with us [at Degania] they stay at night in their parents quarters ... Only recently have we built a hostel for children over twelve where our own children live (Bettelheim, 1969: 18-19).

It is interesting to note that Bettelheims entire argument about the kibbutzim regards the extremely low incidence of mental illness coupled with very high rates of academic success: what turns out in the end to be a kind of reproductive anti-futurism is incredibly effective at de-neuroticising the bearers of the future that Edelman argues characterises all politics. But how does the kibbutzim relate to Rancires notion of politics? Isnt it too overcoded by divisions and roles, however ill worked out? Perhaps. Politics for Rancire is ultimately anarchic: In its strict sense, politics only exists in intermittent acts of implementation that lack any overall principle or law (Rancire, 2006b: 90). But there is something of the kibbutzims attempt to reorganise communal life along the lines of politics, but not with the family first and foremost in mind that troubles the way in which Edelman links politics to reproduction so cleanly. Edelmans desire to conflate all politics with reproductive futurism does an injustice to the politics behind some of the historical shifts in the way abortion, for example, has been conceived. Even in the examples Edelman himself gives of anti-reproductive movements, he is quick to state that these campaigns for abortion rights frame the argument in terms of a fight for our future for our daughters and sons (Edelman, 2004: 3). But, whilst it is true that the anti-abortion debate (especially in America) is often played out on the territory of the right (where the rhetoric of pro-life reigns), it is certainly not the case in other parts of the world that abortion is defended in the name of those children already born, i.e. trapped in the framework of reproductive futurity. Elsewhere, it is the rationality of the woman, her ability to make economic and pragmatic decisions that feature foremost in any debate about the rights and wrongs of abortion. Historically, too, discussions about abortion took place in broader contexts that stressed abortion alongside questions of the equal right to work, progressive notions of family structure and so on. Before Stalin repealed the laws, the Soviet Union under Lenin was the first to provide free and on demand abortions. These laws were couched not

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

in terms of life, but in terms of pragmatism predicated on a notion of political equality. As Wendy Z. Goldman puts it:
Soviet theorists held that the transition to capitalism had transformed the family by undermining its social and economic functions. Under socialism, it would wither away and under communism, it would cease to exist entirely. (Goldman, 1993: 11)

Unless the family is considered in its social and economic function, it makes no sense to speak of its power as an image, however powerful this image might be. Edelman ultimately concedes far too much to a very narrow ideological image of the family that, whilst pernicious, is easier to undo with reference to history and practice than he seems to think. As Tim Dean puts it: the polemical ire that permeates No Future seems to have been appropriated wholesale from the rightwing rants to which he recommends we hearken (Dean, 2008: 126). In the first section I tried to identify some of the contradictions between the contemporary family and the demands of capitalism, while above I gave examples of politics not based on reproduction and reproduction not based on futurity: what follows from this is that there are important historical shifts in the way in which the family and the image of the child comes to shift in and out of focus. Take the discussions surrounding in vitro fertilisation. First viable as a reproductive practice in the late 1970s, early artificial insemination was regarded as a paganistic and atheistic practice (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982: 11). Now, however, despite the wastage of potential viable embryos in the process, it is generally regarded as a practical option for infertile couples. Here the contradictions of contemporary social feeling towards children is exposed once again: reproductive futurism turns out not to be invested in all children, but only those it chooses to keep out of a pragmatism enabled by technology. Edelman talks about the morbidity inherent in fetishization as such when opponents of abortion use photos of foetuses to highlight the proximity of the foetus to the fully-formed child (Edelman, 2004: 41). He is right that morbidity and the politics of life seem to go hand-inhand, but then proceeds to argue that it is the queer alone that has a duty to remain true to this morbidity, to expose the misrecognised investments of sentimental futurism:
The subject must accept its sinthome, its particular pathway to jouissance This, I suggest, is the ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a social order intent on misrecognising its own investment in morbidity, fetishisation, and repetition: to inhabit the place of meaninglessness associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture the culture of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary forms as always already a culture of death intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life. (Edelman, 2004: 47-8)

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

This does not exactly seem like a revelation. We live for the most part in pragmatic acceptance of this culture of death. It hardly shocks us when, for example, statistics reveal that, in 2004, 60% of women who had abortions had already given birth to at least one child (Sharples, 2008). Those people most identified with children mothers turn out, quite often, to deal with life rather more pragmatically than we might otherwise believe. Edelman has to ignore historical and current examples of abortion rights campaigns, and other attitudes towards the family, in order to shoehorn all politics into a single vision to which he then opposes his notion of the queer. As Brenkman puts it: To grant the Right the status of exemplary articulators of the social order strikes me as politically self-destructive and theoretically just plain wrong (Brenkman, 2002: 177). There are genuine moments of historical and political importance in terms of thinking about the family that seem to escape Edelmans dismissal of politics as inevitably futural. We do not need to give up on politics altogether, whilst still accepting that the image of the child is a massive ideological obstacle. Rancires notion of political equality (Politics is that activity which turns on equality as its principle (Rancire, 1999: ix)) neither concedes ground to politics as it appears (the ordering of the state, the police, a supposed consensus) nor does it think that politics is impossible or nondesirable, as Edelman does. We must ask: is all politics conservative by definition? Does negativity or resistance to existing power structures always translate back into some stable and positive form? The examples of the kibbutzim and the various contradictions in the ideology and practices of contemporary reproduction make it clear that Edelman, whilst having a strong argument about the shape that the ideology of the child takes, has to ignore the unstable compromises that the contemporary world has already made with itself regarding life and death in reproduction. Alan Sinfield has questioned whether we should really conflate all political aspirations with Edelmans conception of reproductive futurism: perhaps reproductive futurism is capturing and abusing other political aspirations and they should be reasserted (Sinfield, 2005: 50). It is not, then, that all politics is reproductively futural, but that this image has come to pervert other political desires, which may have a more complex relationship to children and a progressive conception of humanity. Edelman polemically dismisses the left attitude to the queer, as nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification (Edelman, 2004: 28). Whilst a certain strain of leftist thinking does pursue this demystificatory line (arguing, for example, that many forms of sexual expression are natural), Edelman reduces the left position on sexuality to a simple question of acceptance, as a way of arguing that the queer can mean nothing to the left. But there are, as indicated above, quite different ways of thinking about the family (in a non-futural, non-ideological way) and about politics, and the two together. When Rancire discusses the subject of politics, he makes it clear that:

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

The subject of politics can precisely be identified neither with humanity and the gatherings of a population, nor with the identities defined by constitutional texts. They are always defined by an interval between identities, be these identities determined by social relations or juridical categories. (Rancire, 2006a: 59)

Could this interval between identities be the jouissance that Edelman aligns with the queer? Whilst Edelmans psychoanalytic subject could in no way be understood as a similar (non)entity to Rancires subject of politics, this idea of the interval seems to indicate a site of noncapture that could be described in a certain sense as queer. In Edelmans response to John Brenkman he states that: Sexuality refuses demystification as society refuses queerness (Edelman, 2002: 181-5). By reifying sexuality as something that refuses meaning, Edelman oddly substantialises it; Rancires way out of the identities determined by social relations or juridical categories is much less dependent on any pre-existing identity, even though he retains the very concept of politics that Edelman rejects. There seems to be no reason why the subject of politics for Rancire couldnt be a queer subject in Edelmans sense, at the same time as reclaiming a notion of rationality away from the categories of the state. Before turning to a brief summary of this tentative queer rationalism, one more structural element of Edelmans argument will be addressed: that of the death drive. 3. Death and the child One aspect of Edelmans argument is the idea that in some sense, we are all eventually returned, queer or otherwise, to the death drive. Reproductive futurism does its very best to ward off the threat of meaninglessness that the queer supposedly presents, but is ultimately complicit: negating our negativity only returns them, ironically, to the death drive in spite of themselves (Edelman, 2004: 153). Thus reproductive futurism, and the politics (all politics) that bears its mark, is, at heart, as repetitious, undead, narcissistic and meaningless as the death drive that animates the queer it is, perhaps, just the case that the queer enjoys this more (ironically, of course). Edelmans argument is extremely clever on this point, as it avoids the conclusion that the queer is something different in kind from the social order or the symbolic. All drives are death drives, even (or especially) the ones that have little smiling children as their mascots. But, as I have tried to argue in section two, it seems clear that there are forms of repetition and meaninglessness (the discarded embryos of IVF, the sheer everydayness of abortion even by those who are already empirically on the side of reproductive futurism) that are fully recognised. We may not want to call this irony as Edelman does, as opposed to the contradictions generated by ideology and the conflicting demands of capitalism (which is admittedly much less catchy), but it seems clear that beyond the pro-life fury and killing of abortion doctors, there is a very-well understood relation to narcissism (choosing the children you want to survive in your own image) and the senselessness generated by arbitrarily picking one foetus to live over another. This is not a

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

moral point, but about the way in which the symbolic order creates certain subjects capable of living with these contradictions. The contemporary relation of the family and reproduction in relation to capitalism does indeed resemble the Lacanian death drive in certain respects, but, unlike Edelmans conception of queerness, this looks very much like a form of meaninglessness that lacks jouissance. Why? Because all these decisions the supposedly private choices to reproduce, to have IVF, to abort acknowledge in their very repetition the meaninglessness of those very choices (or at least their arbitrary nature). But this meaninglessness is not a kind of jouissance, it is merely the acknowledgement that children are always-dying so that others may live. As the writer Hanif Kureishi argues in relation to Intimacy, a film which explores, among other things, the banality of affairs:
If Britain seems hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics have moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable. (Kureishi, 2001)

The relation between the public and the private, or between the social and the personal, reveals that perhaps what is even less thinkable than queer negativity is the social itself, comprised as it is of the unstable split between the public and the private: if society really cared when and how individuals had children, we would no longer regard these choices as personal decisions, but rather as factors to be understood in the context of politics more broadly. It may well be the case, to go further than Edelman, that the politics of reproductive futurism does not just try to ward off the horror of queer jouissance, but resents it because it shares the same structure as the meaninglessness of contemporary reproductive behaviour, but without the thrill of being meaningless enough. Reproductive futurism may in fact resent the queer, realising that its own structure is indeed a Ponzi scheme, as Edelman describes it, a Ponzi scheme in which even the people at the top dont really get to enjoy themselves for very long. Conclusion Reading Edelman alongside Rancire reveals a shared concern with the interval between identities, and a defence of the out-of-place, whether it be Rancires wrong or Edelmans queer. However, Rancires double conception of politics permits a certain conception of rationality to survive, which avoids the simple fusion of reason with both the existing order and with politics tout court. Perhaps what Edelman refuses in the end is to think of a future that is radically undetermined, the avenir as opposed to the venir. It is compelling, but not the whole picture, to think that politics is exhausted by its futurity, if we have not yet worked out what that futurity might be. This is the way out of Edelmans world that Rancire permits us to see: Rancires notion of politics, however rare, allows us to think both beyond the ironic, undead world of queer jouissance that Edelman

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

invokes and the everyday world of pragmatic, ordered futurism. It does so without reducing either reason or queerness to enemies of themselves or each other. A queer rationalism would precisely reconcile the best elements of both thinkers: a disruptive, egalitarian politics of those unseen and unheard by the mainstream and that understands by reason something other than well-ordered. In place of a sentimental, vitalist understanding of children as bearers of the future, it would treat them as nothing special, but in a positive way. Of all the myriad family structures that exist, none would be heralded as the archetype, and whatever jouissance there might be left, we could start to think its disruption collectively, rather than as a hollow, selfish negativity. Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the co-editor of Alain Badiou's writings on Beckett and has published several articles on Badiou, Feuerbach, Sartre and theories of the subject in 19th and 20th century philosophy. She has also published articles on Iran, education and vintage pornography. Her book on feminism, OneDimensional Woman, is out in November 2009 (Zero Books). Bibliography Badiou, A. (2007), The Century, trans. A. Toscano, Cambridge: Polity. Barrett, M. & McIntosh, M. (1982), The Anti-Social Family, London: Verso. Bettelheim, B. (1969), The Children of the Dream, London: Thames & Hudson. Brenkman, J. (2002), Queer post-politics, Narrative, vol. 10, no. 2. Dean, T. (2008), An impossible embrace: queerness, futurity and the death drive, in J. Bono, T. Dean & E. Plonowska Ziarek (eds), A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, New York: Fordham University Press. Dotte, J.-L. & Lapidus, R. (2004), The differences between Rancire's Msentente (Political Disagreement) and Lyotard's Diffrend, SubStance, vol. 33, no. 1, issue 103. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Fraiman, S. (2003), Cool Men and the Second Sex, New York: Columbia University Press. Gentleman, A (2009), Employers targeting pregnant women for redundancy, The Guardian, 5 June.

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Goldman, W.Z. (1993), Women, The State & Revolution: Soviet Family Policy & Social Life, 1917-1936, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallward, P. (2006), Staging equality: on Rancires theatrocracy, New Left Review, Jan/Feb. Kureishi, H. (2001), Our beautiful project, The Guardian, 31 January. Marcuse, H. (2002), One-Dimensional Man, London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1974), Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone, London: Penguin. Rancire, J. (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2006a). Hatred of Democracy, trans. S. Corcoran, London: Verso. ---. (2006b). The Politics of Aesthetics, trans G. Rockhill, London: Continuum. Sharples, T. (2008), Abortion rate falls, but not equally for all women, Time, 23 September. Sinfield, A. (2005), Review of Lee Edelmans No Future, Radical Philosophy, no. 134, Nov/Dec, pp. 49-51.

borderlands ejournal 2009

16

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

How Queer is the Demos?


Politics, sex, and equality Hector Kollias
Department of French, Kings College, London

This article stages a confrontation between Jacques Rancires political philosophy and the figure of the queer, particularly as reconfigured recently by Lee Edelman with his Lacan-inspired notion of the sinthomosexual. Starting by investigating the currency of Rancirian terms such as the demos, equality, and subjectivation for an articulation of queer politics, the article moves on to argue that Edelmans notion of the queer as a figure constitutively outside politics may be located both outside what Rancire calls the police, and also outside what he calls politics altogether, thus highlighting an optimistic (Rancire) and a pessimistic (Edelman) conception of the queer political subject. The article then considers the fundamental difference between Rancires and Edelmans conceptual worlds, locating it in the psychoanalytic configuration of the queer subject, before arguing for the necessary though impossible choice queer theory is faced with when considering these two seemingly opposed viewpoints.

In his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet Michael Warner asked: what do queers want? The answer was not just sex (Warner, 1993: vii). Ever since then, if not before, queer theory has sought to branch out from the narrowing confines of sexuality studies and identity politics to embrace the big bad world of minoritarian solidarities, interdisciplinarity, and collective struggles, all of which should also by rights be seen as the fruitful continuation of a much longer tradition of queer activism and politics. It is with this expansive, inclusive thrust that queer theorists have now been called upon, if only by the editors of this volume, to meet the political thought of Jacques Rancire, whose radical articulation of politics, equality, subjectivation, and emancipation speaks loudly to queer ears attuned to the noises of strife and recognition. But the degree to which this meeting will prove

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

to be felicitous, the extent to which Rancires carefully developed political philosophy is a match for the multifarious desiderata of queers, will ultimately depend on what it is that one means by queer, what kind of political, social, sexual or other subjects queers make, or indeed, what it is that queers want. And inversely, Rancirian eyes will only see in the various provocations of queer theory a glimpse of the elusive political subject at certain moments with certain preconditions, failing which there is nothing to stop queers being, like the rest, like the others, like everyone, subjects of the police order, content capitalist citizens and consumers, or even wilful members of the multitude obsessed with its own unification. In what follows I shall try to trace such moments within the queer past and the queer present, allowing for a Rancirian interpretation of queer political events and achievements, in order to see how we square up with Rancires trenchant and indefatigable egalitarianism. I shall also, however, argue that given a certain denomination of the meaning of queer, Rancires notions of politics and emancipation become rather more problematic. I am here referring to queer as reconceptualized in Lee Edelmans No Future as the figure of the sinthomosexual, who programmatically resides outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears (Edelman, 2004: 3). Is this the space outside the police order that would be confluent with Rancires politics proper? Or is it a space outside even Rancires universal presupposition of equality as the condition of all politics, thus effectively giving the lie even to this most elegant and most credible conception in Rancires work? It should be evident as well that in this particular encounter between Rancire and Edelman, there are intermediaries whose voices are crucial in the understanding of any disagreement here presented, and there are clashes of vocabulary which could end up being far more than merely terminological inconsistencies. The elephant in the room here is psychoanalysis: Lacan as understood by Edelman on the one hand, and Freud (and to a lesser degree Lacan) as understood by Rancire on the other, as well as the ramifications of what Rancire intends by what he calls the ethical turn in contemporary politics. I shall not try to present a concise and coherent account of the complex relationship Rancire has with psychoanalysis, other than a few words on his engagement with it in his book LInconscient esthtique (Rancire, 2001). Instead I shall begin by looking at queer politics with Rancirian eyes and gradually allow psychoanalytic conceptions and interjections to creep in, aiming to reach a potential impossible identification between what lies at the core of Rancires concept of equality, and the Lacanian Real necessitated by Edelmans provocations of the sinthomosexual. Clearly this is not the easiest path to take in organizing a meeting between Rancires political thought and queer theory, precisely since it encourages the negotiation of several crossroads before it can even hope to reach a conclusion. It is, however, one that will allow something to come out concerning the impact of queer theory now, its future expansion or contraction, its politics and its logic.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

The queer demos and the queer ochlos The demos is the term Rancire uses to designate those who have no part in what he calls the distribution of the sensible.[1] In his Ten theses on Politics, he states: The one who speaks when s/he is not to speak, the one who part-takes [prend part] in what s/he has no part in that person belongs to the demos (Rancire, 2001b). Thus, the demos for Rancire designates the category of peoples who do not count, those who have no qualifications to part-take in arkhe [rule, or the fact of ruling and being ruled], no qualification for being taken into account (Rancire, 2001b). The inaugural moment of politics thus becomes the moment in which those who have no part and cannot be counted make a claim for this part. This moment coincides with what Rancire calls subjectivation, the process by which a political subject extracts itself from the dominant categories of identification and classification (Rancire, 2004b: 92).[2] In Disagreement, Rancire makes clear that this process of subjectivation effectively produces hitherto unnameable and unimaginable political subjects: By subjectivation I mean the production through a series of actions of a body [une instance] and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience (Rancire, 1999: 35). It is a process wherein a group of people stands up to be counted, declaring itself as a political force, effectively taking part by demanding its own part: Any political subjectivation holds to this formula. It is a nos sumus, nos existimus (Rancire, 1999: 36). Subjectivation does not create political identities ex nihilo but it does introduce new political identities into a unified sphere of experience (what Rancire often refers to as the One), which is therefore no longer the same as it was. He cites two such subjectivations that allowed for the creation of new political identities, workers, and women:
Workers or women are identities that apparently hold no mystery. Anyone can tell who is meant. But political subjectivation forces them out of such obviousness by questioning the relationship between a who and a what in the apparent redundancy of the positing of an existence. In politics woman is the subject of experience the denatured, defeminized subject that measures the gap between an acknowledged part (that of sexual complementarity) and a having no part. (Rancire, 1999: 36)

The new political subject that emerges from this process is thus a subject that names the division, the gap between how it is naturally perceived a woman, one of the two sexes - and how it had hitherto failed to function as political subject, having no right to take part in the exercise of power as a woman. Subjectivation then, and the demos that is born with it, is also a process of sense-giving, of naming, and of categorisation, a process whereby an entity which was never suspected to enter into the arena of political categorisations demands entry, and gains it insofar as its new identity transforms this arena and creates a new political agency.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Subjectivation for Rancire also entails two other crucial moments, that of a wrong, and that of an impossible identification. The wrong [le tort] is that over which the demos finds its voice and challenges the established orders categorisations and classifications: The mass of men without qualities [proprits] identify with the community in the name of the wrong that is constantly being done to them by those whose position or qualities [dont la qualit ou proprit] have the natural effect of propelling [the mass of people] into the nonexistence of those who have no part in anything (Rancire, 1999: 9). The wrong is thus, as Gabriel Rockhill has it, a specific form of equality (Rancire, 2004b: 93), and equality for Rancire is not an equal distribution of rights but, as we shall see in more detail later, an a priori that becomes the locus of disagreement and dissensus. Those who have no part discover in this equality the means whereby they can contest the distribution of rights in the name of a universal equality that is shared even by those who have no share. Correcting the wrong then, involves reorganizing the given classifications of a society by appealing to an element that transcends classification. Women asking for the right to vote, in this instance, do so not out of their position as the sexual counterpart of men, but out of their equal share in what was hitherto unacknowledged as the principle whereby the right to vote is bestowed: humanity as such, without gender distinctions. Therefore the subjectivation of women entails their disidentification from their natural gendered identity in order to effect an identification in a space which has hitherto not been identified: Any subjectivation is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part (Rancire, 1999: 36). Disidentification is thus also an identification with other peoples and parties of those who have no part between whom there is no possible identification under the terms of the system in place. This is what Rancire calls an impossible identification, an example of which is the slogan heard during the May 1968 revolution according to which We are all German Jews (Rancire, 2004b: 92). From this it would not be a stretch to imagine the emergence of another political subject, that of gay men and lesbians at the moment which in shorthand is called Stonewall. That moment did indeed entail the creation of a hitherto unimaginable political category, and it did entail the transformation of the categories applied to homosexuals. One can read in Stonewall all the facets of a Rancirian subjectivation, from the revolt against a police order (and against the actual police) intent on disallowing homosexuals from presenting themselves as a unified political community, to the forceful correction of a wrong, the wrong of disallowing assembly and recognition to a category of people who were therefore devoid of rights given to everyone else.[3] The inaugural moment of gay liberation, and arguably also the struggles over HIV/AIDS politics in the eighties and nineties, manifest all the signs of what Rancire means by the emergence of politics, and can show us how a certain kind of gay or

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

queer rhetoric is very much capable of being read in Rancirian terms. What is more, Rancire may offer queer politics a way to circumvent the dilemma presented by the opposition between a strict sexual identity politics and the inclusive tendencies of queer theory towards dissemination into any number of other political fields. We could be asking the question as to whether or not the disputes we are engaged with are confluent with impossible identifications (as they surely were when these identifications were with blacks or women in the sixties and seventies), whether or not a dispute in the name of sexuality can bring forth the recognition of a group hitherto unimaginable as political agents (as was the case with HIV/AIDS). Reading queer politics with Rancirian eyes, it seems to me, does not always lend itself to celebratory conclusions. I shall try to elaborate how more recent struggles (and acquisitions) on a subject such as gay marriage or civil partnerships are more ambiguous when looked at through the prism of Rancires thought. To do this I shall have recourse to a few more of Rancires terms, those of emancipation, the police, and the ochlos. The police, or police order for Rancire is not, or not merely, the enforcement of law, but the general law that determines the distribution of parts and roles in a community as well as its forms of exclusion (Rancire, 2004b: 89). Thus the police represents what is already set out, categorized and classified in a given political system; it represents the distribution of roles and rights within that system as well as the borders and partitions between those who are included in the role- and right-giving and those who are not. The police functions as a distribution and classification machine, sorting out what is proper and what is improper. Emancipation is a moment concomitant with that of subjectivation, the polemical verification of equality (Rancire, 2004b: 86), and entails a logic of heterology insofar as, for those who have no part to demand a part amounts to a re-distribution of parts in the name of something improper to the logic of parts. Stonewall is a moment of emancipation in that it is a moment when the demos constitutes itself in the name of something, namely sexuality, which had not until then been recognized as a political category, had not been distributed by the police order, and does so by appealing to a wrong and an equality which the police order cannot categorize. But I am not certain the same can be said about the rights to civil partnership, even less for gay marriage. It could be argued that the demand for legal recognition of same-sex relationships is tantamount to Rancirian emancipation in that it would entail the levelling of the distribution of legal rights between gay and straight partnerships but in whose name, and with what recourse to an improper, heterogeneous element? Is it not rather the case that demanding such recognition is precisely a demand to accede to full recognition within the proper, already existing classifications of the police order? It might depend on whether one views the acquisition of legal rights by same-sex couples as radically reconfiguring the existing institutions of rights pertaining to couples, or rather as merely the addition of a new group of people on whom these rights are bestowed. If one understands, as I have to confess I do, the demand for gay marriage as a wish to be unified with those who

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

already have that right, then the outcome is that the group who is demanding this would be, in Rancirian terms, much less a demos and more an ochlos. In contradistinction to the demos, the ochlos is, in Gabriel Rockhills gloss obsessed with its own unification (Rancire, 2004b: 88). Rancire differentiates the two in the following way:
If the ochlos from the outset is not the disordered sum of appetites but the passion of the excluding One the frightening rallying of frightened men the relation [between demos and ochlos] must be conceived otherwise. The demos might well be nothing but the movement whereby the multitude tears itself away from the weighty destiny which seeks to drag it into the corporeal form of the ochlos, into the safety of incorporation into the image of the whole. (Rancire, 1995: 31-2)

If the ochlos is the throng desiring its incorporation into the One, the whole of society, at the cost of divisions and differences, saying that the queer struggle for same-sex partnerships to be legally recognized is reminiscent of the ochlos may well ring alarm bells. Civil partners, just as married couples, are by necessity classified under the existing categories set up by the police, and acceding to such a status, from a Rancirian perspective, looks more like capitulation than emancipation. Queer: outside politics or outside the police? Such an injunction for queer politics to be placed not within but resolutely outside the political/police order is certainly not new in queer studies, but it resurfaced most trenchantly in Lee Edelmans No Future, where it is polemically stated almost at the very start: Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the very space that politics makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears (Edelman, 2004: 3). In what follows I shall try to read Edelmans polemic alongside Rancires political theory, firstly to understand whether Edelmans claim to the space outside politics corresponds to what Rancire would understand as outside the police, but also to consider the possibility that Edelmans project may actually undo or subvert Rancires commitment to democracy and equality. When Edelman writes that queerness names the site outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism (Edelman, 2004: 3), or when he writes that the only queerness that queer sexualities could ever hope to signify would spring from their determined opposition to this underlying structure of the political (Edelman, 2004: 13), it would be quite appropriate to interpret politics and the political as what Rancire identifies with the police. What is at stake in Edelmans analysis is a structure of consensus, which is entirely concomitant with the police order and not at all concomitant with the divisionary disagreements necessitated by the politics of the demos. I am even tempted to read an analogy between what Edelman calls the impossible project of a queer

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such (Edelman, 2004: 4) and Rancires impossible identifications that take place at the moment of emancipation and make of the demos a force which in essence does oppose itself to the logic of opposition (ibid). It would also be plausible to suggest a congruence between Rancires analysis of the police order and Edelmans understanding of the involvement of fantasy in politics in the following:
politics may function as the framework within which we experience social reality, but only insofar as it compels us to experience that reality in the form of fantasy: the fantasy, precisely, of form as such, of an order, an organisation, that assures the stability of our identities as subjects and the coherence of the Imaginary totalizations through which those identities appear to us in recognizable form. (Edelman, 2004: 7)

This is indeed the work of the police order, the work of categorization, organization and stability, creating subjects to this police order but not subjects of politics. And if we, once again, read police for politics in what follows, it may make perfect Rancirian sense: Politics, that is, names the struggle to effect a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subjects alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chains of signifiers lived as history (Edelman, 2004: 8). However, glaringly absent from a Rancirian appropriation of the above statements would be all the words lifted from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, words such as fantasy, imaginary, alienation. And this does entail that it would be less than self-evident that Rancire would concede to a description of the order of the police as an order of fantasy. But what if we were to take Edelman at his word, that is to say, what if what he terms queerness and defines as implying a determined opposition to [the] underlying structure of the political were indeed to be understood as going not merely beyond the police order, thereby constituting a political emancipation and subjectivation in Rancirian terms, but as going beyond politics itself, located in a no-mans-land where emancipation itself would prove impossible? The temptation to do this is strong, if Edelmans polemical tone and the negativity in which No Future seeks to inscribe itself are taken in earnest. Let us consider the possibility that Edelman locates the queer in a space not simply outside the regulation of the police order but untouched by any politics whatsoever what would the ramifications of such a gesture be? First and foremost, it seems to me, this would lead us to accept the troubling thought that queer politics should mean an abandonment of all politics, or worse, political self-destruction: perhaps, as Lacans engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political selfdestruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life (Edelman, 2004: 30). Edelmans injunction is to think the possibility of locating the queer outside any political field, and this should also mean outside the definition of politics announced in Rancires work.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Therefore this is a task that would give the lie to Rancires ultimately hopeful, salutary vision of politics and deliver us queers not to emancipation, much less the embrace of the police order, but to something altogether darker and more cruel. Edelman himself is lucid both about the frighteningly negative dimensions of this task and about its value as a demystification from all salutary social and political theories (including Rancires) that would seek to avoid it. He calls it:
a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolics negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy of access onto the queer. (Edelman, 2004: 5)

I shall be coming back to this long and difficult citation, but for now I trust it illustrates the force of this hopeless wager aiming for the transcendence of the political altogether in order to expose the hopeless wager inherent in all politics of hope. And Edelman knows, as a Lacanian would, that the place outside politics, the hopeless place where queers may be located, is the place of a terrible ethics: queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as the resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure (Edelman, 2004: 3). The resistance whose figural status is discussed here may admit an analogy to the supernumerary resistance that subjectivation brings to the political in Rancires thought, but the insistence on the inextricability of such resistance may be read as pointing towards a space where subjectivation, emancipation, politics itself has no place. Equality and the Real: the uses of catachresis It would seem that an impasse has been reached. Rancire posits the emergence of a political subject through subjectivation at those choice moments when a reconfiguration of the field of experience can take place. Edelman stakes a hopeless claim for the positing of a subject, a queer subject, whose function is to figure the very limits of this field of experience, which is what should be understood, in a general sense, by the Lacanian term the Symbolic. Obviously Rancire does not use this term, but his key idea of the distribution of the sensible functions in the same way as the Symbolic does for Lacan and Edelman.[4] More importantly, a conceptual trait shared very distinctly by both Lacan and Rancire in their articulation of the Symbolic or the sensible in its distribution is the fact that it is grounded on an element that is heterogeneous to it. In Lacan, the Symbolic is grounded on an internal fissure issuing not from the Symbolic but from the order of the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Real. Edelman cites Dominick Hoens and Ed Pluth: The subject is able to take its place in the Symbolic order by means of an element heterogeneous to that order. Yet this element is also included in the Symbolic in some way. This order is, then, ultimately grounded in something that is not of the order itself (Edelman, 2004: 36). The element in question is what Lacan terms the sinthome, the symptom of psychoanalytic practice, also extensively theorized by Zizek as a political factor (see Zizek, 1992), and this is of course the basis for Edelmans reconfiguration of the queer as the sinthomosexual. Rancire also founds politics both in relation to the police, and as incorporating a principle completely heterogeneous to it: if politics implements a logic entirely heterogeneous to that of the police, it is always bound up with the latter. The reason for this is simple: politics has no objects or issues of its own. Its sole principle, equality, is not peculiar to it [ne lui est pas propre not proper to it] and is in no way in itself political (Rancire, 1999: 32). This striking analogy between the structures of Lacans and Rancires conceptualisations allows for a remapping of the dispute between Edelmans and Rancires notions of politics. The subject Edelman refers to is a subject of the Symbolic order, but its entry into this order is predicated on an element, the sinthome, representing a remnant of an entirely different order, the Real. The sinthome lies within the Symbolic, which is to say it is bound up in it. But it comes from the Real, the unsymbolizable, and it represents in the Symbolic the very rift in symbolization that the Real effects. For Rancire, politics has a principle on which it is based, but which in no way belongs to it, and this is equality. Politics is also implicated in a relation with the police order, which at first looks like the clearest analogy for Lacans Symbolic. This need not be taken to mean that politics is the police orders sinthome, but it clearly points to what Jeremy Valentine argues: Rancires position seems to imply that the political arises from the existence of that which cannot be symbolized by the police, or which can only be symbolized through terms that succeed in designating its anonymity (Valentine, 2005: 47). This is crucial to the formation of subjectivation and of the moment of politics, since it is crucial for the division between what is proper and improper that political subjects come to identify. Rancire uses the concept of equality to signal the process whereby an element completely heterogeneous to the distribution of the sensible effected by the police is called upon to reconfigure and change that distribution, thus levelling the field and giving rise to the moment of emancipation and subjectivation: The essence of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it with the controversial figures of division (Rancire, 1995: 32-3). Equality may not quite be a symptom but it comes from a field totally heterogeneous to that of the police (the Symbolic), it comes, one could say, from the Real. What comes from the Real, for Lacan and even more so for Edelman, is frightening, potentially paralyzing the subject as indicated in the discussion of the symptom in clinical psychoanalysis. At the same

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

time, it is this fear and paralysis that, if allowed to be interpreted with and in language, that is to say if allowed to be symbolized, will anchor the clinical subject in the Symbolic providing its point de capiton, its quilting point.[5] What comes from the Real is both enabling, then, and disabling. My contention is that, within the framework now set up, the disagreement between Edelman and Rancire can be articulated in terms of enablement and disablement. The very role that Edelmans sinthomosexual is conceived to play is that of a stultifying reminder of the limits of the Symbolic, it is a disabling role, not in that the subjects called sinthomosexuals are in any way themselves disabled, but in that they figure disablement for and in the Symbolic, they represent the excessive jouissance that threatens it with annihilation. Edelmans polemical point is that queers are sinthomosexuals; their function is to represent that is queernesss ethical value the internal threat that the Real poses to the Symbolic. In Edelmans terms: Sinthomosexuality [...] brings into visibility the force of enjoyment that desire desires to put off. In doing so, the sinthomosexual reveals, unendurably to the subject of the law, enjoyments infiltration of, its structural implication in, the very law of desire that works to keep jouissance at bay (Edelman, 2004: 86). A political subject, for Rancire, does the same thing in relation to the police order: it makes visible the constitutive part of the distribution of the sensible that nevertheless the entire police order is constructed to keep at bay equality. But it is clear from Rancires entire work that he intends this process of political subjectivation to be the most enabling form of agency, allowing for new distributions of the sensible, for new conceptions of the demos, for new police orders to be challenged again by the same salutary process. The optimistic thrust of Rancires work is unmistakable. Contrast this statement about the role of sinthomosexuals from Edelman: such sinthomosexuals would insist on the unintelligibles unintelligibility, on the internal limit to signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder: the inescapable Real of the drive (Edelman, 2004: 106-7). Sinthomosexuals, queers, are not there to open up new avenues for the better distribution of the sensible allowing for equality to shine. They are there as a persistent reminder of a Real debt figured in the (death) drive, they are there as a nagging insistence that the Symbolic will never be completely filled with the light of order and signification. Perhaps the best place to observe Edelmans persistent assertion that queerness as sinthomosexuality is designated to figure a limit in the distribution of the sensible rather than a point at which this distribution can be reconfigured by a series of subjectivations and emancipations is his trenchant critique of Judith Butlers reading of (Lacans reading of) the figure of Antigone (Butler, 2000). Butler goes against the antipolitical thrust of Lacans reading of the Sophoclean heroines actions and fate by insisting that Antigones fateful act can be reincorporated in the workings of a new system of kinship and law, even a new conception of the human. Antigone represents or figures the limits of the Symbolic order, the limits of the system of kinship and symbolic

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

exchange that bestows social intelligibility and coherence. For Butler this is the limit of the Symbolic, and Antigones act and claim figuring it means that the Symbolic itself is subject to a potential transformation: If, as Lacan claims, Antigone represents a kind of thinking that counters the Symbolic and, hence, counters life, perhaps it is precisely because the very terms of livability are established by a Symbolic that is challenged by her kind of claim (Butler, 2000: 54). Therefore Antigones act and claim are fundamentally political. Butler names this action whereby the Symbolic is challenged and potentially transformed political catachresis. Antigone becomes an oddly triumphant figure, heralding the potential of a new dawn of kinship and a new future for humanity: If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis. She acts, she speaks, she becomes one for whom the speech act is a fatal crime, but this fatality exceeds her life and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising fatality, the social form of its aberrant, unprecedented future (Butler, 2000: 82). Edelmans critique consists of recalling that catachresis, as Butler understands it, is precisely the way in which the Symbolic order works, and that therefore Butlers Antigone, far from transforming Symbolic law, repeats it and repeats it, in fact, as nothing less than the law of repetition by which our fate is bound to the fate of meaning (Edelman, 2004: 105). How may this debate about catachresis inform our understanding of Rancires theories of emancipation and subjectivation? I would suggest that these moments when a political subject emerges are precisely moments of political catachresis, the moments when the order of the distribution of the sensible is challenged by an act that reconfigures it. Butlers reading of Antigone appears in this light as Rancirian, in that she sees in Antigones act a radical reconfiguration of the field of human experience that leads into the salvation of the promising fatality, the aberrant, unprecedented future. Clearly Rancire does not use such exalted vocabulary but the main elements of his own ideas on the ever-changing reconfigurations of the political field by the irruptions of different kinds of demoi share both the structure of aberration and the mode of the promise with Butlers reading. Edelman is far less promissory and far less hopeful, seeing in the reconfiguration of the Symbolic only the deathless repetition whereby the Symbolic will incorporate the challenge it was facing, precisely by reconfiguring itself, but with such a repetition yet another figure of those who cannot be counted will always emerge again:
No doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the norms of the social order do, in fact, change through catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as figures of moralized sexual horror may trade their chill and silent tombs for a place on the public stage. But that redistribution of social roles doesnt stop the cultural production of figures, sinthomosexuals all, to bear the burden of embodying such a moralized sexual horror. For that horror itself survives the fungible figures that flesh it out insofar as it responds to something

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

in sex thats inherently unspeakable: the Real of sexual difference, the lack that launches the living being into the empty arms of futurity. (Edelman, 2004: 107-8)

Nothing in Rancire comes close to this conception of the living being, and this is not only because his preoccupation is with political subjects, peoples, and not sexual subjects, or even what Lacan would have called pure being. But the disagreement between Edelman and Rancire can now be seen not merely as a matter of stress, enabling versus disabling, hope in the future versus the deathless repetition of the same, but rather as two versions of that element which subtends political or Symbolic experience but which is heterogeneous to it. I would want to argue that Edelmans (and Lacans) Real is structurally analogous to Rancires equality, but reversed, flipped over into a form of negative, impotent, and yet constitutive and effective equality. If for Rancire equality is what is called upon whenever a political subjectivation occurs and a reconfiguration of the field of experience takes place, for Edelman/Lacan the Real is the point at which every inexorable attempt at radical reconfiguration will clash with the persistence of a repetition that never ceases. This is no longer politics: it is the political and polemical manifestation of an impasse of politics, which we may as well call political self-destruction. Aesthetics versus ethics: why Rancire is not a Lacanian Despite all the analogies that can be drawn between the conceptual frameworks of Rancire and Edelman an unbridgeable gap, a rift of incommensurability remains, and it bears the name: psychoanalysis. Edelman is not only borrowing Lacanian vocabulary (Butler is very often doing just that as well), but he is resting the entire political and moral weight of the figure of the sinthomosexual on Lacans work after all, Edelmans book is subtitled Queer Theory and the Death Drive. I have thus far attempted to Lacanize Rancires conceptual world, possibly even contorting it to a degree in order to allow for similarities and differences to be discerned in what is the main issue here: queer politics, and whether there can be Rancirian queer politics. But it is time to address the issue of why psychoanalysis as such is considered politically suspect by Rancire. His most sustained engagement with it is in the as yet untranslated LInconscient esthtique, and this deals entirely with Freud. Lacan features very briefly in the later Malaise dans lesthtique, but it is possible to discern his shadow behind a lot of the criticisms levelled at what Rancire calls the ethical turn.[7] In his book on Freud, Rancire pretty much immediately intends to subsume the unconscious into a more general paradigm shift, which he identifies elsewhere (see Rancire, 1998) as a paradigm shift between a regime of representation, and an aesthetic regime of thought.[8] He writes: My hypothesis is that the Freudian thought of the unconscious is only possible on the basis of this regime of the thought of art and of the idea of thought which is immanent to it (Rancire, 2001a: 14). The Freudian unconscious is made possible by

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

a general shift in the understanding of the relation between thought and art, which psychoanalysis utilizes to erect the theoretical edifice of the Oedipus complex, the theories of the drive, the hermeneutics of the symptom and the dream. Freuds thought is therefore both contextualized historically and also subsumed under the rubric of the aesthetic regime, the unconscious becoming a property of this regime, to be called the aesthetic unconscious: The aesthetic unconscious, which is consubstantial to the aesthetic regime of art, manifests itself in the polarity of this double scene of mute speech: on the one hand, the speech written on bodies, which must be restored to its linguistic signification by the work of a deciphering and a rewriting; on the other hand, the deaf speech of a nameless power lying behind all consciousness and all signification, to which a voice and a body must be given (Rancire, 2001a: 41).[9] These two sides of the unconscious map onto two tendencies, consubstantial but contradictory, in psychoanalysis, namely the aspect of psychoanalysis dealing with the interpretation of speech in the symptom and the dream; and, on the other hand, the aspect dealing with giving voice to the effective but mute drives, including of course the death drive. And here is the rub: Rancire clearly valorizes the former over the latter, clearly advocates the Freud who is a brilliant decipherer of bodily symptoms, dreams, and symptomatic texts such as Jensens Gradiva; and he clearly berates the Freud who is a speculative theorist of the drives, the Oedipus complex, or the discontents of civilization Freud the reader over and above Fred the thinker. What is crucial is the reason why such a valorization takes place a political reason. Rancire associates the Freud of the drives and speculation with a surrender of hermeneutics and therefore of dissensus, a surrender to a mute but effective Law of alterity which he also associates with the ethical. This Freud:
must valorize the mute power of the Others speech, irreducible to any hermeneutics. That is to say he must vindicate the nihilistic entropy determined to transform the ecstasy of the return to the original abyss into sacred relation to the Other and to the Law. This Freudianism thus executes a turning movement around Freudian theory that brings back, in Freuds name and against him, this nihilism that Freuds aesthetic analyses never ceased to do battle with. This turning movement affirms itself as the challenge against the aesthetic tradition. (Rancire, 2001a: 77-8)

This turn is closely related to the distinctions Rancire draws between the ethical and the aesthetic. Aesthetic and ethical become two competing visions of the field of experience, of the responses available to thought when faced with equality and political action. And for Rancire ethical responses, responses in the name of the Other who is not present to be counted, by definition run counter to his own emancipatory political ideas. An ethical community is: raised on the ruins of the perspectives of political emancipation [...] It is an ethical community revoking all project of collective emancipation (Rancire, 2004a: 33). Rancires politics is resolutely an aesthetic politics:

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible that defines the common of a community, in introducing new subjects and new objects to this community, to render visible that which was not, and to allow the voice of those who were only perceived as noisy animals to be heard. This work of creating dissensus constitutes an aesthetics of politics (Rancire 2004a: 38-39).

Rancire thus sides squarely with a vision of the political imbued with the necessity of division, dissensus, and what he calls impurity (Rancire, 2004a: 173), an aesthetic vision going counter to the ethical vision of a politics indebted to an intractable Law of the Other. In so doing, he distinctly dissociates his project from the speculative enterprise of Freudianism (as opposed to its hermeneutics) and thus from Lacan, who paid such attention to the mute force of the drives, and also Edelman, who sees his queer/sinthomosexual subject as the avatar of the death drive. Conclusion: forced choices, impossible identifications Rancire would surely reject Edelmans claims for the sinthomosexual because of the necessary appeal, made manifest in Edelmans calling for queerness to attain an ethical value, to the Law of the Other that is revealed in the sinthomosexuals constant access to jouissance, as Edelmans hopeless wager has it in the passage I promised to return to (Edelman, 2004: 5). He would reject, perhaps in favour of Butlers notion of political catachresis, Edelmans opposing idea that rather than expanding the reach of the human, as in Butlers claim for Antigone, we might [...] insist on enlarging the inhuman instead (Edelman, 2004: 152). Rancire associates the inhuman directly with Lyotard (see Lyotard, 1993), but a statement like Edelmans certainly sounds as if it could easily be painted with the same Rancirian brush. Besides, it is certainly true that queer need not mean, as Edelman intends, sinthomosexual, that queerness may take on the mantle of political catachresis that Butler wants it to. In this case queer theory can, and probably should look to Rancires invaluable exploration of political subjectivation, and the queer demos may rise again. What if, on the other hand, Edelmans very different take on what happens when a subject, the sinthomosexual, figures the persistence of an element within the political constellation that lies resolutely outside politics, is allowed to reveal another side, an underside, to Rancires notion of equality? What lies outside the Symbolic is the Real, and what persists in the Symbolic as a cipher for the constant access to jouissance of the drive is the sinthome, and the sinthome can also be read as a negative Rancirian equality. Edelman may be advocating the enlargement of the inhuman, but he does so in a way which I take to be less congruent with Lyotards appeal to the Law of the Other, and more akin to a nagging reminder that the inhuman persists not only when the police order attempts to subsume it through

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

political catachresis but also when that same police order (the Symbolic) assigns to a figure, the sinthomosexual, the role of embodying the threat of inhumanity repeated in any moment of political subjectivation when the voices of those who were only perceived as noisy animals are heard. What if those noisy inhuman animals were the subjects of equality, an equality that has nothing to do with the political catachresis effectuated by the emergence of the demos? What do queers want? In wanting more than sex, in demanding an equal distribution of rights, in demanding a part in a political configuration that gives or gave us no part, we want to be human, and we are, were, and at other times and places will continue to be, a demos. But, perhaps, in wanting sex, or rather in wanting, claiming and being claimed for by that incessant repetition of the intractable Real of jouissance, we want, claim, and are claimed by an inhumanity that makes us equal to non-queers just as well. Is there a choice here? Are queers faced with what in psychoanalysis would be called a forced choice, an impossible choice between the human and the inhuman, citizenship and sex, emancipation and the hopeless wager of a terrifying ethical value? It is this forced choice, a choice which is at the same time never exactly present as an empirical choice and still always there in the very persistence of what queer may actually mean, that queer theory is, or should be, addressing. It is in this unfeasible but inexorable meeting of Rancires radical humanist politics and Edelmans insistence on the value of the inhuman that queer theory finds its own impossible identification. Hector Kollias completed his PhD in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick before being appointed Lecturer in French at Kings College London. He has published articles on Genet, Nancy, Rancire, and Dustan amongst others, and is currently working on a book about the psychoanalytic concept of perversion and its uses and misuses in queer theory. Notes 1. For ease and continuity of use I shall be referring to the definitions and translations of key Rancirian terms offered by Gabriel Rockhill in his Glossary of Technical Terms (Rancire, 2004b). 2. The French subjectivation is also translated by Julie Rose in Disagreement as subjectification. For reasons of clarity and fidelity to the original French I am keeping subjectivation throughout. 3. I am not here suggesting that before Stonewall queers did not have a place assigned to them by the police order through the criminalisation of queer sexualities, rather that the moment we have come to identify as Stonewall represents, in Rancirian terms, the moment of emancipation when the subjectivation of queers as sexual subjects happens through and as the correction of a wrong. This

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

also involves the disidentification of queers from the criminal category of being against nature and their transformation into political agents because of their sexuality. 4. Despite the dangers that are entailed in bringing together the vocabularies of Rancire and Lacan, dangers which I have already pointed at and will have the chance to encounter further, several commentators see no problem in bringing the two conceptual worlds together, or at least to incorporate Rancires thought in fundamentally Lacanian or structuralist-inspired frames of reference. The most obvious one is Slavoj Zizek (see Zizek (2000), and also the afterword to Rancire (2004b)), but see also Valentine (2005). 5. For the quilting point [point de capiton], a Lacanian term that is key to Zizeks thought on the subject of ideology, see Lacan (2007); Zizek (1989); Zizek (1991). 7. Translations from both these works are my own. 8. There is no space to explain adequately the meaning of these two terms here, other than to say how they affect Rancires reading of Freud. The reader is referred to Rockhills glossary at the end of Rancire (2004b). 9. The term mute speech, translating one of Rancires key concepts, and the title of one his books (Rancire, 2008) refers to the ability of writing under the aesthetic regime to present itself in a double way. For more on this crucial aspect of Rancires thought on aesthetics see Kollias (2007). Bibliography Butler, J. (2000), Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kollias, H. (2007), Taking sides: Jacques Rancire and agonistic literature, Paragraph, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 82-97. Lacan, J. (2007), The crits: the First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & co. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993), The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, London: Polity. Rancire, J. (1995), On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (1998), La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littrature, Paris: Hachette. ---. (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2001a), LInconscient esthtique, Paris: Gallimard. ---. (2001b), Ten theses on politics, trans. D. Panagia, Theory and Event, vol. 5, no. 3. ---. (2004a), Malaise dans lesthtique, Paris: Galile. ---. (2004b), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill, London: Continuum. Valentine, J. (2005), Rancire and contemporary political problems, Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 46-59. Warner, M. (1993), Fear of a Queer Planet: Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zizek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. ---. (1991), For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as Political Factor, London: Verso. ---. (1992), Enjoy your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, London: Verso. ---. (2000), The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.

borderlands ejournal 2009

17

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Inhuman Evanescence
Patricia MacCormack
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.

In On the Shores of Politics Rancire describes the task of politics as giving substance to the evanescent moment which regulates the multiplicity of ecstatic pleasure found in the demos, what he calls a jubilant ethics. Evanescence is found in the in-between. The evanescent moment is defined as the event of the philosophical realisation of the art of politics (Rancire, 1995: 19). As these three trajectories of art, politics and philosophy coalesce to transform themselves as in-between discourse they emancipate the evanescent moment from being an ideational or mythic impossible utopia, opening out the possibility of a realisable utopia. The future of the image and the flesh of words are found through their seduction in excess of meaning as anticipation, gesture and effect. These ideas have many resonances with queer theory. As Rancire corporealises politics, so too queer theory takes representations of subjectivity and sexuality away from centralised human positions into a dissipative multiplicity.

Rancires exploration of the philosophical encounter between art and politics shows that the effacement of a centre effaces the concept of the subject as not empirical but constitutive, and becoming-inhuman is the very language whereby aesthetic fiction is opposed to representative fiction (2007: 126). Genius, according to Rancire, is not knowing, jubilance not being an ethics found in the unrepresentable but nonetheless encountered. The category of the human seems a broad and ambiguous category, but at its core the human is used as a vindication for the search for affirmation of the powers inherent in those who seek their own categorisation as worthy subjects who simultaneously decide who counts as human and who does not. The concept precedes selves to coalesce multiple intensities into categories prepared for the possibility of existing, not the potentialities of existence. The parameters of the human offer liberation to their oppressed when alterity is included in the subsets of different possibilities of being human or when the other achieves

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

acceptable levels of registers of being human enough. Being human can be said to be capable of one kind of perception and perceptibility. This mode is formulated by all orders of signification and all things having to be signified so they may be ordered. Nothing escapes. Concepts of the inhuman and a-human do not oppose the human. The prefix a-, a-desire, a-signification and a-human, denotes without connoting. It is before, between and beyond, most importantly without signification and opposition. A- prefixed terms are no less concrete or material for being such, they simply demand the we that perceives after. We seek catalysts to become inhuman and a-human in order to go without. A-humanity is neither human nor not human. The very category itself is no longer available, either for purposes of evaluation or existence. Sexuality is an example where becoming-inhuman requires a not-knowing and not-being, not through what Rancire critiques as nihilistic humanism, but the human becoming-aesthetic, an enfleshed corporeal aestheticisation of politics, not a series of empty shopping-list perversions. Art offers us the connection with asignifiable particles that demand either we perceive beyond human comprehension, or the art cannot emerge. A-humanism does not seek additions, opposites or radical others. The inhuman shows the hypocrisy of history evaluating worthy, rational and civilised behaviour premised on the spectre of the category human being register of the qualities of actions and knowledge. Unethical behaviour is described as inhumane, while the human is refined in its capacity for unethical behaviour and the amorphous not-human (usually animal) is maligned as representative of the unethical qualities which make us human, but which we rationalise as not human because we have the power to name them as such. Becoming a- and inhuman gifts the comfort of being a subject to possible encounters with the outside within self and connected to other elements as a band of consistency, potentiality beyond possibility, thought beyond knowledge, perception beyond what we believe is able to be perceived (and how). The scariest part is that we continue to exist when there are no categories. The gift of self should be scary, because politics is about risk. Rancires ethics offer techniques of regulating the risks and limits of queer and the politics of sexual aesthetics the evanescent inbetweens of desire, seduction and the body as anticipation, jubilance and gesture. A democracy of queer raises a series of issues which both address the past political mobilisation of a queer voice and queer addressee, leading to the difficulty of thinking a community of queer. I will lead this to a configuration of queer subjectivity as an artistic mode of expression queer as art. Through Rancires elaborations of the art of words and the art of images, played out in a theatre of material expression which replaces any adherence to the pitfalls of the idea of performativity, this article will explore the suggestion by many philosophers, such as Lyotard (1991), Guattari (1995), Foucault (1997), Blanchot (1993, 2003) and Deleuze (1994), that art belongs to and makes us inhuman and a-human, negotiating the very premise of the human, and thus by being art, queer is beyond the human. A turn

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

toward queer desire in thought potentialises an inhuman and thus ethical mode of desire. Where does Rancires work fit in with the more established paradigm of the constitution of queer theory as a theoretical and activist movement? The catalyst for my, and arguably most, lines of queering through Continental philosophy comes from the rich body of work, which has prevailed especially since the early 1990s, particularly from theorists such as Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve Sedgwick, David Halperin and others. This essay will take Rancire as part of the group of theorists of the inhuman cited above to show that not only can all texts be queered but we can, optimistically, queer all theorists to dissipate and make dissonant the uses, effects and perverse relations between theorists and subjects to open up futures. This leads to the question why I have chosen a very specific trajectory within which to contextualise the queering of Rancire, which is through the canon of Continental philosophy and, especially in light of the crucial role feminism had to play in the inception of queer theory, why I have not chosen feminist Continental philosophy for my queering which could occur through, for example, Luce Irigaray, Michelle Le Doeuff, Hlne Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Arguably, it is the very philosophers who risk the criticism of fetishising and subsuming queer and feminine alterity which need to be addressed in order to disorient these risks. These feminists have done precisely this, so this essay can be considered, as well as an alternate trajectory to the queer theory of the 1990s and today, one which comes from, but will not explicitly deal with, these feminists work on art and within Continental philosophy. The inception of queer theory was marked by its adamant inflection with politics, where discourse and activism were not bifurcated. Butler considers Foucaults persistent troubling analysis of sex as taking the category of sexuality as a monolithic unity (1994: 3). Butlers critique seeks to take one of the key thinkers of Continental Philosophy out of that canon and into the, at least discursive, streets. Thus early queer theory paved the way for discussions of what could, problematically, be called activist queering of real life experiences; race, AIDS (the number of authors dealing with both these issues are enormous) which has been extended to other modes of illness (Diedrich, 2007), disability (McRuer, 2007), the concept of political, activist and subjective freedom (Winnubst, 2006) amongst many other elements of subjectivity. Here lies a necessary contradiction. These despotic elements of alterity colliding with queer add on to multiply elements of singular constitutive paradigms which elicit oppression so that the other is now emphatically more than one. Discussion often limits itself to what has been (experience) and what is to come (sometimes inclusion, sometimes a radicalisation of modes of perception). Liberation comes in my use of Rancire and other theorists of the inand a-human through the falling away of the human rather than the becoming-human which is still needed but along a different trajectory of enquiry. Lee Edelman demarcates that the most crucial and constitutive dramas of human life are those that can never be viewed

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

head on, those that can never be taken in frontally, but only approached from behind (Edelman, 1994: 175). Edelman claims the front on gaze sees nothing, which Irigarays work would dismiss as a phallologic search premised by female sexuality/genitalia as having nothing to see or seen as nothing only through a human gaze (Irigaray, 1985: 47). His mastery of Freud is one of anally (re)productive philosophy. By claiming his work resists gay theory as based on human experience (1994: xvi) Edelman emphasises the problems with both terms, however he insists on gay identity, even if it is one of performance over registering. Seeking the dramas is a ruse for actualising the human, constituted by the affirmation of the possibility of the human which precludes the search. Edelman urges theoretical transgression within activist discussion and vice versa. Queering, like all philosophical enquiries, is formed of a constellation of specific territories which intersect to create their own unique terrains. Butlers connection between the difficulties of rationality as it is responsible to actual corporeal human beings can be seen in her discussion of Levinas. She states that responsibility cannot be tied to a conceit of a self fully transparent to itself ... reasons limit is the sign of our humanity (2005: 83, my emphasis). Art as a-human catalyst is experienced beyond systems of logic and so can be used to navigate Butlers recognition that reason makes us human and we are human because we claim that truth is found through reason. The Enlightenment thought she criticises herself for seeing as a necessary residue toward ethics is precisely what Rancire and other philosophers of the inhuman forsake. Butlers connection resonates with that of queer activism needing to be rational in order to be perceived at all. Continental philosophers were often writing as a response to remarkable, radical and historically significant real life events, such as May 1968, the Reale Law, the Gulf War and so forth. The original publication dates and the spirit of their writing are, sadly, beyond the scope of this essay. However it is an undeniably unfortunate sacrifice. While I suggest their concepts seek a-humanity as an ethical turn, they are very much part of their own concrete political moments. The proliferation of trajectories and the strange relations they create, rather than their commensurability or incommensurability with activism and identity, is a queer manoeuvre. Rancire claims equality is not democracy and justice not the management of wrong (1999: 63). The traditional relation of politics to philosophy posits philosophy as an analysis which comes after the political sphere, and only when philosophy replaces politics can politics be achieved. The place of demos, before the performance of a philosophy, is retarded.
The demos is there, with its three features: The erecting of a sphere for the name of the people to appear; the unequal count of this people that is both whole and part at the same time; the paradoxical revelation of the dispute by a part of the community

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

that identifies with the whole in the very name of the wrong that makes it the other party. (1999: 62)

The place of the demos describes our condition of emergence and recognition as a human one, because only humans can populate a political democracy and only by being acknowledged in this place of demos can we count as human, by virtue of these three features. These three features themselves are what define humanity and thus humanity is simply a pre-formed space of occupation which occurs when the material actuality of certain flesh is occupied by these features. A queer politics is prevented from emerging as a philosophy of queer when the queer community comes into being only through the context by which it could emerge in the antecedent order of signification. The fight for recognition would then homogenise queer while ghettoising it as other. Queer would find its political position transgressed through the elements of the antecedent order and seek to identify with the dominant order so that it may count as part of that order. This justifies the conditions of oppression because it seeks those conditions to no longer oppress the now reified community of queer, what Rancire points out is the emergence of a part identical with the whole (1999: 61). Many issues arise here which refer back to the very conditions of possibility by which queer theory emerged in the 1990s as a necessary and combative politics. The politics of homosexuality, beginning with the fight for equal recognition and rights of gay men, which then became an incremental inclusive politics of the add-on lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and so forth did identify with the oppressor as the politics first incepted the peopling of the oppressive regime with recognition of new kinds of people who had been wronged. To be righted was to be made a minority with an ambition to be subsumed, but still always as a minority, into the majority. Righting the wrong atrophied the other through the system of the same and subsumation vindicated the system itself by only offering inclusion, not paradigmatic shifts, in the mechanisms of emergence. Beyond lesbian, gay and transgender theory, queer both challenges the subjectivisation of sexual alterity and the space of the demos. It demands encounters with desire which are not, as Rancire laments of politics, the result of policing righting the wrong, participation without interference but of expression and multiplicity. The expression of queer is a voice without commonality, a community of the uncommon, not because each queer participant is different but because the tenets of the category itself are neither forthcoming nor deferential to particular conditions of possibility that ensure the structure by which the future may emerge. When the demos demands a response by the oppressed to the question which does not yet exist, it performs the elliptical function of subjectivisation of which Rancire is so critical in his negotiation of Althusser. The field of knowledge is thus structured as a weaving of questions and answers that do not belong to each other but whose very disparity is an earnest of sufficiency: an enormous reserve of answers to bad questions waiting for good questions (Rancire, 2004: 133) . Gays, lesbians and other

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

sexual minorities were allowed political inclusion when their questions fitted with the pre-formed answers awaiting them. Their structure was a question to which the answer existed and thus their political liberation was already its own new form of oppression. What, then, did queer do to this system? Rancire sees philosophy with politics as encompassing phrased chaos, linkages without syntax, whispering, music and other expressive voices (2007: 58-9). A politics of queer is impossible within this logic of speech. A unified voice of the oppressed or non-included must be a different kind of voice, not one with a different content. It is the subject of the speaking subject that must change, not the speech (the perversion of which will necessarily follow). The shift from speech to sonority, timbre, whispers and other vocal aberrations inclines toward a queer mode of expression as one of art not politics, or politics as art. This is what Rancire demands when he calls for a political philosophy as politics without politics, metapolitics, the politics of gaps and the beyond. Anti-representative art is constitutively an art without un-representable things. There are no longer any inherent limits to representation, to its possibilities. This boundlessness also means that there is no longer a language appropriate to a subject, whatever it might be (Rancire, 2007: 137). The ethical turn occurs when the jubilance toward possibilities and impossibilities of art simultaneously addresses what Rancire, discussing Lyotard, calls an ethical logic of denunciation of the very phenomenon of representation (Rancire, 2007: 131). Rancire sees the bearing down of structures upon the events through which they are incarnated as irreducibly singular, as planes of expression. For Rancire discourse is never extricable from events, which is where disagreement differs from Lyotards differend (Rancire, 1999: xi). By enhancing alternative modes of expression without privileging any one mode or one constitutive expressive form, Rancire circumvents, and offers a salient warning against, the risks of hyper-performativity or what he calls exaggeration of elements of alterity, which are transgressive or considered inherently more arty or unrepresentable than any other. The object of representation is there, irrefutably, undeniably, perhaps even devastatingly. It is not a shadowy simulacrum which revels in the perceived lack of its own presence. However, it is unrepresentable and the event of our experience of it unthinkable (Rancire, 2007: 130-31). Lyotard invokes the contradiction in the sublime where we must bear witness to what cannot be apprehended as testament to itself but which is indeterminate. Rancires attention to the incommensurable notion in Lyotards critique of a structuring of the sublime laments the impasse in creating a relation between unrepresentability and un-thinkability as itself establishing a dialectic of indeterminacy. What Rancires redemption of Lyotard offers is the idea of a submission (Rancire, 2007: 136) by the object and presumably the event itself, a painful experience of desire because we must bear witness to the impossible without renouncing the event. Here Rancire sees Lyotard offering a way out of Hegels end of art, where the beyond insinuates bad infinity (Rancire, 2007: 136). Rancire both extends and circumvents Lyotards sublime beyond as a fidelity to an original debt.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Correspondence between representation and aesthetics is repudiated for correspondence as a paradoxical event that encounters the event of its own system of making the desiring aesthetic moment possible, not as nomenclature but indeterminacy with accountability. Such a configuration of the event resonates with queer desire which, while being indeterminate and outside traditional sexual dialectics, nonetheless accounts for its affects and shows fidelity to its own paradoxes. The conditions of presence are altered. Here is where the ethics of the shift from queer as political to queer as art occurs. Beyond a politics of inclusion with the risks of the three tenets of the demos queer is absolute, it is everything as object, not an aberrant object. As queer we are neither the same nor disparate, neither unified nor multiple. A-human beings seeking alternate revocations with perception and relation. Rather than, as Rancire critiques, vocalising a desire for representation which leads to the perils of performative exaggeration, we queers are desiring. In a political philosophy of queer, desire is voluminously present but without the possibility of re-presentation because it is never the same as itself. It is better then to understand desiring as a-desire, permanently present, beyond object, limit or consciousness. Certain terms arise which seem antithetical to post-structuralisms repudiation of essence, but it is precisely where these emerge that Rancire redeems the vacuity of much post-modern thought and art and reminds us of the material ethics post-structuralism seeks. Political collectivity is apolitical, but only insofar as it is a living paradox, with the emphasis on life neither metaphor nor analogy. The grave question of how to activate politics as a living paradox beyond these two temptations is also the question without answer, or, as discussed above, the answer which cannot find a suitable question. Art is politics without syntax, activism paradox through ecstasy, the constant state of queer as desiring. Extricating itself from the syntaxes of desire for the object, its mode of subjectivisation or voice, emergence through recognition-representation and most crucially for the appropriate question to which the self-object is the good or bad answer queer desiring is ecstasy. Ecstasy, like art, like the event, is immanent. It is beyond causality and pre-formed futurity. It is what the subject is, not what the subject is in, like queer desiring, the noun itself becomes verb. But it has very definite, concrete affective qualities and brings into being, through the unique qualities of its ecstasies, new patterns of possibility, perception and expression. It is adamant in the relations it creates but queer as a state of desiring cannot represent or describe, only acknowledge and reflect on, the specificity of new conditions produced. Ethical address comes from the distancing of self from self to momentarily slow the space-state of ecstasy to allow the self to recede. The interval is the point of reflection but because events of ecstasy are un-representable ethical reflection can only ever be a fleeting relation of proximity and affectivity. It cannot be reflected upon as an externalised and reified strategy of address a desiring relation between two. It presents, as the necessary impossible of observing, the effects and dissipations of objects through desire without ever being able to be an observer.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Like ecstasy itself, art as politics hurts as much as it pleasures, and, like politics, is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, but the double specificity of political dialogue (Rancire, 1999: 43). Political rationality comes from a freeing from choice good/bad, pleasure/pain, right/wrong thus the in-between and the beyond takes as its first moment the forsaking of duality, which Rancire states serves subjectivity. Subjectivity serves also the division between logic and alogia, the division of man as machine with rationality. To adhere to this division, remaining faithful to the perceived extrication of logos from the mechanical animal of Aristotle, stays with the arithmetic of the animal as plane of exchange and allocation. Queer can neither be allocated nor exchanged. It also cannot serve its own subjectivity as the subject is mobilised. So the speech of queer politics is simultaneously animal and logical, thus it must be a-human. Rancire sees political speech as at once argumentative and poetical because we are no longer the we nor the identity assigned to it (Rancire, 1999: 59). Queer manifests as politically real, as actual flesh which virtualises new possibilities of further actualisations of constantly new flesh, but there is no we and no identity. Logic comes from the a-human non-we but is logical as it uses language to elaborate and think, actualise and incant. The relations this logic makes are tangible and its effects are irrefutable. A-human logic sees no animal-human division of sense-thought; arepresentation does not follow an art/subject divide; and a-reality accepts material reality without signification or reification. Desiring as and through these is how queer desire emerges, as art, against the politics of inclusion, allocation, measurement and policing. Rancire suggests the power of art [equates with] the obliteration of the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the living and the dead, the animal and the mineral, all alike merged in the density of the sentence or the thickness of the pictorial paste (Rancire, 2007: 27). What much Continental philosophy has offered in its own negotiation of subjectivity is precisely why none have dealt with sexuality as object. Queer as a self, even if it is an expressive power of self, while encompassing the kind of activist philosophy often necessary for pragmatic alterations in, for example, law and rights, is incommensurable with residual subjectivity as a desiring subject. More correctly, Continental philosophys queer subject is neither subject nor queer-subject, as we find in Rancires work the shift from noun object to adjectival element (Rancire, 1999: 72). The shift is not simply for the minority because as stated above, the grouping of the oppressed is unsatisfactory for a turn toward the evanescent demos. The extrication, however, between alterity itself and the dominant takes risks if the dominant is also not acknowledged as an expression of force a kind of style, whose adaptability to offer the answer which demands the oppressed choose the correct question in order to be included, knows no limits. Thus by not privileging queer as expressive force against the dominant as atrophied group, Rancire makes clear the in-between space as decentring both elements, and thus the opposition itself dissipates, forcing all engagement to alter their tactics and thus the nature of their grouping.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

The phantasy of the collective insinuates a relatively straightforward wiping out of that group. The dance of the transgressive (but never for their own sake) with the dominant is precisely that: a gestural dance where the making evanescent of the spaces of the dance the territory or demos and the puissance of the conjugal relations of bodies as political matter is the focus. Where all are queer none are queer-ed but all desire becomes accountable as its own affective specificity and power. Thus Rancire in his collapse of binaries names them boundaries, spaces and tempos rather than demarcated entities. The binaries which collapse do not privilege the space between but the consistency of the qualities of relations when their categorisation disappears, so even the notion of both and neither becomes unsatisfactory. The matter of elements is a question. The political ethic tries to address (but not answer) the question of the specificity of relation without breaking it into one of two, or two plus the space between as a privileged third site. So the question asks how do we shift politics from oppositional activism to dance? As dance is gestural art, it is part of two art forms Rancire focuses on poetry and the image. Art is not different to politics but understanding politics through and as art may allow differing modes of expression of alterity imperative to all. As my interpretation of Rancire argues, the inhuman will be not opposed to the human, but will be all. This creates a resonance with the aims of queer as de-fetishising sexual alterity to demand an acknowledgement of the constant state of desire present within all subjects and relations that simultaneously demands accountability. The density and consistency matter (and materialise the matter). The question is not what but how? How, when queer is art, does politics shift the demos? Two elements are emphasised in the work of Rancire, neither of which are extricated from nor de-politicised: the image, which encompassed anything that is visually apprehended (or aapprehended), and the word. Rancire demarcates three orders of the image. The naked image refuses any possibility of resemblance as it testifies to an absolute reality thus does not define itself as art. The ostensive image, while acknowledging itself as art, claims a pure presence without need for a signified. If the naked image testifies to absolute reality then the ostensive does so to pure art. The metaphorical image is defined by dissemblance and delimitation, creating localised singular consistency. The metaphorical is always a relation. But it does not oppose the norm with the not-norm, the traditional with the subversive; it is a plane of disfiguration or shared surface (Rancire, 2007: 105). Pure art and impure art are not two principles but differing organisations on the same plane (Rancire, 2007: 105-6). The question is how can we queer the organisation? By way of a tactical explication of resonances, but in no way one which seeks to make commensurable the elements of the image with that of queer, how can these three organisations show the possible emergences of a queering? The first organising principle addresses the human most directly. For this reason I will survey the naked image in that it may help negotiate

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

the crucial, problematic and ultimately indecidable issue of real life politics and queer as theory. As queer (as opposed to, say, the use of a politics of desire in most Continental philosophy) came from specific issues of the rights of certain bodies and the irrefutable violence perpetrated upon the bodies of these minorities, I think it essential to raise the issue of real life violence, to which most naked images testify. This offers a way in which Rancires work on art can help queer theory as political philosophy to go beyond the reallife/theory split, while still acknowledging the suffering of bodies. Testimony to naked reality is a difficult but perhaps necessary phantasy of relation. Witnessing an image of the absolute reality of an event requires a belief in that event without our presence. Our presence thus must be imagined as real in front of the image whose event-reality lacks in us, while the reality of the event, poverty stricken in its lack of us at the moment of its reality, demands our belief in that reality. The subject and authenticity need to be retained to an extent. Frequently these kinds of images are testifying not to a reality they are rarely ordinary but a horrific event and lamentation of inhumanity, the suggestion that for something to be inhuman means it is nothing more than a brutish devaluation of the human. This insipidly insinuates that both everything that is not human is inhuman, thus brutal, and that the human should be valued more than anything. Most often these events are never about the image or even testament to its reality. The real is neither the event of the image nor the authenticity of the spectatorial relation. It refers to one of the few ideas which are irrefutable, namely death. It is a rare case when death of what as a post-structural negotiation of subjectivity loses its force. The political territory is not one of reality/phantasy, falsity/truth or presence/lack but of the effects by which a turn to this kind of image taken as real can show the horror of the powers of a certain treatment of other emergences of life upon a specific territory of relation. It is precisely because the territory is seen to be human only in so far as certain persons are understood as counting or not counting as human that these events of violence happen. These images are testament to a particular configuration of the organisation of elements, and this organisation is precisely that which is most traditionally understood as human. The human organises the territory and the witnessing of that image. But, as Rancire points out, one must annihilate oneself and also annihilate ones claim to be an interpreter (Rancire, 2004: 85). Indeed, Rancire sees the imperative to take the word as real in its affects as both absurd and annihilating the very flesh of the reader, as a wound. (This argument raises many complex and impossible issues addressed by Lyotard (1988), Derrida (1992) and Nancy (2000) among others). What I am concerned with here is not the issue of testaments of violence per se but of territories which result in it. Knowledge of an event does little. Thought incited through the encounter with an image demands a response to the conditions of the territory by which an event occurred. Some issues which could express a naked relation of queer are most obviously the acts and results of the refusal of rights for sexual others.

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

The focus on rights creates an unsatisfactory demos of subsumation and simultaneous expulsion. Just as we may ask what do queers have in common which demands a homogenisation of an oppressed group, we also ask what benefits are gained by bearing witness to the oppression of queers? A relation of art with the naked image insinuates naked qualities of the oppressed. Queer emerged as a direct and radical repudiation of any grouping of persons based on shared sexual standpoint politics. Like the image which doesnt necessarily name the victim of violence, queer doesnt name its inherent qualities not what we are but that we are. As it is difficult to understand queer extricated from a binary of being opposed to another term, queer offers an escape route from the problems of categorisation Rancire sees as working against a political philosophy, no matter how adamant and eventually recognised we are. Queer was both a term which includes all and fights against the increasing taxonomy which came about through gay (and lesbian and transgender and and and). If the human is the ubiquitous category for every subject then counting as human necessitates a categorisation (always within a hierarchy, always essentialized in order to find the appropriate space). Covertly sexual rights came from the demarcation of certain desire and queer saw the problems with shifting from counting to not counting. Queer then was an escape, from binary to boundary. A queer art, which in this essay posits queer as an art politics, can be testimony to an event in that it neither accepts nor refuses. Rancire claims of art that it is always a slippage, and when it is given an impermeable genre or institutionalised as unreal, the slippages of artreality are denied. He says books are:
attestations to the existence of what they discuss ... Fiction forms part of reality as a particular space-time in which socially acceptable laws (passion drives one mad) produce fantastic consequences with which one can amuse oneself without trouble, since they do not go beyond the imaginary situation. (Rancire, 2004: 88-9)

We must believe in fiction as testament to its effects rather than as describing it as reality. Fiction which alters terrains queers desire for conservative economies of knowledge toward passions of thought. If the naked image demands testament without imagination it is because the events are unimaginable. Only thinking imagining the conditions of potentialities which made them emerge can apprehend the territory in order to acknowledge the gravity of the event. Irreducibly separating fiction and reality institutionalises the image as real but without any inflammation that demands we act. Fantastic consequences ethical revolutions can come only through realising the image as unimaginable but no less real for being so. Queering our relation with the naked image as one of art over raw testament is the only way ethical consequences can emerge. Rancire emphasises liberty comes only from incommensurables (Rancire, 1999: 42). The naked image sees art and reality as incommensurable and thus risks

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

turning from liberty, while the experience of the metaphorical image demands incommensurables as the very principle of opening new futures, a fresh sphere of visibility for further demonstrations (Rancire, 1999: 42). The ostensive image may seem more appealing in confessing itself as art. However, here I wish to take Rancires use of art to its limit. Art is a practice of thought or, for Rancire, a labour (but without capital). The metaphorical image refuses art as extricated from other spheres as it functions as a playing on the ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances (Rancire, 2007: 24). If queer is the infinite in-between which knows not the binaries it is between, nor the nature of its own between-ness, then it can offer a form of art in that it is made of an articulation of two contradictory operations (Rancire, 2007: 71). The collapses which invoke art as slippage perform for Rancire a perversion. While painting and words express, extend and occupy different spheres, they share the nature of art as the abolition of allocation (Rancire, 2007: 105). Here we are reminded of the pitfalls of allocation and exchange discussed in Disagreement. The power of literature is the power of indeterminacy or metamorphosis [transformation] is indeed literal and at the same time it is not so (Rancire, 2004: 153). Queer as desiring, rather than exemplifying a mode, expresses a labour which indeed plays on the ambiguity of resemblances in that it obstinately challenges its fellow desiring schemas to insert it. If queer desire exploits incorrect object choices then queer desiring shows a space of incorrect desire as ubiquitous, as rudely subsuming, yet failing to be and being beyond, all other desires. Modes of resemblance are challenges which may assist deconstructing traditional dialectics of desire. Queer doesnt resemble anything except its place within the broad category of desire, so its resemblance is always a dissemblance. For political philosophy, without genesis or destination, transformation still needs to come from some where or some thing. The speaking queer subject, even when understood as an expressive art manifestation, the space where queer fights its contestations, and the point of desire which incepts a need for queer political philosophy, are all necessary residues if we are to think the difficult task of queer as both grave and limitless, queer as art and no less activist for being so. Through the metaphorical image, art is no longer framed by an autonomous history of forms or a history of deeds changing the world. Thus art is led to query the radicalism of its powers, to devote its operations to more modest tasks (Rancire, 2007: 24-5). The metaphorical image performs a double function to cause rupture and to de-nullify the images reduction to one of exchange, circulation and the absence of being a metaphor for anything else, which is, having no relations. After Rancire art could be the queery that is a response which comes from desiring radicalisation without simply becoming a radical. Queer desire is always and nothing more than the devastating rupture of concepts of desiring subjectivity and dialectics.

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

To return to the crucial element of Rancires understanding of art however, images are metaphorical in that they perform actual operations but without being inherently present to themselves as art or to us as naked. They show art itself as performing resemblances and dissemblances, both with strange bedfellows (non-art, real-life the naked) and with themselves (without metaphor ostensive). In capitalism, after Lacan, access to any concept of desire beyond lack is compelled to negotiate with desire as everything, a shift back from want to archaic need. Queer need isnt a return to an infantile or atrophied state. It is a new need, an a-semiotic need, because it is an irresistible must. Desire that lacks wants a thing, a goal, an object and to be an object. It seeks its own allocation through the functioning of desiring operations which place the object of desire in its own correct place. Desire for equality, for reparation, for counting is the double task of being enough like and enough unlike the dominant. At best the desiring other can become a fetishised transgressive who gets a place only because they are coveted for their powers which can at anytime be either replaced or slaughtered. At worst the desiring other is ghettoised. Slaughter and ghettoisation when we finally come to count are real issues with corporeally devastating actual effects resistant to signification, yet ironically they can be lamented and resisted only when the sexual other is signified. This space of apparent real life politics is anti-politics for Rancire. But, as this so called real life political desire to count comes only via being signified, the desire and the self both belong to the space of the desire=lack, want=object systems. Queer will, and can never, count because it cant be counted, allocated, made equivalent. It has no opposite and thus its desiring project also has no other to covet. Queer is neither in opposition with nor equivalent to. This is true of both its self and its want. But it is nonetheless a deeply political philosophy; it comes about because we must still fight for a political philosophy; Yet, as we are compelled by Rancire to fight beyond the established system, we are fighting for and toward nothing we can apprehend or think. Like children not pre-adult but pre-signifying we have to have, we are sustained by what? The what is the trickiest point of political philosophy. It must be material enough to mobilise but amorphous, adaptive, and most importantly inconclusive; an expressive, gestural political philosophy or, as already suggested, a dance between rather than within spheres. Rancires modest tasks of art are modest political spheres. Queer cant, and doesnt seek to, shift the territory of the world because this is an operation of replacement. Only modest little tasks can open spaces for new political philosophies, dissipating the territory without creating new allocations, like the oft cited example of a drop of water in a pond. Queer queries its radicalism, it is accountable, yet it is also necessary. Its powers of transformation are inevitable, like our inevitable need for certain things food, water. Indeed, the shift from need to want is the crucial moment of being incepted as human. The need for desire means we no longer count as human. So it goes beyond and cannot be allocated to a certain system. Like art, queer is a creative expression of what is possible in that it expresses possibility itself

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

potentiality. Art makes the ordinary extraordinary, it seduces us with elements as minute as they are grand, topics, frames, movement, particles which take our breath away. We dont know why or how, and rarely what, but the seductions of art create the openings that show us, not what is there to be seen, but that the possibilities of seeing and modes of desiring are infinite. The tasks occur within all space as the same, not a special artistic space. To love art is to love as art, and queer as political philosophy, but always coming from and associated with a politics of desire, can here be seen as a politics of art. Rancires project of thinking a political philosophy could, without homogenising the specificities of each also include his work on art. When politics becomes art:
The art of politics is the art of putting the democratic contradiction to positive use; the demos is the union of a centripetal force and a centrifugal force, the living paradox of a political collectivity formed from apolitical individuals. The demos is forever drawing away from itself, dispersing itself in the multiplicity of ecstatic and sporadic pleasures. The art of politics must regulate the intermittency of the demos by imposing intervals which place its strength at a distance from its turbulence, at a distance from itself. (Rancire, 1995: 15)

Queer is a contradiction. Not between the binaries of desire which occur in reference to acts or objects, nor even between dominance and alterity. Queer elucidates the inevitable contradiction between being human and being overwhelmed at all moments, differing only in speeds and consistencies, by being not noun but verb, not a desiring subject but nothing more than a desiring and a-desiring. Quiet moments of political tasks are tactical intervals. Rancire discusses the lyrical mode of expressive speech as having a potentially democratic function as it speaks through the I and mimetically, like the metaphorical image, without recourse to notions of authenticity, art as falsity and transparency. He raises the beautiful concept of meaning without sense but as sensory. Politics occupies the non-signifying, the non-representative (Rancire, 1995: 13). The aesthetic revolution abolishes the distance between the eidos of the beautiful and the spectacle of the perceptible; the ability of the beautiful to make itself be appreciated without concept (Rancire, 1995: 18). Poetry is the free play of imagination. The reconciliation between nature and liberty is the moment of politics. Rancire calls the poet the wanderer (Rancire, 2004: 14) because freedom comes as a result of the freeing up of the allocation of concepts to perception. Accessing nature through imagination affords liberty. Nature is not its own sphere but simply that which must be perceived as it is in relation to us. This does not preclude or exclude self as part of nature. Crafting a queer self takes the self as the first point of nature which makes self an inextricable part of all territories and queer perception as an artistic plane. If nothing else, nature is the a-human. Art, requiring imagination, emphasises that the freedom to perceive comes with ethical accountability. Mimesis does not copy in relation to the perceived self but neither does it fail to acknowledge the external

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

element as compelling a form of perception. It wanders. It encounters as communication of feelings and of natural associations of ideas in a state of excitement (Rancire, 1995: 19). These words, associated inevitably with desiring the beautiful, excitement, sensation and sensuality are not objects eliciting results. They describe the experience of philosophy, not of things. Like desiring, they are states because the beautiful causes excitement without conversion, indeed because there is no conversion. Here liberty could be found both in political philosophy and because of the difficulty of the task of political philosophy. Rancire calls sublime art the unthinkable:
Between what is visible and what is intelligible there is a missing link, a specific type of interest capable of ensuring a suitable relationship between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, the expected and the unexpected ... Genius is an active power of nature, opposed to any norm, which is its own norm. But a genius is also someone who does not know what he is doing or how he does it the aesthetic revolution establishes this identity of ignorance and knowledge, acting and suffering, as the very definition of art. In it the artistic phenomenon is identified as the identity, in a physical form, of thought and non-thought, of the activity of a will that wishes to realise its idea and a nonintentionality, a radical passivity of being there (Rancire, 2007: 112-13, 119)

Queer desiring is often maligned for not knowing what it wants. It cannot because it doesnt know itself, only that it is a wanting self, voluminously so. There is no object to know, no concept to subsume. There is all of the world and what can materialise in it through the infinite tools available, primarily thought, that is wanted and to be wanted by. The a-human risks the self it does not know and this is why it is jubilant rather than sacrificial. It gifts itself nonetheless without debt or demand, because connections occur that no longer expose meaning through the abyss between self and other, observer and art, desiring subject and object. To lose oneself in this way is a form of grace. Grace may be encountered as the loss which is not felt as loss but as production of ecstasy. Queer thought not only incarnates in a physical form but its radical passivity shows an insurgent grace, seeking liberation and political ethos as much as the ecstasy of self as art. Patricia MacCormack is Reader in English, Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively in the areas of Continental Philosophy, perversion, body modification, queer theory, ethics, the post-human and horror film. She is the author of Cinesexuality and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema. Bibliography Blanchot, M. (1993), The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2003), The Book to Come, trans. C. Mandell, Stanford: Stanford UP. Butler, J. (1994), Against proper objects, Differences, Special Issue: More Gender Trouble Feminism Meets Queer Theory, Summer-Fall, pp. 1-26. ---. (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Diedrich, L. (2007), Treatments: Language, Politics and the Culture of Illness, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, New York: Columbia UP. Derrida, J. (1992), The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, L. (1994), Homographesis, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1997), Thought from the outside, trans. B. Massumi, in M. Foucault & M. Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot, New York: Zone Books. Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An EthicoAesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains & J. Pefanis, Sydney: Powerhouse. Irigaray, L. (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill, New York: Cornell University Press. Lyotard, J.F. (1988), The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (1991), The Inhuman, trans. G. Bennington & R. Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity. McRuer, R. (2007), Crip Theory: Cutural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2000), Being Singular Plural, trans. R.D. Richardson & A.E. OByrne, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancire, J. (1995), On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso. ---. (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2004), The Flesh of Words, trans. C. Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ---. (2007), The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliot, London: Verso. Winnubst, S. (2006), Queering Freedom, Indianapolis: University of Indiana.

borderlands ejournal 2009

17

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

The Torsion of Politics and Friendship in Derrida, Foucault and Rancire

Richard Stamp
Bath Spa University

This paper intervenes in the contemporary re-evaluation of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and in queer theories and historiographies of friendship particularly in the influential work of the late Alan Bray by arguing that Jacques Rancires conceptualisation of politics as wrong (or tort) offers a crucial twist to queer critical-deconstructive approaches to politics, friendship and democratic citizenship. By reading Derridas (1997) figure of virile homosexuality in terms of a problematically exclusionary logic, this paper demonstrates that whilst Rancires political thinking is very close, even indebted to Derridean deconstruction, his polemical conception of politics aligns him more productively with Foucaults later work on friendship as a way of life. Re-read through Rancire, Foucaults slogan for the inventiveness of queer cultures of friendship is given a political form as that which interrupts, or twists, the proper (police) ordering of classes and identities by inventing new and always particular sequences of relationality.

The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship. (Foucault, 1997: 136) This double exclusion of the feminine in this philosophical paradigm would then confer on friendship the essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality. (Derrida, 1997: 279) The torsion or twist that causes politics to occur is also what establishes each class as being different from itself. (Rancire, 1999: 18)

There is a peculiar relation between the first two of these epigraphs, both taken from texts published in English translation in the same

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

year, and both originally published in French three years earlier.[1] What strikes me as peculiar is that these two statements, each in their way central to each thinkers respective argument, appear to conjoin friendship and homosexuality in parallel yet divergent ways. Where Foucault sees this conjunction as a tendency, a line of development, Derrida sees it as exclusion from a paradigm, an exemplary figure. One might be tempted to characterise this divergence in terms of Foucaults endeavour to (keep) open a relation between these two terms, and Derridas strategic closure of this relation into a sublime figure. Such a reading would require a far more careful interpretation of Derridas text, not least from the perspective of Foucaults relative absence from it, of which I can only provide an outline here; but this divergence gives some leverage to intervene in the current reevaluation of Foucault and Derrida in queer theories and historiographies of friendship, particularly in the influential work of the late Alan Bray. The reasoning of this intervention will in turn provide the basis for arguing that Jacques Rancires conceptualisation of politics as tort, or a wrong, offers a crucial supplement to queer critical-deconstructive approaches (whether Foucauldian-Deleuzian or Derridean) to politics, friendship and democratic citizenship. Hence the third epigraph: for what Rancires historical tracking of the utopian dream of a community of equals opens up through a reconceptualisation of politics as the torsion that interrupts the proper ordering of orders, classes and identities is the possibility of another way of recontextualising, or better, twisting that shared inheritance of politics, friendship and equality routed through philia, the Christian spiritualisation and institutionalisation of brotherhood, and the codification of fraternity in the French republicanism. I will argue that whilst Rancires argument is very close, even indebted to Derridean deconstruction, there are significant disagreements over the relation of politics, democracy and equality that might be most productively affiliated with the later Foucaults articulation of friendship as a way of life. This recontextualising intervention begins with an anecdote retold by one of the editors of the present edition of this e-journal. In their moving tribute to Alan Bray, which prefaces his contribution to a collection of conference papers on love, sex, intimacy and friendship between men in the early modern period, Michael ORourke and Katherine ODonnell (2003a) recount the moment in his talk when Bray predicted that it will be Derridas Politics of Friendship and not Foucaults History of Sexuality, Volume One which will dominate such discussion in the next twenty years. (84) This claim of a historical shift is repeated and reinforced in Brays posthumously published book, The Friend (2003), which is capped by two references to Politics of Friendship. In his Introduction, Bray confesses that reading Derridas book made him realise that they were both asking at root the same questions (2003: 8), and at the end of his Afterword, reviewing the gradual emergence of historical scholarship of friendship across a range of disciplines, it has become the defining moment [] which drew together those uncertain ethics of friendship that had unmistakeably reasserted themselves by this point at the end of the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

twentieth century (2003: 322). So, what are the questions that Derrida holds in common with Bray and what constitutes those uncertain ethics of friendship? If Politics of Friendship bookends The Friend it is because Bray finds in Derrida a companion analysis of a historical shift, or turning point, in the ethical and political position of friendship in late modern culture (2003: 2). He explains this imagined companionship in terms of a shared interest in the peculiar uncertainties of friendship:
In the traditional cultures I describe, friendship was ultimately inalienable from the particular loyalties in which it was begun, as in the contemporary world on which Derrida reflects. The ethical uncertainties of that stance were pivotal in the ethics of the world I have described. There is, of course, no return now to the friendship of traditional society, but the ethics of friendship have an archaeology, if I may put it that way, that can be recovered (2003: 8)

In a narrative common to an expanding body of contemporary friendship studies, across the range of disciplines he mentions, Bray seeks to show that where once friendship had played a significant public role in traditional, pre- and early modern cultures, the emergence of modern civil society and institutions meant that friendship has not been perceived as a public matter, or more precisely ought not to be so. Yet increasingly it is (2003: 2). For Bray, and others within an emergent inter-discipline of friendship studies, it is friendships particularity or better, its peculiarity that made it both the object of suspicion within the institutions of modernity and the site of contemporary experimentation with para-institutional forms of living. Also in common with others, Bray identifies this increasingly public reassertion of friendship in late modernity with feminism and the attendant critique and apparent crisis in masculinity, but he concedes that it has found its most contested form in claims that homosexual friendship constitutes an alternative form of family (2003: 2). Interestingly, Bray immediately distances The Friend from being confined to such a narrow debate, by recasting it within a broader contemporary crisis in the ethics of friendship that touches upon overlapping questions of identity, loyalty and collectivity, of which sexuality has been one, but only one, strand (2003: 8, emphasis added). Although Brays shift of focus has itself been contested, in particular in the redrawn division of sexuality and friendship,[2] he is surely right in this respect. For although feminist, gay and lesbian, and queer theoretical and political activisms have made sexuality central to conceptions of political citizenship, it would be a mistake to make it the sole, ontological ground of social relationality. Not least because the political challenge posed by each and all of these activisms is how we are to understand, use or connect any of the crucial terms involved in such debates not simply sexuality, but also family (Budgeon and Roseneil, 2002), kinship (Butler, 2002), friendship (Bell and Binnie, 2000), public (Berlant and Warner, 1998), not to mention the concepts of ethics and politics themselves. None of these terms can ultimately provide the ground for all the rest.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

This desire to widen the debate might explain Brays reticence about the first volume of Foucaults History of Sexuality (1979), given its incontestable influence in the formation of the disciplinary field of queer studies. It might be that, for Bray, the name and work of Foucault is too closely bound up with the categorial privileging of sexuality at a certain historical moment in queer studies. Hence why it is so strange that he makes no mention of the second and third volumes of Foucaults unfinished history, The Uses of Pleasure (1984) and The Care of the Self (1986), or other later texts, such as the interview, Friendship as a Way of Life (1981), in which friendship plays such a crucial role.[3] In and across these texts, friendship features both as a Greek solution to the precariousness of sexual desire, which lies at the heart of their aesthetic morality (1984: 221), and as a kind of becoming of homosexuality, a mode of life that Foucault defines as a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities across an entire social fabric (1997: 138). Indeed, the image of friendship that Foucault sketches is peculiarly open in this interview, insofar as it is dissociated from any intrinsic qualities of the homosexual. Tom Roach (2005) succinctly summarises Foucaults strategy as refus[ing] to tell his gay audience what to do with friendship nor does he tell them exactly what it is or means; and that it in the end seems an utterly amorphous and malleable relation that can become just about anything (2005: 58). This is crucial to understanding the creative potential of friendship that Bray also explores in The Friend, a connection that David Halperin makes when he draws on both texts in the context of discussing the impoverished relationality that characterises the heteronormative weave of modern social institutions, and the imperative within (and without) queer cultures to expand and invent new relational possibilities (Halperin, 2004: 35). In the less often cited conclusion to Friendship as a Way of Life, Foucault returns to this need for invention by making the political point that to invent a mode of living entails demonstrating the fundamental groundlessness of what counts as intelligible:
There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these feelings, this need that Americans call coming out, that is, showing oneself. The program must be wide open. We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question: what can be played? (1997: 139-40)

In what follows I will take up this question of what might be played, or thought out, in the always-particular (even peculiar) political relationality of friendship as it figures within and between the work of Derrida, Foucault and Rancire. A queer-friendly democracy (to come)

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

This observation about the fundamental groundlessness of the political is what makes Politics of Friendship so important for future direction(s) in queer theories and politics of friendship (ORourke, 2005; 2006). Derridas deconstructive reading of a certain philosophical tradition of friendship works patiently and persistently to question the hegemonic schema of a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of the political (1997: viii, trans. modified). The schematic of filiation that runs through the political accentuates the linkages of State, civil society, family and especially fraternity, with Derrida drawing equivalence between the non-dialectical remainder of the life of the family and civil society within the dialectic of the State one of his recurrent concerns in Glas (1986), for example and the seemingly ubiquitous reference to confraternity or brotherhood in the discourse of democracy (1997: viii).[4] His argument that a certain configuration of politics through friendship and fraternity has always accompanied a specifically French genealogy of the concept of democracy, almost always associated with equality and freedom in the republican motto (1997: viii), implicates not only the values of political citizenship, sovereignty, allegiance, community, but also thereby opens up paths by which queer theory might analyse the political ramifications of heteronormative filiation. So when Derrida asks why the figure of the friend would be like a brother and whether the politics of such a beyond the principle of fraternity would still deserve the name politics, he not only pulls at threads of the dialectic of family and State, the institution of the couple and of sexual difference, which he had already started (and goes on) to unravel elsewhere (1983; 1986; 1987; 2004), but also in so doing opens up further possible paths for future queer interventions into discourses of community, friendship and the political. This attention to the brother and the filial, therefore, may not be entirely novel within his work, but this hegemonic configuration of fraternity as the principle of the political is (1997: viii).[5] Derridas deconstructive reading of the philosophical tradition of fraternal friendship as the exemplary political figure is in many ways a gift to queer theory, since it provides a way of tracking these homosocial tropics across canonical texts on friendship by Aristotle, Plato and Cicero, via those by Montaigne, Kant and Nietzsche, right up to thinkers who would count among Derridas closest philosophical friends, such as Bataille (2001), Blanchot (1988; 1997), and Nancy (1991; 1993).[6] However, at the same time, his reading also works, much more problematically, to shore up this tradition. This shoring up occurs when Derrida configures that queer figure of the brother-friend as exclusionary. Not that the identification of exclusions is itself the problem, since framing his enquiry in terms of the double exclusion of the feminine that is, friendship between women, and friendship between men and women allows Derrida to expose the structures of the constitutive boundaries and assumptions of this hegemonic paradigm. The problem lies in the configuration of this exclusionary logic. Derrida identifies such exclusive fraternization with the essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality (1997: 279). Why? This formulation (as given in the epigraph above) is itself

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

unchanged from an earlier paper, first published in English, in which he argues that the exclusions of the feminine would have some relation to the movement that has always politicised the model of friendship at the very moment one tries to remove this model from an integral politicisation (Derrida, 1988: 642). Mapping the effects of such a movement of (de)politicisation, he points out, would entail an extensive analysis of the gendered distribution of public and private, the political and the domestic. Derridas conjunction of this double exclusion and a virile homosexuality is both consistent and consequential for his analysis of the very possibility of a just politics. Alex Thomson underscores this point when he argues that, for Derrida, this exclusion of the feminine (and of sexual difference) would make it impossible to address inequality between the sexes within politics, except at the cost of reducing the sister to a brother (2005: 21). This is Derridas argument: Sisters, if there are any, are species of the genus brother (1997: 156).[7] The stakes are high but the phrase itself is surely problematic: so what does Derrida mean by virile homosexuality? First, the adjective virile refers us to manliness and masculinity; but also to the power of (sexual) potency, potentiality and self-generation. Derrida thus tracks an equation of friendship with the virility of sovereign, public virtue from Aristotle to Nietzsche (and beyond), insofar as such virile virtue binds the politics of friendship to a classical metaphysical schema of activity and passivity, the actual and the virtual, which he states is never very far away in Aristotles Ethics (1988: 633). The virility of virtue is what binds friendship to this privileged brotherhood at every level: from Aristotles praise for loving rather than being loved to Montaignes spiritual union that excludes women, who lack the capacity for it, and even to the inversions and ruptures of a certain community without community of thinkers to come (Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, for example), marked by the teleopoietic call of Nietzsche: the addressees are brothers, and their coming virtue remains virile. The Gay Science [] says that declared enemies are indispensable for men who must rise to the level of their own virtue, virility (Mnnlichkeit), and cheerfulness (1997: 61-2). Nietzsche reaffirms the political strength of virtue, even (or particularly) when he perverts and hyperbolises the inherited concepts of friend and enemy. This virile autarchy, which lies at the heart of every conception (and perversion) of virtuous friendship in this philosophical tradition, is nonetheless shot through with traces of a more originary passivity: an immemorial and minimal friendship that always already structures the very possibility of assuming the responsibility to speak, to decide or to act what Derrida refers to as the others decision in me (1988: 634-5). A certain passivity thus haunts the potency and sufficiency of friendships virile virtue. It is for this reason that the citizen-brother couples of Montaignes text provide the principle defile for Derridas formulation.[8] In a famous passage from Of Friendship, which Derrida quotes at length in a footnote, Montaigne proclaims the incapacity of women for the holy bond of friendship, because their souls do not seem firm enough to

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn [assez ferme pour soutenir letreinte dun nud si press] (Montaigne, 1998: 315). According to Montaigne, it seems that it is a spiritual fault that rules women out of a more full form of loving-friendship if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, he adds that would encompass the union of both body and soul (Montaigne, 1998: 315). This famous passage, with its famously virile image of a taught knot, provides the initial evidence upon which Derrida builds his argument that, for Montaigne and the hegemonic tradition which he is made to exemplify, the cause of womens claimed inadequacy for friendship lies less with marriage than in woman, in her sex (Derrida, 1997: 191, n. 6). Yet Derrida seems to ignore or obliterate the fact that Montaigne, in the sentence directly following this passage, dismisses the possibility of such a perfect combination of physical with spiritual love existing between men: And that other Greek license is justly abhorred by our mores (Montaigne, 1998: 315-16).[9] On closer examination, it would appear that Montaigne discounts both heterosexual and homosexual relations from this paradigm of friendship because he aligns each with the body and with desire. For this is Derridas own overriding question:
The principal question would rightly concern the hegemony of a philosophical canon in this domain: how has it prevailed? Whence derives its force? How has it been able to exclude the feminine or heterosexuality, friendship between women or friendship between men and women? Why can an essential inventory not be made of feminine or heterosexual experiences of friendship? Why this heterogeneity between ros and philia? (1997: 277)

A series of questions to which, it seems, the exclusionary figure of a virile homosexuality is the (at least provisional) answer. Derrida notes that these canonical oppositions constitute an unstable domination undermined from within, unable to stifle their own deconstruction, but whose domination becomes all the more imperious as a result (1997: 277). However, by laying out this system of exclusions along divisions not only between femininity and virility, ros and philia, but also between heterosexuality and homosexuality, Derrida allows the rhetoric of exclusion to overlay a grid of positions in which sexuality is discounted at the very moment it matters most.[10] This attentiveness to fraternal friendship as a virile figure of exclusion itself excludes from consideration any other other. Indeed, it is only towards the end of Politics of Friendship that Derrida pauses to reflect on what he sees as the politico-rhetorical infirmity of such exclusion, noting the not yet with which both Montaigne and Nietzsche undercut the apparent hegemony of the double exclusion of the feminine, by urging us to stop speaking simply of exclusion (1997: 290). But this gesture comes too late in a text built upon a conviction in the hegemonic homosocial functioning of friendship, in which reference to homosexuality is almost entirely absent, save as the figure for the double exclusion of the feminine.[11] Such a strategy may even have the effect of making the tradition appear all

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

the more invulnerable (or more virile, perhaps?). When Derrida states, in relation to Blanchots peculiar tribute to Foucault, that the Greek model of philia could never be enriched otherwise than with that which it has violently and essentially attempted to exclude (1997: 300), one cannot help but wonder whether feminist historical scholarship of female friendships such as Lillian Fadermans Surpassing the Love of Men (1980) which was an essential reference point in Foucaults late thinking of friendship would have made any impact upon Derridas strategy.[12] At the same time, this insistent identification of the virile virtue of fraternal friendship as exclusionary effectively shuts out any question of the positive and possibly liberatory social and historical relations of homosexuality and friendship (precisely the kind of social history pioneered by Bray, for example), and the task of retracing the fragile spaces and times in which queer cultures of friendship might have made themselves felt. So, although I am not so certain that Derrida doesnt allow for such fissures or interruptions, strategically at least,[13] it remains the case that he chooses not to speak about them.[14] This exclusionary figure of virile homosexuality is thus central to the way in which Derrida chooses to read this French idiom and inheritance of the political as phratrocentric democracy a figure that encompasses a tradition from Montaigne and Michelet to Blanchot and Nancy. Indeed, it is the deconstruction of such a tradition that allows for the articulation of another equality that can only come from the other, from the other who is both to come and always already presumed in the very act of proclaiming his or her absence. The issue here is not that Derrida is wrong to state that women and the feminine have been excluded from a political-philosophical tradition of thinking about friendship, nor to deny that this tradition has explicitly tied the friend-brother to virtue and justice, to moral reason and political reason (Derrida, 1997: 277). Instead, he brings about a wrong by figuring that exclusion in terms of homosexuality (virile or not). In fact, this wrong (in Rancires use of tort, a twisting or wringing of a given discursive formation or conceptual schema)[15] is what opens up the politics of friendship at the very moment Derrida (and his commentators, such as Thomson) fail to notice it or transpose it (like Byrne and McQuillan). It is precisely because Derrida pins the history of democracy to the hegemonic closure of an exclusively fraternal figure of politics that he can speak of the promise of an other democracy that always remains to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable concept (1997: 306). A democracy-tocome is deconstructions virtualised, non-presentable surplus; it is the future of a certain democracy that is the promise of any deconstruction to think an always-other possibility.[16] This is an absolute break, such that even on the very final page of Politics of Friendship, Derrida can only ask: Is it possible to open up the come of a certain democracy which is no longer an insult to the friendship we have striven to think beyond the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema? (1997: 306). This question in itself performs an interesting series of gestures. First, we might note that the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

displacement of virile homosexuality by the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema renders the sense and state of the homo undecidable here. It is not strictly nor simply the homo- of an ontological sameness or similitude, since the possibility of thinking friendship beyond it can only refer us back to Derridas preceding formula. Second, what is (thought) beyond has itself long been subjected to insult, insofar as Derridas question concerns the possibility of its eventual cessation (no longer an insult) as much as the history of its effects. What is the rhetorical-political force of this insult operative in this canonical homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema? Who has been insulted? Who feels it? And who, or what inflicts it? Because insult is of a piece with exclusion, insofar as it names a relation marked by negation that transforms another subject (into the insulted, the excluded, and so on), this formulation of insult is highly problematic for similar reasons as the rhetoric of exclusion. As with the figure of exclusion, Derrida is content to call to a time in which there would no longer be such an insult. Democracy for mongrels
Community wanted to forge equals through brotherhood. The problem was that it had equals already, in the shape of hybrid beings, mongrels of various aspect, all of which bear the stamp of inequality (Rancire, 1995: 80)

The concept of democracy has always been linked to insult. As Rancire never ceases to point out, it begins as an insult in the mouths of Athenian aristocrats (2009: 116), whose echoes he finds in contemporary critiques of a democratic illness, manifested in complaints about everything from Muslim students wearing headscarves in French schools to homosexual marriage ceremonies (2006: 1). If Platos inaugural critique of democracy as rule by the drawing of lots is always his point of reference it is because it shows that democracy, if it is anything, is first a polemical name that interrupts the proper, ordered distribution of places and meanings. Disturbing any proper, proportionate distribution of places or qualification for rule whose origin would lie in age, wealth, education, status, parenthood the democratic drawing of lots represents the paradox of a qualification which amounts to the absence of all arkh, to a qualification without qualification (Rancire, 2007: 90).[17] Paradoxically, it is this anarchic government by chance that consequently makes democracy the only available form of political government, for it provides the only available form of political qualification common to both rulers and ruled: the absence of all qualification for rule, which means that anyone can rule. Pulling at this thread, Rancire defines democracy as neither institution nor power, but rather as the an-archic principle of equality that restates this absence of any arkh. Democracy becomes coextensive with a conception of politics that arises from a radically anarchic, egalitarian presupposition: the equality of anyone and everyone. What he refers to as the hatred of democracy thus arises precisely because democracy is first of all the paradoxical condition of politics, which

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

confronts us with the foundational violence of every act of institution: it is the point where every ultimate legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy (2006: 94). In other words, it confronts us with the uncomfortable recognition of the fundamental inequality and illegitimacy of any social order or community. Like Brays account of the anxious ethics of friendship, Rancires account of the democratic paradox lays claim to a common ground with Derridas aporetic structure of democracy (2007: 84). Indeed, although he claims to present a more radical conception of democracy than that of Derridas auto-immunity,[18] Rancire remains very close to Derrida in this formulation of democracy as a supplementary, grounding power, which both legitimises and delegitimises every set of institutions and the power of any one group of people (Rancire, 2007: 91).[19] The point of difference, according to Rancire, lies in their respective conceptions of the relation between democracy and alterity. Rancire reads Derridas calls for an otherness which must come from the outside in terms of a thread from the pure receptivity of the khra through to the other or newcomer, whose inclusion demarcates the horizon of a democracy to come (2007: 91). It might be objected that this is a polemical (mis)reading of Derrida, whose articulation of the others decision in me, as we have seen, is far queerer than Rancire concedes.[20] But having set up Derrida in this way, which both appropriates elements of Derridas conceptual lexicon (X sans X) and expropriates the logical schema of its staging, Rancire makes his simple objection:
Otherness must not come to politics from outside. Politics has its own otherness, its own principle of heterogeneity. Democracy is precisely this principle. Democracy is not the power of a self; on the contrary, it is the disruption of any such power. Democracy means the disruption of the circularity of the arkh. If politics is to exist at all, this anarchical principle must be presupposed. This principle precludes the self-grounding of politics and turns it into the site of division. (2007: 92)

Rancieres objection is that whilst the fractured time of a democracy to come (as promise and an infinite openness to the other) allows Derrida to keep his distance from any triumphalist declarations of liberal democracy, it remains the only conception of democracy with which to oppose this oligarchic state practice (Rancire, 2007: 99). In other words, he worries that Derridas opposition between an institution and a transcendental horizon loses sight of democracy as practice, which might be able to account for the process of political subjectivisation (2007: 98) that generates new forms of political speech and intervention. Although we might ask whether Rancires formulation is, in fact, so very far removed from Derridas own aporetic relation to alterity and decision, it is worth noting Rancires unambiguous refusal of its unconditional, or hauntological, structure. Rancire refuses what he sees as an ethical overstatement of otherness in the messianic

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

promise of the other to come, insisting instead on the political power of a heterology: [t]here is not one infinite openness to otherness but many ways of inscribing the part of the other (Rancire, 2007: 99). This is not to oppose an ontology of the multiple, or multitude, to the One, but to refuse to fix the positions in a given political dispute within an ontological relation of exclusion. When Derrida argues that to think an alterity without hierarchical difference at the root of democracy means to free a certain interpretation of equality by removing it from the phallogocentric scheme of fraternity (1997: 232), this equality the inclusion of the excluded is always marked as to come. Derrida pitches the aporia of fraternal friendship between the infinite alterity of the promise held in a democracy to come and the absolute past of a friendship prior to friendships, an ineffaceable friendship, fundamental and groundless, one that breathes in a shared language (past or to come) and in the being-together that all allocution supposes (Derrida, 1997: 236). But suspended between promise and immemorial past, Derridas phenomenological aporia remains a curiously static formula: the friend, or friendship, to come must represent an absolute future in order to retain the others force of radical irruption of the selfs finite horizons (Webb, 2003: 120). According to Rancire, Derridas deconstruction of political ontology in this post-foundational hauntology of a democracy to come risks substantialising the otherness that undermines the foundationalist project (2003: 12). At a point of almost absolute proximity to Derrida, precisely around the reconfiguring of the relation(s) between equality and fraternity, Rancire states: For my part, I tried to conceptualise democratic practice as the inscription of the part of those who have no part which does not mean the excluded but anybody or whoever (2007: 99, emphasis added). It is this shift from the excluded to the anybody, to the part of those who have no part, that is decisive both for Rancires political thought and for its possible contribution to queer theorising of friendship, community and democracy. How so? At one level, both Derrida and Rancire locate friendship and community, via fraternity and democracy, within a paradoxical (or aporetic) political sequence of equality. But where Derridas configurations of exclusionary friendship and a democracy to come remain perched between two unconditional temporalities, Rancire sees democracy as a process of political subjectivisation (2007: 98) an invention of new voices and new objects that creates a specific time, a broken time and intermittent legacy of emancipation. (2007: 99) This conception of politics as the intermittent invention of new relations of emancipation echoes Foucaults articulation of a queer inventiveness special to a situation like ours (1997: 139), in which contingency of the intelligible is both demonstrated and opened up to the political demand for new relational possibilities. (Halperin 2004: 35) For both Foucault and Rancire it is a matter of thinking the becoming of an aesthetic politics, in which the ordering, or distribution, of the sensible-perceptual field is the place where politics can intervene. Politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field, and in that it makes audible what used to be inaudible. It inscribes one perceptual world within

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

another (Rancire, 2004b: 226). These two incompatible distributions of the sensible are politics and police: the latter is the division of the sensible that claims to recognise only real parties to the exclusion of all empty spaces and supplements;[21] and the former is the mode of acting that perturbs this arrangement by instituting within its perceptual frames the contradictory theatre of its appearances (2004: 226). In other words, politics is aesthetic because it operates at the level of appearances: it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field, and [] makes audible what used to be inaudible (2004: 226). Politics is therefore synonymous with an interruption of the regular police ordering of the social, demonstrating its contingent foundation by (re)introducing, or staging, the equality that every hierarchy must presuppose in its attempts to justify itself. This means that, for Rancire, politics rarely happens:
Politics only occurs when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any order. (1999: 17)

It is for this reason that Rancire argues that democracy is incommensurable with every institution of community, insofar as it is defined as what muddles community, what continually reduces it to its own messiness; it is the unthinkable aspect of community (Rancire, 1995: 67). In this way, Rancire uses the concept of politics to name an irreducible supplement to any given social order or community; it is that property which always interrupts, or thwarts (a favourite trope), the coherence of police.[22] Such a definition of politics means not only that it is a rare occurrence, but also, and most importantly, that it is always local and occasional (1999: 139): Politics only occurs when This is because politics exceptionality does not have a specific place of its own, but takes place in the space of the police, by rephrasing and restaging social issues, police problems and so on (Rancire, 2003: 8). The demonstration of this fundamental equality takes place in the staging of a wrong, or tort, which should not be conflated with a resolvable dispute between parties, such as a lawsuit, for example. For Rancire, a wrong is not procedure brought about by two parties, but a process of naming subjects whose existence had not been registered in society prior to its declaration. A wrong is thus what measures the incommensurability of these two orders or communities police and politics, or the declared political community and the community that defines itself as being excluded from this community by making the part of those who have no part appear on the political stage as those of no account (1999: 38). It is crucial to grasp that the staging of a wrong constitutes a process of twisting, or wringing the police order of the social. Drawing upon the etymological roots of tort, Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) emphasises the

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

interrelatedness of politics of the police in Rancires logic of the wrong:


The social order is wrung because it must produce ontological inequality since hierarchy is its basic arkhe, while at the same time this inequality is only logically possible on the basis of radical equality. As can be seen here, the play on the word tort (from tordre, to twist), both a wrong within, and a twisting of, the ontology of the social field is the key to Rancires political ontology. (5)

Politics wrings the police ordering of the social. What Deranty neatly describes as Rancires twisted anti-ontology (2003: 5) implies the superimposition of an egalitarian logic over the police order of the community, not in a fixed ontological relation of antagonism (pace Marchart (2007)), but insofar as the wrong consists in what the politics does to the police order. There is no ontological gap but a twist that ties together the contingency of equality and the contingency of inequality (Rancire, 2003: 12). This twisting of the social fabric does not, however, bring about a solution to the contradiction between the supposed fullness of the police distribution of the social and the lack of the part that has no part, since the verification of equality is always occasional and cannot form any social bond in its own right. It can only demonstrate and verify this contingent equality of anyone and whoever by including it as excluded, as counted. As such, political subjects do not enact a pre-existent identity, but merely verify an equality denied them by conjoining the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not; a verification that consists in twisting together a relation of inclusion and a relation of exclusion (Rancire, 2004a: 304, emphasis added). Rancire provides numerous cases of this double relation of inclusion and exclusion, where new subjects such as proletarians, workers and women in the nineteenth-century stage their inclusion in a given social distribution by setting up the gap between their supposed inclusion and their real exclusion (2003a: 17). Returning to the example of arguments over gay marriage, indicated in the introduction, we might usefully link this double relation to the way in which the paradox of demanding equal rights for gay men and lesbians to have their union recognised (legally, institutionally and socially) leaves in place the institutional, heteronormative institution of marriage (and the equally institutionalised form of the couple) as the (exclusive) form of social relationality. This paradox is part of a debate well rehearsed across a range of political positions from within queer studies (see Bell and Binnie, 2000; Butler, 2002; Halperin, 2004; Roach, 2005), but what Rancires conception of politics introduces is an insistence on the logic of tort at work here. Indeed, Todd May takes it up as an example in his account of Rancires political thought:
A politics of gay rights, for instance, confronts a world that preaches but does not live equality with a singular construction of the universality of equality. Here, now, in this demonstration, in this

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

wedding ceremony, in this act of love, the universality of equality is constructed, over and against the police order that at once posits and denies equality. (2007: 112-13)

Although he rightly underlines the always-occasional nature of the singular universal here, now, in this demonstration May does not go far enough in explaining the relevance of Rancires insistence on wrong in this instance. Gay marriage is not reducible to the exposure of the lie lived by a world that doesnt practice what it preaches. Or rather, it does not just demonstrate such a contradiction over rights. It also crucially, momentarily, puts into play the more utopian possibility of inventing forms of social relationality, of rights and of institutions, quite different from those currently existing: to think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces (Foucault, 1997: 140), which may open the way to rework and revise the social organization of friendship, sexual contacts, and community to produce non-state-centred forms of support and alliance (Butler, 2002: 21). In other words: that homosexuality names the trajectory by which the inclusion of those excluded doesnt restore a social fabric, but reopens the gaps whereby new affective and relational virtualities might be invented.[23] In the final analysis, it is by shifting our attention from the exclusionary legacy of a fraternal politics of friendship to the twisting of places and properties in the staging of political dissensus (the inclusion of the excluded and the exclusion of the included), that Rancires work makes available a language of relationality sensitised to the relational virtualities at the heart of Foucaults unfinished work on friendship. For Foucault as much as Rancire, this utopian politics of an always contingent equality might be described as the art of warped deductions and mixed identities insofar as it only ever stages the local and singular construction of cases of universality (Rancire, 1999: 139). But this is not a showdown between two republican mottos, Fraternity and Equality;[24] rather, it is a shift in focus that alters the relation of community and politics, which comes to emphasise the invention of particular sequences of relationality and most particularly, friendship. As David Webb argues with regard to Foucaults later work on the care of the self, friendship possesses no form of its own, and so the singularity of friends results from the fact that the conditions of each friendship themselves are always particular, always concrete, and unlike those of any other. (2003: 138) If Foucault claims that friendship is the development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends, it is because he defines homosexuality is an always particular task of becoming, or invention, rather than the discoverable truth of an identifiable sexuality (Foucault, 1997: 136). The task of inventing always particular relations does not necessarily invalidate existing institutional forms of social relationality, but it cannot but interrupt or short-circuit their assumed coherence and plenitude:
Institutional forms cant validate these relations with multiple intensities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and changing

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

forms. These relations short-circuit it and introduce love where theres supposed to be only law, rule, habit. (Foucault, 1997: 137)

As Rancire argues with regard to the two modes of distribution of the sensible, politics and the police, the effect of these new forms of relationality lies in demonstrating the inclusion of a lack, the excluded, within the institutional rule of law and habit. Once again, this logic of a wrong as a process of becoming (or subjectification) can be transposed back into Rancires writing on fraternal community and the community of equals: the paradox of democracy entails that the inequality in any fraternal community always presupposes the (impossible?) community of equals, which it excludes. Thus, if the community of fraternity always works to disguise the division of the equal-unequal that it institutes, the community of equals must always remain an insubstantial community of individuals, engaged in an ongoing creation of equality (1995: 80, emphasis added), which is to say, the virtuality of new forms of social relationality. As we have already seen, Derridas strategic figuration of a virile homosexuality paradoxically works to reinforce[25] the hegemonic exclusion of female and queer friendship: first, the place of women in this history is defined solely in negative terms of their effective absence or silence, without a sense that another tradition, language or history of female friendship might co-exist with the hegemonic one; and second, the exclusion of heterosexual friendship by a dominant virile homosexuality not only ignores the sexual ambivalence of certain hegemonic texts on friendship and democracy, but also effectively silences the historical-political precariousness and persecution of queer friendship cultures.[26] This is not to claim that Derrida, deconstruction, or even this way of conceiving the hegemonic role of friendship in the philosophical tradition is necessarily homophobic. It is rather to show that something is wrong with the central argument of Politics of Friendship, in which the exclusionary logic of a hegemonic fraternization brings about a wrong by attaching that figure of homosexuality, and the fate of a democracy to come along with it, to an insult. In contrast, for Rancire, democracy is invented as a polemical name that always interrupts, or muddles, any fraternal community insofar as that communal desire to forge equals through brotherhood always disavows those mongrels, the excluded, that bear the stamp of inequality (1995: 80). So we might modify Derridas problematic adherence to an exclusionary figure of homosexuality, not by simply inverting its terms (which would be a misunderstanding and worse) nor by cunningly transposing its terms (as in Byrne and McQuillans translation), but by allowing Rancires formulation of politics to open up the litigious torsion between these names: friend, brother, citizen, man, homosexual, and whomsoever other to come Each of these names might serve as the singular universal that would reaffirm and restate the equality of anyone and everyone, by contesting the lines of inclusion and exclusion of the police order. Political subjects exist in the interval between different identities, which is why there is never one subject of democracy but rather multiple forms of subjectivisation

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

in the interval between two identities (Rancire, 2007: 95, 96). It is in this way that Rancires twisted political anti-ontology operates by installing a logic that divides each class against itself in order to keep putting the universal into play. Richard Stamp teaches cultural studies at Bath Spa University. He is an editor of the online journal Film-Philosophy, and coeditor (with Paul Bowman) of The Truth of iek (Continuum, 2007), Reading Rancire (Continuum, forthcoming 2010) and Jacques Rancire: in disagreement, parallax 52 (2009). He has also published work on Maurice Blanchot in Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust (Rodopi, 2000) and Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers (Rodopi, 2001). Acknowledgements I would like to thank Michael O'Rourke and Sam Chambers for their great patience and encouraging feedback. My thanks also go to the two anonymous Borderlands readers whose advice and suggestions were invaluable. But above all, I know that without Karen nothing at all would get done. Notes
1. Both texts also had prior publications, albeit at different ends of the

previous decade: Foucaults interview, Friendship as a Way of Life, first appeared in an edition of the (then still monthly) magazine, Gai Pied, in 1981; whilst Derridas self-styled essay (1997: vii) drew upon his 1988-89 weekly seminar, Politics of Friendship. If this coincidence and non-coincidence of dates is merely a quirk of the temporal lag of republication and translation, which might itself complicate efforts to determine their contemporaneousness given that both texts are engaged precisely with questions of how to make an intervention into the contemporary.
2. Valerie Traub (2004) argues that Brays refusal to confine his

enquiry within the narrow equation of sexuality and the erotic might risk leaving open the field of ontological definition to those who would claim to know only too well what homo- (or hetero-) sexuality is. Consequently, her friendly criticisms of what she defines as a persistent analytic tension between eroticism and friendship (2004: 345) in Brays work, which installs a strategic ambiguity carried out in the name of ethics (2004: 349), are reminiscent of familiar complaints that Derrida (and deconstruction in general) indefinitely defers the most pressing questions (ontology, epistemology, politics, etc).
3. Foucaults absence from Brays book represents a missed

conjunction with methodological shifts in his work after The Will to Knowledge, particularly in his account of the relation between

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

sexuality and friendship in The Uses of Pleasure (see Foucault, 1986: 1-32). This situation is mirrored in Derridas own remark about Foucault in fact, the sole reference to Foucaults work therein at the very end of Politics of Friendship. In the context of a commentary on Blanchots Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, that philia remains strangely marginalised, not to say left in silence, in his [Foucaults] last works, at least those published to date (1997: 301). We might forgive Derridas error here, given the publication dates discussed previously (Foucaults Dits et crits are published the same year as Politiques de lamiti (1994)), but again we might ask: what of Lusage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi (both published in 1984)? The absence of any reference by Derrida and Bray to these texts is all the more perplexing given their respective aims of recovering an archaeology the ethics of friendship (Bray, 2003: 8), and tracing the genealogy of that essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality (Derrida, 1997: 279).
4. This question further implicates his own genealogical enquiry into

the friend as brother, of course, since the concept of genealogy itself presupposes the institution of heteronormative lineage and inheritance. Needless to say, this is a question to which Derrida is more than attentive.
5. It is for this reason that we need to take seriously his wish that this

book be read as a modest and belated contribution to the work of friends (and others) at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, which operated at the Ecole Normale Suprieure between 1980 and 1984, under the direction of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. (For the founding and closing documents of the Centre, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997: 105-47). The fact that the second (and final) publication from the Centre, Le retrait du politique (Galile, 1983), included Rancires essay, La representation de louvrier ou la classe introuvable (89-111), would thus add yet another direction to the present line of enquiry.) Oliver Marchart rightly identifies the Centre as the location for the most intense and influential re-elaboration so far [] of the difference between politics and the political, thus germinating the common concern with post-foundational political thought that link Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe with Badiou, or Lefort with Laclau and Mouffe, as all members of various clans of left Heideggerianism (2007: 61). And what of Rancire? (See note 22, below.)
6. In a long footnote on Batailles phrase, the community of those who

have nothing in common, Derrida routes the teleopoietic legacy of Nietzsche through these three thinkers, but remains reticent about the residual rhetoric of fraternization in their work: There is still perhaps some brotherhood in Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy, and I wonder, in the innermost recess of my admiring friendship, if it does not deserve a little loosening up, and if it should still guide the thinking of community, be it a community without community, or a brotherhood without brotherhood (1997: 48, n. 15).

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

7. Note Derridas evident delight in the following example: In this

Christian space [] one remembers the letter of the great and good Saint Francis of Assisi, who could not help but write to a nun: Dear Brother Jacqueline (1997: 156).
8. The privileging of Montaignes text also lies, as Martin McQuillan

(2005) points out, in the fact that Derrida explicitly situates the political figuration of friendship in a specifically French idiom and republican rhetoric of fraternalism, to which Montaignes essay provides such a paradoxical bequest.
9. Marc Schachter (2008) demonstrates that Derridas omission of this

clause is facilitated by standard modern editorial revision of this essay, in which a paragraph break is introduced after womans exclusion from friendship. It is possible to return to the first edition of the Essais (1580), as Schachter has done, to show that the hegemonic exclusion of heterosexuality and pederasty were originally articulated by Montaigne: But no example of this sex has yet been able to achieve it, and that other Grecian license is justly abhorred by our mores (Montaigne, 1580, cited Schachter, 2008: 154). Only in subsequent revisions for the 1588 edition did Montaigne introduce punctuation to turn these two clauses into two sentences, and add the authority of the Ancient schools of philosophy about womans exclusion from it. However, the paragraph break (as replicated by Derrida) is a wholly modern invention, traceable to the eighteenth-century editors of the Essais (Schachter, 2008: 154-6). Such philological scrutiny is itself influenced by Derridas own micrological readings, but what interests me here is not to read Montaignes essay as some kind of confession that his perfect friendship with La Botie might have been still more perfect had it also been erotic; nor the attendant problematic overlay of friendship, eroticism, pederasty and homosexuality at work here. Instead, what I would extract from this scene of philological forensics is the way in which the historical instability of this text exposes the apparently unacknowledged political capacities of Derridas choice of words in designating the hegemony of a philosophical canon.
10. Steven Garlick raises an analogous problem when he notes that

although Derrida rightly highlights the hegemonic masculinity of a philosophical tradition of friendship, he does not account the extent to which the hegemonic notion of friendship has become effectively feminized as early as the beginning of the twentieth century: We need to ask (as Derrida does not) how the current feminine condition of friendship articulates with the overwhelmingly masculine tradition. Does this not leave men (in particular) in something like an impossible, or impassable, position? (2002: 563, 571) Not unproblematic itself, Garlicks argument has the virtue of begging the question: what is meant by feminised or masculine (or even virile) friendship, and the difference between them? A question to which no one, Derrida and his critics included, seems to have an adequate answer.

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

11. As Schachter observes: Derrida would have written a different

book had this observation been his starting point rather than one of his conclusions (2008: 164). Indeed, whilst Bray appears not to have detected this absence in his own praise for this books uncertain ethics, this is not the case in Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillans (1999) transposition of Derridas phrase in a deft reading of the fraternal figure of democracy through Disneys Hugo adaptation, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wise & Trousdale, 1996, USA). Resetting the context to post-1989 (Disneyland) Europe, Byrne and McQuillan revise Derridas formulation of a virile hegemonic tradition of the fraternal-political by adding another exclusion: Democracy as friendship for Disney is always structured as male, even when it is female, and as a homo-virile virtue excludes the possibility of a homosexual relation (1999: 150). In this way, the double exclusion of female and heterosexual friendships can be rewritten as the double exclusion of the feminine and the homosexual, brought about by the inscription of a homo-fraternal (homosexual-homophobic) and phallogocentric schema (McQuillan & Byrne, 1999: 149-50). This is Derrida rewritten through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks (1985) crucial paradigm of the continuum of homosocial and homosexual desire. But their rewriting of the matrix of homo and hetero here begs the question: why did Derrida ascribe this decisively hegemonic exclusion to a figure of virile homo-sexuality, when the erotic and sexuality are effectively written out of the text (as we saw with the decisive quotation from Montaigne) in a way more consistent with the foreclosed operation of homo-sociality? For Schachter, this is a strategic decision on Derridas part: to have acknowledged the intermittent presence of women in this tradition, and likewise to register the problematic presence of eroticism and pederasty instead of sublimating it within a figure of virile homosexuality, would have opened a fissure in his own comments on the subject (2008: 164). However, I am not so certain that fissure (or interruption), decision or choice are such straightforward operations (see note 14, below). See, in particular, Fadermans comparative analysis of Montaignes essay and eighteenth century womens epistolary friendships (1980: 65-73). Foucault references her book in both late interviews (1997; 1997a).
12. 13. Joanna Zylinska makes a similar complaint when she states that

Derrida leaves all these questions in suspense, as if unable or unwilling to proceed any further. However, she also grants the strategic possibility of such suspension, as if such withholding of an answer may well be performing a political act by posing femininity as a question (2001: 99-100).
14. What kind of choice is this? I have in mind Derridas (1997; 2005)

expression of friendly non-critical concern with Nancys rhetoric of fraternity in The Experience of Freedom (1993: 72): What is the political impact and range of this chosen word, among other possible words, even and especially if the choice is not deliberate? (1997:

19

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

305, emphasis added). This analysis of a non-deliberate choice is still more sustained in Rogues: So why retain the word fraternity rather than another? What does fraternity still name when it has no relationship to birth, death, the father, the mother, sons and brothers? (2005: 58, 167). As Derrida recognises, Nancys defence might very well be that he is simply recounting and analysing a history of this received concept, without necessarily subscribing to it; its not me who is saying this, Nancy (or Derrida, or anyone) can always say (2005: 59). This is interesting. So I am simply asking about Derridas own choice of words in his microanalyses of politics of friendship, even and especially if the choice is not deliberate: why retain the word homosexuality rather than another?
15. Instead of fraternity, as we shall see, Rancire links the concept of

democracy to an anarchic equality of tort, or wrong, a configuration that points to his relevance for queer theoretical reflections on the politics of friendship insofar as it signifies a consonant movement of twisting or torsion of all social relationality, which short-circuits the natural logic of properties (1999: 13).
16. Interestingly, the rhetorical-political force of the insult is central to

Didier Eribons argument, in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (1999), that the experience of being the object of insult becomes the foundational structure of gay subjectivity: A gay man learns about his difference through the force of insult and its effects the principal one being the awareness of a fundamental asymmetry instantiated by that particular linguistic act (1999: 16). What is striking about Eribons reliance upon the performative force of the insult in Eribons argument is, as Tom Roach (2005a) astutely notes, its Derridean rather than Foucauldian resonance.
17. This echoing of Derridas avowedly Blanchotian syntax of X sans

X can be read as a respectful gesture, in the context of his tribute essay to Derrida, but also as a polemical one, in the context of Rancires disagreement with Derridas (qualified) messianism of a democracy to come. In an interview with Peter Hallward, Rancire deliberately distances his work from any relation to Blanchot or the uses of his work (2003: 208).
18. Democratic auto-immunity has two aporetic functions: first, the

right to unlimited auto-critique, even to the point of attacking democracy as such; and second, the power of democratic governments to curtail (or even suspend) democratic rights, in order to protect democracy from enemies who would exploit those rights (see Derrida, 2005: 28-41).
19. See, for example: Deconstruction is an institutional practice for

which the concept of the institution remains a problem (Derrida, 2002: 53).

20

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

20. I would like to add this particular formulation to Michael ORourkes

(2006: 24-5) impressively partial listing of queer tropes in Derridas work.


21. Rancire (1999: 28) credits Foucaults essay, Omnes and

Singulatim (2000), as the origin of his use of this term; see also Ross (2002: 22-5).
22. The political rests on the supplementary power of the people,

which both founds it and withdraws its foundations (Rancire, 2007: 91). Such a conception of the relation between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique) leads Marchart to cast Rancires approach (along with that of Badiou) as a simple reversal (2007: 119) of the post-foundational logic of the political difference (see note 9, above). He describes Rancires conception of politics as precisely what is antagonistic to policing: true politics as a process of equality effectuates a break with the order of policing, thus demonstrating the contingency of the latter (2007: 120). This all-too brief attempt to include Rancire within these clans of left Heideggerianism strikes me as rather unconvincing. Marchart tends to flatten the way in which Rancire interrelates politics and the police: politics might interrupt the order of policing, but it does not break with it.
23. In this sense, Rancire is far closer to Foucaults later texts than

May seems to notice; but he is also arguably brought closer to Derridas deconstructive attempts to open up always other possibilities. See, not just for example, his references to gay marriage and the couple in his dialogues with Elisabeth Roudinesco (2004: 345).
24. Not least because of the complex and specifically French historical

contexts that accompany them. The historical emergence of a specifically French emphasis on fraternity provides both Rancire and Derrida with common reference point in the work of Pierre Leroux, the nineteenth-century French utopian (or romantic) socialist. Whilst for Derrida, Lerouxs claim to universal fraternity is exemplary of a French republican legacy of exclusionary fraternization; for Rancire (1995) the significance of Lerouxs utopian socialism for modern communitarian thought lies in the paradox of the community of equals. In short: the moment when, mid nineteenth-century communists such as the Icarians, the community of property became the means by which equality might be realised, the only two models of community available via Lerouxs De lEgalit (1838) were the Classical/Greek and the Christian/monastic fraternities, which offered only two models: a community of masters (Athenian guardians) and a community of slaves (monastic orders).
25. In The Uses of Pleasure, Foucault explains that the male erotic

relation becomes the object of acute moral consideration in Greek culture, precisely because of the perception of a boys virility. The

21

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

disquiet or unease that he finds in the Greeks aesthetic morality, as it related to the boys body, derives from the fragile status of legitimate desire and the fugitive nature of its beauty. This is because the boy cannot be both loved and virile: He must not bear any physical mark of virility; but it must be present as a precocious form and a promise of bearing: to conduct oneself as the man that one not yet is (Foucault, 1984: 221). At this fearful moment of loss, friendship becomes both morally necessary and socially useful, with Xenophon advising that the best course of action lies in converting the bond of love (bound to disappear) into a relation of friendship, of philia (1984: 221). At the moment that erotic (and implicitly feminine) passivity co-exists with anything more than the promise of properly virile masculinity, the order of social division intercedes, in the form of friendship. Yet this is a very different conception of the durability and steadfastness of virile virtue of male friendship from that offered by Derrida, in one major respect: in Derrida, homosexuality is named as the virile force of exclusion of sexual difference from friendship; whilst according to Foucault, it seems that male friendship, for the Greeks, becomes virile at the moment it leaves behind homosexual eroticism. It should also be noted that Foucaults reading overlaps with Derridas emphasis on the hegemonic privileging of activity over passivity, of loving over being-loved in Politics of Friendship (even if Derrida seems to have forgotten its existence): This is one of the frequent themes of moral reflection on this kind of relation, [] it is also a precept, since it is not good to love a boy who has passed a certain age, no more than for him to allow himself to be loved [pour lui de se laisser aimer] (Foucault, 1984: 221).
26. Such a claim is itself limited because a more expansive reading

would have to return to those passages in Glas in which Derrida works through (and across) sexual difference and the brother-sister relation in Hegels reading of Antigone and his letters (1986: 148ff). Such a qualification is implicit, I think, in Schachters own reservations: I submit that the ongoing opening up to a democracy to come requires attention to the vexed place of women in the friendship tradition and an unpacking of the ambivalences of the homo that, at least for the Derrida of Politics of Friendship, remained occluded (2008: 18). Bibliography Bataille, G. (2001), Friendship, trans. H. Weslati, parallax, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 3-15. Bell, D. & Binnie, J. (2000), The Sexual Citizen, Cambridge: Polity. Berlant, L. & Warner, M. (1998), Sex in public, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter, pp. 547-66. Blanchot, M. (1988), The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Joris, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill.

22

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (1997), Friendship, trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bray, A. (2003), The Friend, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. ---. (2003a), A traditional rite for blessing friendship, in K. ODonnell & M. ORourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87-98. Budgeon, S. & Roseneil, S. (2002), Cultures of intimacy and care beyond the family: friendship and sexual/love relationships in the twenty-first century, CAVA, accessed 10 October 2009, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cava/papers/culturesofintimacy.htm Butler, J. (2002), Is kinship always already heterosexual? differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 14-44. Byrne, E. & McQuillan, M. (1999), Deconstructing Disney, London: Pluto. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy? London & New York: Verso. Deranty, J.-P. (2003), Rancire and contemporary political ontology, Theory & Event, vol. 6, no. 4. Derrida, J. (1983), Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference, Research in Phenomenology, no. 13, pp. 65-83. ---. (1986), Glas, trans. R. Rand, Lincoln, NE & London: University of Nebraska Press. ---. (1987), Geschlecht 2: Heidegger's hand, trans. J. P. Leavey Jr., in J. Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. ---. (1988), The politics of friendship, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 85, no. 11, Eighty-Fifth Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (November), pp. 632-44. ---. (1994), Politiques de lamiti, Paris: Galile. ---. (1997), Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins, London: Verso. ---. (2001), The Work of Mourning, ed. M. Naas & P.-A. Brault, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press.

23

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2002), Privileges: justificatory title and introductory remarks, Whos Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, trans. J. Plug, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-66. ---. (2004), For What Tomorrow A Dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ---. (2005), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P.-A. Brault & M. Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eribon, D. (1999), Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1979), The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin. ---. (1984), Histoire du sexualit, II. Lusage des plaisirs, Paris: Gallimard. ---. (1985), The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin. ---. (1986), The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin. ---. (1997), Friendship as a way of life, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, ed. P. Rabinow, London: Penguin, pp. 135-40. ---. (1997a), 'The social triumph of the sexual will', Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, ed. P. Rabinow, London: Penguin, pp. 157-62. ---. (2000), Omnes and Singulatim: toward a critique of political reason, Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 3, ed. J. D. Faubion, London: Penguin, pp. 298-325. Freccero, C. (1992), Cannibalism, homophobia, women, in P. Parker & M. Hendricks (eds), Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, New York: Routledge, pp. 7383. Garlick, S. (2002), The beauty of friendship: Foucault, masculinity and the work of art, Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 558-77. Greene, J. (2004), Introduction: the work of friendship, GLQ, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 319-37. Halperin, D. (2004), Foucault, gay marriage, and gay and lesbian studies in the United States. An interview with David Halperin,

24

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Sexuality Research & Social Policy, vol. 1, no. 3, September, pp. 327. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. & Nancy, J.-L. (1997), Retreating the Political, ed. and trans. S. Sparks et al, London & New York: Routledge. Leroux, P. (1848), De lEgalit, nouvelle edn, Boussac: Imprimerie de Pierre Leroux. McQuillan, M. (2005), Introduction: Three Colours, Deconstruction Reading Politics, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-21. Marchart, O. (2007), Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in the Thought of Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. May, T. (2008), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Montaigne, M. de (1998), Essais de Michel de Montaigne. Livre I, Paris: Imprimerie nationale. Mowitt, J. (2002), Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1991), The Inoperative Community, trans. and ed. P. Connor et al, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (1993), The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. McDonald, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ODonnell, K. & ORourke, M. (2003), In memoriam Alan Bray (1948-2001), in ODonnell & ORourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 82-6. ORourke, M. (2005), Queer theory's loss and the work of mourning Jacques Derrida, Rhizomes, no. 10, Spring, accessed 10 October 2009, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/orourke.htm ---. (2006), The roguish future of queer studies, SQS, vol. 1, no. 2, accessed 10 October 2009, http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sqs/sqs2_06/sqs22006orourke.pdf Rancire, J. (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. K. Ross, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ---. (1992), Politics, identification, and subjectivization, October, no. 61, Summer, pp. 58-64.

25

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (1995), On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso. ---. (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis, MN & London: University of Minnesota Press. ---. (2001), Ten theses on politics, trans. R. Bowlby & D. Panagia, Theory & Event, vol. 5, no. 3. ---. (2003), The thinking of dissensus: politics and aesthetics [unpublished paper], Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Rancire and the Political, conference organised by the Post-Structuralism and Radical Politics and Marxism specialist groups of the Political Studies Association of the UK, Goldsmiths College, London, 16-17 September. ---. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill, London & New York: Continuum. ---. (2004a), Who is the subject of the rights of man? South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2/3, Spring/Summer, pp. 297-310. ---. (2004b), The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. J. Drury, C. Oster & A. Parker, Durham & London: Duke University Press. ---. (2007), Does democracy mean something? in C. Douzinas (ed.), Adieu Derrida, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 84100. ---. (2008), Aesthetic separation, aesthetic community: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art, Art & Research, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer, accessed 10 October 2009, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/ranciere.html ---. (2009), A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancire, parallax 52, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 114-23. Rancire, J. & Hallward, P. (2003), Politics and aesthetics: an interview, Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2, August, pp. 191-211. Rancire, J. & Panagia, D. (2000), Dissenting words: a conversation with Jacques Rancire, Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 113-26. Rifkin, A. (2005), Il y a des mots quon souhaiterait ne plus lire, Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 96-109. Roach, T. (2005), Impersonal friends: Foucault, Guibert and an ethics of discomfort, New Formations, no. 55, pp. 54-72. ---. (2005a), Reflections on the gay question, Theory & Event, vol. 8, no. 3.

26

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Ross, K. (2002), May 68 and its Afterlives, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Schachter, M.C. (2008), Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France, London: Ashgate. Sedgwick, E.K. (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press. Thomson, A. (2005), Deconstruction and Democracy: Derridas Politics of Friendship, London & New York: Continuum. Traub, V. (2004), Friendships loss: Alan Brays making of history, GLQ, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 339-65. Tukhanen, M. (2006), Foucaults queer virtualities, Rhizomes, no. 11/12, Fall/Spring, accessed 10 October 2009, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/tuhkanen.html Webb, D. (2003), On friendship: Derrida, Foucault, and the practice of becoming, Research in Phenomenology, no. 33, pp. 119-40. Zylinska, J. (2001), On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

borderlands ejournal 2009

27

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Aberrant Pedagogies
JR, QT and Bruce Lee Paul Bowman
Cardiff University

This article proposes that central to queer studies (and radical, politicized scholarship more widely) is a critique focused on the cultural power of institutions pedagogical institutions in particular. It relates Jacques Rancires critique of such institutions to this wider radical political impulse, and relates this impulse itself to 1960s counterculture. It asks why Rancires critique stops before his own historical moment, a moment that can be tied to the 1960s; and it attempts to establish the discursive status of Rancirean and radical approaches such as queer theory by picking up where Rancire leaves off: the countercultural critique of pedagogical institutions, which spread through many realms of society, including martial arts. The key figure here is the anti-institutional and countercultural Bruce Lee. So, the article explores Bruce Lees iconoclastic, inter- and antidisciplinary approach to learning in relation to Rancires queer pedagogy in order to deepen our thinking about an emancipatory relation.

[W]hat if the field of Cultural Studies, far from actually threatening todays global relations of domination, fit their framework perfectly[?] ~ Slavoj iek (2001: 225-6)

Queer Lee Bruce Lee is hard. Bruce Lee is sexy. Bruce Lee is cool. Bruce Lee is not white. Bruce Lee is Asian. Bruce Lee kicks white, American, Russian, Japanese, Italian, imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, gangster and indeed anyone and everyones ass. There is something patriarchal here, in this phallic hero. There is also something

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

homoerotic. There is something heteronormative. There is also something postcolonial. This much we know. But is that it? Is that all there is? Within film studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and various ethnic identity studies, this appears to be about the long and short of it. These are the main sorts of lessons that are regularly learned from and about Bruce Lee: lessons about identification, lack and desire, about cultural identity, the role of fantasy, about the body as bearer of ideology, the ambivalence and polysemy of Bruce Lees texts, the homo at the heart of the hetero, and so on (Abbas, 1997; Brown, 1997; Chan, 2000; Eperjesi, 2004; Hunt, 2003; Marchetti, 2001; Morris, 2001; Teo, 2008). These are important lessons. But there is more. There are other lessons to be learned from Bruce Lee, no less queer than those readings which try to queer Bruce Lee, or those that fantasize through him, with him, in him, of him. These lessons are not necessarily or literally sexual, but they are wedded or welded to patriarchal, arboreal and phallogocentric structures. The ones I would like to draw attention to here relate to learning, to lessons that have been learned, and to the significance of the ways in which the lessons that are to be learned from Bruce Lee intersect unexpectedly with lessons in and about the project of cultural studies and its critics. In saying this, I am using the term cultural studies as short-hand, as an umbrella term to evoke the genealogically and ethico-politically entangled discursive formation of work in postcolonialism, history from below, gender studies, poststructuralism, queer theory and as is so easy to say so on. My decision to elevate cultural studies as the umbrella term to cover such a wide, complex and contradictory field will, I hope, neither be received as particularly controversial nor as especially unusual, as each of these overlapping fields always also folds into the others and has them folded into itself in more than one way.[1] However, what is less straightforward is the fact that, when I evoke this formations critics, I will not be referring to those whose work is clearly and decidedly (or decidably) outside the fields of queer-, postcolonial-, etc. cultural studies. Rather, I will be lining up the rather unexpected and unlikely (non)couple of Slavoj iek and Jacques Rancire. This is not because I see their work as being even remotely similar, in its own right. It is rather in order to show that, despite the immense differences between Rancire and a character like iek, they both occupy (equivalently but differently) a fraught border on the shores of this (or these) cultural studies that they both so clearly take their distances from. To experience both the beaches and the ports of these shores the points of convergence and play as well as of articulation, communication and control my primary contention is that we might do no better than taking seriously the question of the lessons to be learned from Bruce Lee. Reciprocally, to learn something more from Bruce Lee, and to pose a rather more tantalising challenge to cultural studies in all its forms than the ones we are familiar with, we might do no better than taking seriously the question of the lessons to be learned from Jacques Rancire.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

In the face of studying Bruce Lee, and despite the apparently trivial status of this long-departed Hong Kong American celebrity martial artist, it is of more than academic interest to note, right at the start, the extent to which China or Chineseness is inscribed (indeed, hegemonic) within the current theoretical and political discourses of cultural studies, post-structuralism, ethnicity and feminism. As Rey Chow makes plain, this is so in at least three ways. First, the Chinese other played a constitutive (haunting) role in the deconstructive critique of logocentrism and phonocentrism, in ways that far exceed the general turn East (in the search for alternatives) characteristic of French theory and much more besides of the 1960s and 1970s. Second, the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s actively admired and championed the Chinese encouragement of women to speak bitterness against patriarchy. And third, the enduring interest in the subaltern among politicized projects in the West has always found an exemplary example in the case of the Chinese peasantry. Indeed, says Chow, in these ways and more, modern China is, whether we know it or not, the foundation of contemporary cultural studies (Chow, 1993: 18). This sort of (unhomely) historicization of the interplay of forces constitutive of the contours, investments and impulses of contemporary cultural studies (and its critics) can hurt. This is especially so when we want to believe that our own position is unique, superior, untainted or uncompromised by the messy and often ugly intertwined forces that have produced the present conjuncture. But acknowledging the fraught genealogy of the present is surely an essential stage of any work a harrowing ordeal that may nevertheless provide an enlivening jolt. There are many ways to do this. If Chow recasts the investments and orientations of cultural studies, post-structuralism, and the politicised studies-suffix subjects in terms of what she calls an unacknowledged but constitutive Chinese prejudice, theorists such as iek, Bourdieu and others have often cast cultural studies as being at the forefront of the ideology of political correctness which itself is recast as the cutting edge ideology of neoliberalism. There are many versions of such challenges to cultural studies putative ethical and political values and virtues, of course, just as there are many different forms of response to and engagement with such questions within the various fields and forms of cultural studies. In fact, no footnote could suffice to indicate the breadth and depth of these debates. But we could look quickly at one provocative and pertinent contribution to it. Meaghan Morris essay, Learning from Bruce Lee: Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts Cinema (2001), is particularly apposite here because in it Morris examines the relationship between film and cultural criticism and the forces, discourses and impulses of PC or political correctness. Crucially, Morris concedes the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

disappointing links between contemporary film and cultural criticism and the much vilified and stereotyped PC (a link which boils down to moralism), but she seeks nevertheless to find a way to redeem both. She tries to do this by focusing on the theme of pedagogy. Before we get to pedagogy, it is helpful to note Morris primary argument:
PC is not primarily a code regulating expression but a spectators revolt. Aesthetically focused but social in resonance, PC is an act or a movement of criticism initiated by groups of people who develop shared responses to particular cultural conventions, and begin to form an audience in the marketing sense: by articulating a collective commentary on cinema, they announce themselves as an audience. And they vocally object to the quality of something which cinema provides. Understood this way, PC as a critical formation has less in common with the grim radicals of media bad dreams (real as dreams may be) than with those highly respectable consumer movements which have, through the very same media, powerfully influenced business and advertising practices in recent decades. (Morris, 2001: 181)

Of course, in affiliating aesthetic dissensus with consumer movements that are highly respectable, Morris opens the door for the iekian retort that such movements are therefore not political, precisely because they are both respectable and consumer. The iekian insistence on the internal dynamics of capitalism as the Real (and) backdrop or horizon against which any claim of the political is to be judged (iek, 2000) is a challenge that no matter how hyperbolical, (performatively) self-contradictory, and no matter how logically refutable it may be (Laclau, 2000, 2005) nevertheless haunts my own thinking here and elsewhere. For, whatever else may be said about iek, he nevertheless has a point. And it wont just go away. So, without attempting to exorcise the iekian spectre, but whilst refusing to be dominated by it, I will attempt to use it, along with the coordinates provided by Chow and Morris, to triangulate a point from which to craft a manoeuvre informed by, equivalent to but different from, those executed by the likes of Chow, Morris, iek and, ultimately, Rancire. This manoeuvre relates to rethinking pedagogy. The lesson of Bruce Lee Meaghan Morris tries to look at Bruce Lee otherwise by focusing on the peculiar importance of pedagogy when it comes to grasping his significance. She points out the enduring centrality of pedagogy in martial arts films and the often overlooked importance of Bruce Lee as a teacher. It is crucial to approach Bruce Lee in terms of pedagogy, argues Morris, because the overwhelming concern with the body in recent cultural criticism can obscure this aspect of (Western) Bruce Lee worship and narrow unduly our approach to action cinema in general. So, Morris draws attention to the significant persistence of the training film in Hollywood cinema, and to the ways that training films give us lessons in using aesthetics understood as a practical discipline the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

sense of beauty to overcome personal and social adversity (Morris, 2001: 175-6).[2] Of course, we should note, straight away, that the kind of looking otherwise (or reading differently) that Morris undertakes is not deliberately provocative or controversial. Morris does not seek to offer the kind of reading which would boil the blood of conservatives or antiPC militants of common sense. In fact, although Morris does suggest that the technique of queering is [the] liveliest recent manifestation of a key interpretative drive in film studies, one that can be creative, she actually suggests that queering can also be blinkered and narrow in its relentlessness (2001: 184). So, although Morris wants to read Bruce Lee otherwise, she does not want to rush headlong into acts of queering or othering. At least not directly. Rather, Morris operates in terms of the insight that there can only be so many times that looking at Bruce Lee otherwise, by for instance revealing the homo at the disavowed heart of the hetero, can be regarded as news.[3] Which is why what Morris seeks to learn from Bruce Lee does not relate to the erotic and does not simply relate to issues of patriarchy, phallocentricity, heteronormativity, masculinity, or suchlike. Instead, she chooses to learn something else from Bruce Lee. This is a lesson about learning from cinematic images or rather about realising, becoming aware, being transformed by experiencing through cinematic images, and the overall complexity of the experience of films. Amid a discussion of the aesthetics (including, of course, the camp and kitsch dimensions) of many American martial arts films, Morris turns her attention to a scene within the film, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993). This film is, in Morriss words, a sanitized as well as hagiographic interpretation of Bruce Lees life as authorized by his widow, Linda Lee-Cadwell (Morris, 2001: 180). In it, Bruce (played by Jason Scott Lee) and Linda (Lauren Holly), on one of their first dates, end up in a cinema watching Breakfast at Tiffanys. It is significant indeed foregrounded and emphasized by the film that they have ended up in the cinema because they have been refused entry to a restaurant for obviously racist reasons. So, they find themselves in a laff fest revival. In the cinema, we watch them watching the spectacle of Mickey Rooney bumbling around as the slapstick Japanese character, Mr Yunioshi. Morris deftly points out the way that the camera shows us Bruce and Linda watching the same scene differently: Linda initially laughs along with the rest of the audience, until she notices Bruces distinct lack of enjoyment. Then the camera shows us a very significant moment of realisation. According to Morris, this scene actually shows a viewing subject enter into another subjectivity (181) through the act of viewing and, specifically, through viewing an other(s) way of viewing and being viewed. As she sees it:
when Linda suddenly connects the Chinese man beside her, the Oriental on screen, and her pleasure in both, she makes an imaginative leap outside the logic of her own familiar dreams which

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

allows her to experience something new. Putting herself in anothers position, she finds that her companion lives a connection between his body and the grotesque parody on screen one fictionally modeled on a fleeting moment of cinema but relayed and sustained in its everyday life by the gazes (and the voices) of other people. (Morris, 2001: 181)

In the terms of Jacques Rancire, we could conceptualise this scene as a moment of aesthetic dissensus, in which the experience by Linda and (perhaps) Bruce amounts to a moment of subjectivization, or, in Rancires words, the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other through a process of disidentification or declassification (Rancire, 1992: 60, 61). Thus, at this point, Linda could be regarded as becoming an outsider or, more, an in-between (61) by way of what Rancire calls an impossible identification (61). It is impossible because Linda is not that which she has just realized; or, in Rancires terms, Lindas is an identification that cannot be embodied by her, herself. As Rancire theorizes it, political subjectivization always involves an impossible identification, an identification that cannot be embodied by he or she who utters it. It is rather, according to Rancire, a heterology, a logic of the other; it is never the simple assertion of an identity; it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy (62). Learning from pedagogy However, there is more to a Rancirean reading than providing slick lessons in identity formation or the production of new subjectivities that occupy new subject-positions. That is, there is a difference between Rancire and Morris here. This devolves on different notions of pedagogy, but it has a far wider significance. This can be seen if we use Rancire to focus on the way pedagogy itself organises Morris vision when she is learning from Bruce Lee. For, although what Morris would rightly have us learn is a lesson about the dubious ethics and orientations of much film criticism itself, it is nevertheless the case that Morris still ultimately identifies with and prioritizes a certain classical pedagogical position. For, Morris will go on to propose that Linda returns to Breakfast at Tiffanys with the eyes and ears of a critic, or so I like to think; as a student, she is certainly able to enter into another subjectivity (181). But let us hesitate before making such a step ourselves; for, as Rancire (1991) has urged us to notice, an interpretive decision such as this also carries the connotation that becoming a critic amounts to maturing into a critic, or, in the case of Lindas moment of revelation, being re-born (satori-like) as an enlightened one. To identify such a moment of transformation, realisation or subjectivization (Rancire, 1992) with an already-instituted institutional category (The Critic) is, in Rancire (as in Barthes [1977]), to rob it of its emancipatory potential. Indeed, as Rancire sees it, this would be to participate in a logic whereby the social critic gains by showing democracy losing (Ross,

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

1987: xi) by claiming that the insight, the knowledge, or the wisdom is always and already the property of the critic. As Kristin Ross puts this:
if science belongs to the intellectuals the masters and the critique of bourgeois content is reserved for those who already know, then there is only one way for students to criticize their masters knowledge ... and that is to become their peers. (Ross, 1987: xvii)

Thus, even though Morris figures spec(tac)ular cultural relations as potentially politicizing, her own fundamental identification remains with the position of the pedagogue. In this, Morris exemplifies the postGramscian tendency in cultural studies to regard culture as pedagogy (Giroux, 2002) and, accordingly, to seek to find and to teach (about) the best that has been thought, said and broadcast. This is the improving, educating rationale that Jacques Rancire identifies in so many philosophers, critics, theorists and pedagogues, including, most famously, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu. To Rancires list of philosophers and their poor, we might add perhaps all of the key figures of cultural studies and cultural theory. It is not their motives but their orientations that Rancire challenges. This is because, as is well known, the lesson of Rancire is the lesson of equality. Here, the lesson to be learned from Rancire is that pedagogy premised on imparting knowledge to the ignorant stultifies. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), Rancire devotes himself to a consideration of the fact that everyone demonstrably, verifiably can and very often does learn without being taught in the mode of what Rancire calls explication (the intellectual intervention of an explicator). Classical pedagogy Rancire calls the explicative order, and his deconstructive contention is that it is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such (Rancire, 1991: 6); and hence his contention is that:
Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid. (1991: 6)

This, Rancire calls the double inaugural gesture (6) of the explicative order the thinking which divides the world into two, or divides intelligence into two, by proceeding as if there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one:
The former registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the young child and the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle of explication. (1991: 7)

Following Joseph Jacotot, the Eighteenth Century educator that Rancire reads in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, he concludes that this the dominant conception of education is to be regarded as the principle of enforced stultification (Rancire, 1991: 7). The logic of self-legitimation of the explicator runs: Until [the teacher] came along, the child has been groping blindly, figuring out riddles. Now he will learn (7). Proceeding by figuring out riddles, says Rancire, is overwhelmingly regarded by explicators as proceeding incorrectly, outrageously: moving along in a manner one shouldnt move along the way children move, blindly, figuring out riddles (10) is disparaged. Rather than enforcing as a matter of routine or principle this disciplined hierarchy as if it were the necessary character of all learning, Rancire advocates Jacotots postulate that the universal process of learning is something shared alike by the child, the learned man, and the revolutionary (12). Its key coordinates are called chance, experiment, equality and will. The method of equality was above all a method of the will, writes Rancire: One could learn by oneself and without a master explicator when one wanted to, propelled by ones own desire or by the constraint of the situation (12). Without a master explicator, concludes Jacotot; but not without a master per se (12-13). In other words, the role of the master is not that of a subject supposed to know, to be followed, listened to, obeyed, as ignorant to learned. Rather, the master is the one who issues a command. Solve this. Work out that. The masters intelligence is by the by. The notion of the master, and specifically the will of the master, is separated from that of intelligence. Realising this, says Rancire, allows the jumbled categories of the pedagogical act to be sorted out, and explicative stultification to be precisely defined. Thus, concludes Rancire/Jacotot: there is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. For although a person and a child in particular may need a master when his own will is not strong enough to set him on track and keep him there that subjection is purely one of will over will. And this it deserves to be said is no bad thing. However:
It becomes stultification when it links an intelligence to another intelligence. In the act of teaching and learning there are two wills and two intelligences. We will call their coincidence stultification.... We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will emancipation. (13)

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Rancire is unequivocal about the significance of this: This pedagogical experiment created a rupture with the logic of all pedagogies. For, Jacotots experiment simply telling students to learn both the French and the Flemish pages of the bilingual book Tlmaque, an experiment which led the students to learn excellent French very quickly did not involve the transmission of the masters knowledge to the students. In fact, Jacotot had transmitted nothing:
He had not used any method. The method was purely the students. And whether one learns French more quickly or less quickly is in itself a matter of little consequence. The comparison was no longer between methods but rather between two uses of intelligence and two conceptions of the intellectual order. The rapid route was not that of a better pedagogy. It was another route, that of liberty. (14)

The rest of The Ignorant Schoolmaster charts the ensuing misappropriations and misadventures of Jacotots realisation once it was picked up, turned over, assessed, implemented or instituted by others, all over the world. However, it seems noteworthy that Rancires book stops before the moment of the post-1968 institutional reformation which in some sense inspired Rancires critique in the first place. So, the question is: what became of Jacotots universal learning? And what is Rancires own relation to, investment in, or status vis--vis the post-1968 field that he critiques and intervenes into by insinuating the subversive lesson of Jacotot? Forget Jacotot In September 1971, Black Belt Magazine published an article called Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate. It was written by Bruce Lee. This article is arguably epochal, in many ways. It is important to note that Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate is one of the few definitive written statements given by Bruce Lee on the subject of what he wanted to teach namely a revolutionary approach to martial arts that he called Jeet Kune Do.[4] In Bruce Lees words: Literally, jeet means to intercept or to stop; kune is the fist; and do is the way, the ultimate reality; so, Jeet Kune Do means the way of the intercepting fist (1971: 24). Yet, Lee insists: Do remember, however, that Jeet Kune Do is merely a convenient name. I am not interested with [sic] the term itself; I am interested in its effect of liberation when JKD is used as a mirror for self-examination (24). Thus, rather than a style, a method or a syllabus, Bruce Lees Jeet Kune Do was originally an experimental ethos organised in terms of liberation. Given this, it seems pertinent to reflect on the fact that many academics who have sought to study Bruce Lee, to read Bruce Lee, and to learn from Bruce Lee in film studies, gender studies, postcolonialism, and so on have overwhelmingly overlooked the fact that Bruce Lee himself actually sought to teach at all. Many have overlooked that he sought to teach and what he sought to teach. Yet, when we enquire into the nature of the lesson that Bruce Lee sought

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

to teach the final signified that he intended to impress upon the world we encounter a lesson that is uncannily similar to the lesson of Rancires Jacotot: you can learn without being taught and you can teach what you do not know. The term Jeet Kune Do had been coined by Lee to evoke the guiding principles (Do) or ultimate aim in fighting quick and decisive victory. Lee believed these to be encapsulated in anything that could simultaneously intercept/interrupt an attack (Jeet) and deliver a simultaneous hit of ones own (Kune). According to his senior student, Dan Inosanto, Lee was particularly enamoured of Western fencings stop-hit technique the act of blocking and striking simultaneously in one movement hence, the name (and indeed, the look and feel of) Jeet Kune Do. But Lee was at pains to emphasize that in itself JKD was not a style: Unlike a classical martial art, there is no series of rules or classification of technique that constitutes a distinct Jeet Kune Do method of fighting (24), he insisted.[5] The point, instead, writes Lee, is that through instinctive body feeling, each of us knows our own most efficient and dynamic manner of achieving effective leverage, balance in motion, economical use of energy, etc (24). Thus, we all already know how to move, how to fight. At the same time, learning formal patterns, techniques or forms touch[es] only the fringe of genuine understanding. Formal training in martial arts actually stultifies the learner. According to Lee, the core of understanding lies in the individual mind, and until that is touched, everything is uncertain and superficial. He claims: Truth cannot be perceived until we come to fully understand ourselves and our potentials. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge:
At this point you may ask, How do I gain this knowledge? That you will have to find out all by yourself. You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help. For the same reason I cannot tell you how to gain freedom, since freedom exists within you. I cannot tell you what not to do, I cannot tell you what you should do, since that would be confining you to a particular approach. Formulas can only inhibit freedom, externally dictated prescriptions only squelch creativity and assure mediocrity. Bear in mind that the freedom that accrues from self-knowledge cannot be acquired through strict adherence to a formula; we do not suddenly become free, we simply are free. Learning is definitely not mere imitation, nor is it the ability to accumulate and regurgitate fixed knowledge. Learning is a constant process of discovery, a process without end. In JKD we begin not by accumulation but by discovering the cause of our ignorance, a discovery that involves a shedding process. Unfortunately, most students in the martial arts are conformists. Instead of learning to depend on themselves for expression, they blindly follow their instructors, no longer feeling alone, and finding security in mass imitation. The product of this imitation is a dependent mind. Independent inquiry, which is essential to genuine

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

understanding, is sacrificed. Look around the martial arts and witness the assortment of routine performers, trick artists, desensitized robots, glorifiers of the past and so on all followers or exponents of organized despair. (Lee, 1971: 24)

In place of formal pedagogical structures, Bruce Lee who had no formal qualification in any martial art but who could demonstrate mastery in many advocated autodidacticism, self-help, constant innovation, testing, exploration, experiment and dynamic verification. In other words, Bruce Lee was quite radical or revolutionary. Indeed, suggests Daniele Bolelli: At a time when no forms of established authority went unchallenged, it seems only natural that even the field of martial arts was destined to experience some drastic change (Bolelli, 2003: 182-3). After characterising Bruce Lees time the late 1960s as an era of all things anti-authoritarian, Bolelli concludes that:
The philosophy of JKD can therefore be seen as the gift (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the alchemical mixing of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, the antiauthoritarian culture of the 1960s, and Bruce Lees own personality. Regardless of whether we agree with Lees approach or not, his example remains as an open invitation to do one of the healthiest things that anyone, martial artist or not, can do; questioning ones own beliefs. (183)

The only help is self-help. Push yourself. Know thyself. You already know yourself, in yourself. Subject all institutions to a deconstructive questioning. Dont follow leaders. Question all beliefs. Experiment with interdisciplinarity in the name of antidisciplinarity. This is the lesson of Bruce Lee. Of course, it is often said that a vague (but violent) ethnic Chinese cultural nationalism comes out in Lees films, whilst this radical egalitarian/universalist individualism comes out in his martial arts philosophy and written texts. However, even in Lees early films (largely written and directed by others and following stock formulas) Lees nationalism always comes in response to nationalisticallyinflected aggression against innocent Chinese underdogs. Moreover, Lees later and increasingly self-controlled works (such as the incomplete Game of Death) all seek to emphasize themes of universalistic equality and individualistic emancipation. So it is clear that what subtends all of Lees texts is the egalitarian impulse that can be seen in Liberate Yourself. This article ends:
There is no standard in total combat, and expression must be free. This liberating truth is a reality only in so far as it is experienced and lived by the individual himself; it is a truth that transcends styles or disciplines. Remember, too, that Jeet Kune Do is merely a term, a label to be used as a boat to get one across; once across, it is to be discarded and not carried on ones back. These few paragraphs are, at best, a finger pointing to the moon. Please do not take the finger to be the moon or fix your gaze so intently on the finger as to miss all the beautiful sights of heaven.

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

After all, the usefulness of the finger is in pointing away from itself to the light which illumines finger and all. (24)

Lee was to use this finger pointing analogy again. It reoccurs at the start of Enter the Dragon (1973), during one of the establishing scenes. The opening scenes of the film are of course all about establishing an interpretive context, and what these opening scenes chiefly provide will undoubtedly have been many viewers first experience or inkling of the discipline and mysticism of the legendary Shaolin Temple and its mythical warrior monks. This mysticism is condensed in one of the very first scenes, in which Lee tutors a young monk, Lau. This scene runs like this:
Lee: Its Laus time. Braithwaite [surprised and somewhat puzzled]: Yes, of course Lee: Kick me. [Lau seems puzzled] Kick me. [Lau throws a sidekick] What was that? An exhibition? We need [pointing to his head] emotional content. Try again! [Lau kicks again] I said emotional content. Not anger! Now try again! With me! [Lau throws two more kicks, causing Lee to respond] Thats it! How did it feel to you? Lau: Let me think. Lee: [Slaps Laus head] Dont think! Feel! It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. [Slaps Laus head] Dont concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory. Do you understand? Lau: [smiles, nods, bows] Lee: [Slaps the back of Laus head] Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow. Thats it.

The behaviour of Lees character in this teacherly mode is not without precedent. According to Avital Ronell, Zen teachers often liberally strike students who give the wrong answers to Zen koans (riddles, essentially); an act which arguably has various pedagogical functions. The main function of the strike is to jolt the student into realization, awakening, or satori (Ronell, 2004: 62). In Ronells words:
The hit seals a sort of compliment conferred by the attentive master, who prods the physical body for the purpose of uninhibiting a scene of contemplation, new and unanticipated. The shock is crucial to the experience of the koan: it stages the opening of thought exceeding itself in the jolt. (Ronell, 2004: 62)

The riddler But, in Liberate Yourself and in Enter the Dragon, what is the thought? In an essay on the pedagogy of Buddhism, a piece which

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

involves an analysis of some of the occurrences of the finger pointing to the moon riddle in Zen Buddhist writings, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes that whilst on the one hand Western education largely proceeds by assuming that every lesson can be divided into ever more bite-sized, ever more assimilable bits, on the other hand, the wisdom traditions of Buddhism principally assume that students have already surmounted a fairly high threshold of recognition (2003: 171-2). This is coupled with what she calls a radical doubt that a basic realization can be communicated at all (172). It is in this, she suggests, that the difference between Western and Buddhist pedagogy consists: Buddhist pedagogy does not teach; rather it attempts to establish to verify, to test recognition, or realisation. As Ronell formulates this, the koan, offered by the teacher the master is meant to open the pupil to the possibility of Saying. The master is responsible for initiating the call of such an opening. This call of such an opening, she continues, is often attained by the administration of a shock. This is why the master is frequently figured as beating, hitting, or slugging the pupil (Ronell, 2004: 62). Ronell jolts her consideration of Buddhist pedagogy back to questions of Western philosophy. Sedgwick, too, quickly returns the discussion back to Philosophy proper, so to speak.[6] However, Sedgwick is guided by a fascination with the Buddhas claim: I have not taught a single word during the forty-nine years of my Dharma preaching; and that, rather than teaching as such, the Buddha spoke many sutras, which should only be taken as the finger that points to the moon, not the moon itself (Sedgwick, 2003: 170). If such pedagogies can be taken seriously by both queer and other radical emancipatory theorists in the realms of philosophy, wisdom traditions and pedagogy proper, this still raises the question of the pedagogical status of Bruce Lees cinematic and journalistic nonteaching of exactly the same things (if it still makes sense to put it like this)? And what of the fact that the moment of Lees emergence was also the moment of high-hippy countercultural utopianism (the late 1960s and early 1970s)? What is to be made of the fact that this period is also the period that spurred so many critiques of institutions and particularly pedagogical institutions including those coming from deconstruction, cultural studies, feminism, postcolonialism, gender and sexuality studies, Bourdieu and (hence) Rancire? The finger It would be fair to say that Bruce Lees finger is pointing not just to the moon, but to problems of referentiality, indexicality and ontology, all of which at a certain time coalesced into one hell of a discursive convergence. As already noted, the dialectical synthesis of the apparently diametrically opposing lessons of Bruce Lee (the Chinese nationalism of the lesson of the early celluloid Lee versus the pragmatic, egalitarian inter- and antidisciplinary lesson of JKD) can be found in what might be called a certain spirit. This spirit subtends,

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

infuses and suffuses both lessons of Bruce Lee. This spirit is often too quickly represented as the spirit of Zen a putatively timeless, transcultural spirit. However, such a spirit surely can and should be historicized. According to Sedgwick:
In the United States it seems to have fallen to the twentieth-century popularizers of Zen, after World War II, to begin to articulate the centrality in many forms of Buddhism of [a] radical doubt that a basic realization can be communicated at all. After all, if Zen practice cannot promise to bring one methodically over the high learning threshold of satori [awakening, realization], it at least offers distinct practices, such as wrestling with koans, for dramatizing and perhaps exhausting the impossibility of methodical learning. Furthermore, the anti-scholasticism of Zen and the often anti-intellectualism of the counterculture merged in a durable consciousness of the limits of verbal articulation. The 1960s heyday of these explorations [] was one when a critique of school institutions became the vehicle of almost every form of utopian investment; if Buddhist explorations were peripheral to the student movement, they nonetheless both enabled and were enabled by it. (172)

Quite how one ultimately judges the value and lasting effects of such a movement remains to be decided. What is clear is the central place of Bruce Lee within this movement, as expression and agency, bringing many elements of the cultural and political margins right to the centre of global popular culture. Indeed, Bruce Lee can be regarded as providing what Rancire calls the aesthetic dimension of the reconfiguration of the relationships between doing, seeing and saying that circumscribe the being-in-common [which] is inherent to every political or social movement (2000: 17). Of course, Rancire adds quickly, this aesthetic component of politics does not lead me to seek the political everywhere that there is a reconfiguration of perceptible attributes in general. I am far from believing that everything is political. Yet, he quickly adds: On the other hand, I believe its important to note that the political dimension of the arts can be seen first of all in the way that their forms materially propose the paradigms of the community (17). This is not to suggest that Bruce Lee was a herald and trailblazer of a PC utopia. However, it is, at least, to locate Bruce Lee firmly at the shifting centre of enduring intercultural and cross-ethnic representation. As Rey Chow sees it, this is:
a process in which the acceleration and intensification of contacts brought by technology and commerce entail an acceleration and intensification of stereotypes, stereotypes that, rather than simply being false or incorrect (and thus dismissable), have the potential of effecting changes in entire intellectual climates (Chow 2002: 63)

What is the mechanism and the political status of such changes? We have already seen one example of the way in which a viewer might learn from Bruce Lee, in Morris reading of Lindas experience

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

in the face of Bruces experience of Breakfast at Tiffanys. There are others. On the shores of aesthetic dissensus In his afterword to Rancires The Politics of Aesthetics, Slavoj iek claims:
when, three decades ago, Kung Fu films were popular (Bruce Lee, etc.), was it not obvious that we were dealing with a genuine working class ideology of youngsters whose only means of success was the disciplinary training of their only possession, their bodies? Spontaneity and the let it go attitude of indulging in excessive freedoms belong to those who have the means to afford it those who have nothing have only their discipline. The bad bodily discipline, if there is one, is not collective training, but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realization of the Selfs inner potentials no wonder that the obsession with ones body is an almost obligatory part of the passage of ex-Leftist radicals into the maturity of pragmatic politics: from Jane Fonda to Joschka Fischer, the period of latency between the two phases was marked by the focus on ones own body. (iek, 2004: 78-9)

In other words, for iek, if the emergence of the image was a pole of subjectivating identification, the future of the image was ideological phantasy. So, as many thinkers have noted,[7] ieks point is that images, moments, events, become (to use an overburdened and deeply problematic word) co-opted ideologically recuperated: domesticated, channelled, moved into a place. However, for Rancire, as we have seen, subjectivization (in contradistinction to interpellation) involves an identification that cannot be embodied not the simple assertion of an identity but always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy. Thus, we might say that where iek (in a way that is not all that different from Althusser) would see imaginary and symbolic identification as placing us in a pre-given ideological place, Rancire prompts us to see identification as a disidentification that displaces us into a political place. This is a place of dissensus. In our example, the relation of Linda to Bruce and to her community that is constituted by the dissonance of her viewing awakening (or satori) arguably amounts to what Rancire calls the aesthetic dimension of the reconfiguration of the relationships between doing, seeing and saying that circumscribe the being-in-common [which] is inherent to every political or social movement (Rancire, 2000: 17) and now we might add, every emancipatory pedagogical relation, whether that be in relation to the book, the magazine or the screen. Paul Bowman is author of Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), and Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies (2007). He is co-editor of Jacques Rancire: In Disagreement (Parallax, 2009) Reading Rancire (2010) and The

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Truth of iek (2007), as well as editor of Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003) and The Rey Chow Reader (2010). Notes 1. For an extended discussion of all of these points and others, see my book Theorizing Bruce Lee (Bowman, 2009). 2. Bruce Lee has long been recognised as a muse for postmodern self-construction: Morris clarifies this by discussing his role in the camp US martial arts film, No Retreat, No Surrender, in which the ghost of Lee comes back to enable the teen hero to reconstruct himself to vanquish his foes. 3. In fact, the crux of Morriss entire article in this regard is that although she sees the grain of truth in Robert Hughes caricatural comment that the world changes more widely, deeply, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickenss portrayal of Little Nell (184); on the other hand, Morris believes that there has in fact been a wide, deep, thrilling change in the world which Robert Hughes has missed namely, that fretting over phallocentricity is now a popular occupation (184). We may or may not accept Morris contention that fretting over phallocentricity is now a popular occupation. (Personally, I do not, although I think that in the mid to late 1990s perhaps it looked like it was about to become more of a popular occupation; and maybe it did briefly become slightly more common than it had been, at least journalistically.) 4. For, since his death, Lees name has been attached to the wholesale and indiscriminate posthumous publication of selections from his notebooks, college essays, journals and jotters, and these include many unattributed but readily traceable quotations from other thinkers all of which ultimately makes Bruce Lee seem to be a barefaced plagiarist as if he himself made the decision to publish his words in that form, after he died. But Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate was signed and signed off by Bruce Lee. It is his manifesto for Jeet Kune Do. 5. He continues: JKD is not a form of special conditioning with its own rigid philosophy. It looks at combat not from a single angle, but from all possible angles. Thus, There are no prearranged sets or kata in the teaching of JKD, nor are they necessary (1971: 24). 6. Sedgwick chases the interpretation of the finger-moon riddle through the archives of Zen Buddhist writings; for the implication of the finger/moon image is that pointing may invite less misunderstanding than speech, but that even its non-linguistic concreteness cannot shield it from the slippery problems that surround reference (2003: 170). As she concludes: Perhaps the most distinctive way Mahayana Buddhism has tried to negotiate the finger

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

pointing at the moon issue is through the ostentive language of thusness or suchness (170). However, ostention, indexicality, acts of reference, and suchlike, produce a resonant double movement (171), which Sedgwick prefers to approach through the terms and poetics of Buddhism itself. This preference allows her to propose that finally, in the view of thusness, even the distinction between finger and moon dissolves, and with it perhaps the immemorial injunction against confusing them: As a contemporary Zen abbot notes, The finger pointing to the moon is the moon, and the moon is the finger. . . they realize each other (). A koan commentary elaborates: When the monk asked about the meaning of the moon, the master [Fa Yen] answered to point at; when someone else asked about the meaning of to point at the master replied the moon: Why was it so? The deepest reasoning, probably, was in the Enlightened mind of the Chan master, where there was no distinction between what the ordinary mind called to point at and the moon: To him, the relation between the two was similar to the relation of an ocean to its waves (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003: 171). 7. See, for example, the discussion of this in Brown (1997). I refer the reader to Brown in particular for two reasons: the first is because Browns discussion of Stuart Halls trailblazing analysis of co-optation or ideological rearticulation refers and relates directly to martial arts culture; the second is because Browns analysis of co-optation is considerably more nuanced and sophisticated than most others. Bibliography Abbas, A. (1997), Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, R. (1977), Image Music Text, London: Fontana. Bolelli, D. (2003), On the Warriors Path: Philosophy, Fighting, and Martial Arts Mythology, Berkeley, Ca.: Blue Snake Books. Bowman, P. (2009), Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film Fantasy Fighting Philosophy, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Brown, B. (1997), Global bodies/postnationalities: Charles Johnsons consumer culture, Representations, no. 58, Spring, pp. 24-48. Chan, J.W. (2000), Bruce Lees fictional models of masculinity, Men and Masculinities, vol. 2, no. 4, April, pp. 371-87. Chan, S. (2000), The construction and export of culture as artefact: the case of Japanese martial arts, Body & Society, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 6974.

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Chow, R. (1993), Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. ---. (2002), The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Eperjesi, J.R. (2004), Crouching tiger, hidden dragon: Kung Fu diplomacy and the dream of cultural china, Asian Studies Review, vol. 28, pp. 25-39. Giroux, H.A. (2002), Breaking into the Movies, London: Blackwell. Hunt, L. (2003), Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger, London: Wallflower. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham & London: Duke. Laclau, E. (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso. ---. (2005), On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Lee, B. (1971), Liberate yourself from classical Karate, Black Belt Magazine, vol. 9, no. 9, September, p. 24, Rainbow Publications. Marchetti, G. (2001), Jackie Chan and the black connection, in M. Tinkcom and A. Villarejo (eds), Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Miller, D. (2000), The Tao of Bruce Lee, London: Vintage. Morris, M. (2001), Learning from Bruce Lee, in M. Tinkcom and A. Villarejo (eds), Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 171-84. Rancire, J. (1991) [1987], The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. K. Ross, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press. ---. (1992), Politics, identification, and subjectivization, October, vol. 61, Special Issue: The Identity in Question, Summer, pp. 58-64. ---. (2000), Jacques Rancire: literature, politics, aesthetics: approaches to democratic disagreement: interviewed by Solange Gunoun and James H. Kavanagh, Substance, no. 92, pp. 3-24. ---. (2006), Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge, Parrhesia, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-12. Universality:

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Ronell, A. (2004), Koan practice or taking down the test, parallax, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 5871. Ross, K. (1991) [1987], Translators introduction, in J. Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Teo, S. (2008), Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimension, London: British Film Institute. iek, S. (2001), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Interventions in The (Mis)use of a Notion, London: Verso. Five

---. (2004), The lesson of Rancire, Afterword, in J. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum. Filmography Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), dir. Rob Cohen. Enter the Dragon (1973), dir. Robert Clouse. G.I. Jane (1997), dir. Ridley Scott. Game of Death (1978) [1973], dir. Bruce Lee. No Retreat, No Surrender (1986), dir. Corey Yuen. Breakfast at Tiffanys (1961), dir. Blake Edwards. Rocky (1976), dir. John G. Avildsen.

borderlands ejournal 2009

19

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Aesthetic Revolution, the Staging of (Homosexual) Equality and Contemporary Art

Roger Cook
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London

This paper discusses the aesthetic staging of same-sex equality in contemporary art in relation to Jacques Rancires engagement with the fields of contemporary art, aesthetics and art history, and the wrong of domination. It uses Rancires ideas of disagreement and disidentification to deal with the problematic categorization of samesex identification. Rancire shows that art viewed from within the contemporary aesthetic regime must be made in the name of the anonym, the name of anyone and everyone. Rancire illuminates the staging of equality with regard to the egalitarian aesthetics of photography, the political disturbance of the uncanny, and the contradictory torsion between the autonomy of art and the heteronomy of life. The paradox of the aesthetic revolution is that art is radically political not according to the ways it conveys messages concerning issues or identities, but as it frames an indifferent convivium: the liberty and equality of a common aesthetic.

Aesthetics and the practice of equality Marking a growing art world interest in the work of Jacques Rancire, in March 2007, one of the worlds leading contemporary art magazines devoted a number of pages to his work. One contributor speculated that one reason for this interest might be that the paradox intentionally lodged at its core reflected contemporary arts own contradictions (Funcke, 2007: 283). For some years Rancire has been making interventions in a field he describes as a dispositif of the aesthetic regime of art (Rancire, 2009b: 23). His most provocative and productive challenge has been his belief that the accepted teleology of avant-garde modernism is unhelpful when it comes to thinking about contemporary forms of art and the relation between

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

aesthetics and politics (Rancire, 2004a: 20). To try to clarify matters, he distinguishes three historically sequential, but presently co-existent regimes of art, broadly associated with the ancient, classical and modern periods which he names: the ethical, representational and aesthetic. In the ancient world art had no autonomy; images were questioned solely for their truth: for their effect on the ideology and ethos of individuals and the community. In the representational regime works of art are no longer subject to the laws of truth or the common rules of utility but belong to the sphere of imitation, though not so much as copies of reality but ways of imposing form on matter. As such, they are subject to norms: hierarchy of genres, adequation of expression to subject matter, correspondence between the arts, etc. The aesthetic regime overthrows this normativity and the relationship between form and matter on which it is based. Works of art are now defined as such, by belonging to a specific sensorium that stands out as an exception from the normal regime of the sensible (Rancire, 2002: 135). The revolution of the aesthetic regime emerged fully during the eighteenth century with its manifesto reflected in the writings of Schiller, Winckelmann and Kant. Schiller said that aesthetic experience bear[s] the edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the art of living [] aesthetic experience is effective inasmuch as it is the experience of that and. It grounds the autonomy of art, to the extent that it connects it to the hope of changing life (Rancire, 2002: 134). Understanding the politics of aesthetics involves understanding the ways that the autonomy of art is linked to the heteronomy of life:
The key formula of the aesthetic regime of art is that art is an autonomous form of life. This is a formula, however, that can be read in two different ways: autonomy can be stressed over life, or life over autonomyand these lines of interpretation can be opposed, or they can intersect.

Such oppositions and intersections can be traced as the interplay between three major scenarios. Art can become life. Life can become art. Art and life can exchange their properties. These three scenarios yield three configurations of the aesthetic, emplotted in three versions of temporality. According to the logic of the and, each is also a variant of the politics of aesthetics, or what we should rather call its metapoliticsthat is, its way of producing its own politics, proposing to politics rearrangements of its space, reconfiguring art as a political issue, or asserting itself as true politics (Rancire, 2002: 137). Thematized in the Kantian aesthetic, it is this new form of the distribution of the sensible that Schiller captured with the term play: an activity that has no other form than itself and no desire to dominate (Rancire, 2009: 30). Jean-Phillipe Deranty, one of Rancires most perspicacious French commentators writing in English asks: What does it mean to talk about equality regarding a practice, notably regarding the techniques and practices of art? And what is equality in experience, notably in aesthetic experience? (Deranty, 2007: 242). This complex question

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

engages head on, the tense relational twist between the autonomy of art and the heteronomy of forms of life that Rancire has discussed in his writings on aesthetics and politics, and most particularly and recently, in relation to photography (Rancire, 2004a, 2007a, 2009a). In writing thus, Deranty accords with declarations of the indissoluble inherence of the political in what Rancire calls the aesthetic partition and distribution of sensible experience (le partage du sensible) making visible what had been excluded from the perceptual field and audible what used to be inaudible (Rancire, 2003: 226). Rooted in the senses, art is inherently democratic; the immediacy of its aesthetic impact shared, felt and sensed organoleptically, before being understood; creating a platforma conviviumwhich celebrates equality (Panagia, 2007: 177; 2009: 140-45). As Rancire phrases it, art is:
political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a "sense of the common" embodied in a common sensorium. (Rancire, 2005: n.p.)

Equality Rancire insists is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances (Rancire, 1991: 138). Beneath social inequality and domination there lies a more foundational equality such as Jean Genet famously recounted, when, in a third class car, between Salon and SaintRambert-DAblon, he: Suddenly knew the painfulyes, painful feeling, that any man was exactlysorry, but I want to emphasize exactlyworth any other man (Genet, 2003: 91-101). For Rancire, it was the discovery of the writings of the nineteenth century Ignorant Schoolmaster Joseph Jacotot, that caused him to oppose emancipatory movements based on identity claims to those based on universality (Rancire, 1991; Deranty, 2003: 146), thus granting everyone the potential freedom to play or act out the equality of their intelligence (Rancire, 1999: 88). What might the art of subjects whose same sex subjectification has been inhibited by the world they inhabit have to show with regard to this? For Rancire, art performs the same task as politics, re-organizing accepted perceptions of reality (Deranty, 2003: 137). At the start of his description of A Personal Itinerary Rancire tells how he pursued two or three questions that are, at once, very simple and very complicated:
How do individuals get some idea in their heads that makes them either satisfied with their position or indignant about it? How are representations of self and otherwhich sustain hierarchy, consensus or conflictformed and transformed? (Rancire, 2003: xxv).

Such questions are fundamental to the pursuit of homosexual equality

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

and its staging. Rancire takes issue with the consensual nature of identity politics; for Rancire, the essence of politics is a dissensus (Rancire, 2001: 12). At its best, the contemporary art world is a model of Rancire's notion of democracy as disagreement (la msentente): the perpetual struggle by the part with no part (le part sans-part) for equality in the distribution or partition of the sensible (le partage du sensible). One might also say that the history of art is a model of Rancire's view that the subject comes about through disidentification. It is always by dis-identifying from what has gone before that contemporary art and artists emerge; and one might add, it is disidentification that asserts difference and demonstrates equality. As queer theorist Michael Warner understands it: the activity we undertake with each other is a kind of agonistic performance dependent on our interactions with others, bringing into being the space of our world, which is then the background against which we understand ourselves and our belonging. This world is not predesignated, but one disclosed in practice immanent to history unlike ideas of community or identity, which tend to be naturalized as stable or originary (Warner, 2000: n.p.). The policing of identity has been the curse of the history of the relatively recent invention of homosexuality, alongside heterosexuality (Foucault, 1990; Katz, 1995). Stabilizing identity is exactly what Rancire wishes to resist: which makes any discussion of sexuality in terms of identities inimical to his work; his investment is not in subjects but in processes of subjectivation and dis-identification. Ultimately, then, one might say that Rancires understanding of art and politics is a queer one, insofar as he believes that both must be radically disruptive of the policies of established order which keep everyone in place. Queering categorization In this paper I propose to examine the aesthetic regimes torsion between art and lifewith regard to the singularity of queer subjectivationin the creative practice of some contemporary artists who share a common investment in the democratic aesthetics of equality: a belief that aesthetic experience is open to all who open themselves to its disruptions, to the gaze of anyone at all (Rancire, 2009b: 13). Inequality is something that homosexuals share, part sans-part with other stigmatized minorities: a past history of subjugation, nonrecognition: non-celebration, hence the significance of the actively celebratory term 'queer.' This category originating as a term of insult was reclaimed by the same-sex community in the early 90s as a nongendered alternative term of 'affirmative difference' to 'gay,' 'lesbian' and 'homosexual' all terms which are subject to continuing discursive dissensus. Interestingly queer bears an etymological relation to the legal term for being wrongedtort through the Latin verb to twist (torquere). The translation of tort as wrong, though not incorrect, fails to disclose its legal dimension: that of the injustice of being wronged. However, tort is not simply a juridical category since a wrong does

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

not occur between determined parties and cannot be resolved by juridical procedures. A wrong can only be treated by modes of political subjectivization that reconfigure the field of experience (Panagia, 2006: 89; Rancire, 2004a: 93). As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out queer is a continuing moment, movement, motiverecurrent, eddying, troublant. The word "queer" itself means acrossit comes from the Indo-European roottwerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1994: 8). Its usage need not be confined to homosexuality:
'queer' can refer to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality are made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically (Sedgwick, 1994: 8)

Presupposition of equality does not have to be recognized consciously for it to be effective, in order for a democratics to occur. It is usually explicit, but it can be implicit (May, 2008a: 58). Under the rubric 'camouflage and provocation' the politics of equality in queer aesthetic practices can be divided into two main categories: implicit and explicit. The former operating in a coded manner, the latter declarative. In a recent interview Terence Davies respectfully differentiated himself from fellow film maker Derek Jarman on his categorization as gay film maker, declaring himself a film maker who happens to be gay; the distinction might seem trivial, but it is important. Categorizing essentializes: reducing art to a specific destiny, compromising its universality and therefore the equality of aesthetic experience. Rancire states that he is concerned with aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity (Rancire, 2004a: 9) as good a definition as any of what makes art vital and emancipatory. The question of how the political agency of art is embodied in the artwork, how its meaning (sens) is organoleptically present in the sensory in the materiality of its flesh and not just in the rhetoric outside of it, is central to the specificity of the aesthetic revolution, which is no doubt why Rancire entitled his book on the politics of writing The Flesh of Words (Rancire, 2004b: 13). This is especially important for art dealing with sexual politics and the political subjectivization of sexual minorities. As Rancires fellow philosopher states in his maxims of affirmationist art: Art cannot be the expression of a particularity, whether ethnic or egoistic. It is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to all (Badiou, 2006: 143). Non-imperial art Badiou says is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic: it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people (Badiou, 2003: n.p.). As Rancire writes: the name of any injured community that invokes its rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone and its universality is not enclosed in citizen or human being; it is involved in the "what follows," in its discursive and practical enactment

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

(Rancire, 1992: 60). No matter on whose behalf, the battle for equality is a battle for all, though scepticism regarding categorization in no way precludes artists investment in the history of their specific form of sexual culture through their work. In short, categorisations regarding same-sexuality are paradoxical, suspensive, paratactical, non-identical (Deranty, 2003: 146), which is why in the title of this paper I decided to put (homosexual) under erasure, suspended, bracketed and in inverted commas. Interestingly for Rancire, aesthetics is suspensive: a way of thinking the paradoxical sensorium that makes it possible to define the things of art (Rancire, 2009b: 11). Aesthetic experience is experience of the ambivalent (Rancire, 2008a: 73), its identification with a way of life is a structural contradiction of the aesthetic regime of art (Rancire, 2000: 23). The pure category 'art' is mixed with the impurity of non-art: art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. It is always aestheticized, meaning that it is always posed as a form of life" (Rancire, 2002: 137; Gunoun, 2000: 252; Rancire, 2004a: 26). To take a contemporary example: the artist Lukas Duwenhggers 2007 competition proposal for a public memorial in Berlin to the Homosexual Victims of National Socialism. This dealt humorously with same-sex experience (cottagingtea room trade) by taking the theatrical form of a Celestial Teapot performing the historically resonant and defiantly camp akimbo gesture (King, 1994: 20-43; King, 2008: 41-138), with disruptive vigour and conviction on behalf of this specifically dominated form of life. Such a monument is patently frivolous and absurd, yet it disturbs: in Rancirean phraseology disturbing in the very scenery of the sensible and its distribution (Rancire, 2008a: 74) the humourless male fantasies of Nazi domination. As Jan Verwoert has suggested, Duwenhgger (b. 1955) who lives and works in Istanbul addresses the viewer as a knowledgeable reader of queer codes in which the Dandyist revolution is realized in barely visible gestures of refined symbolic meaning, an art of innuendo [] for surviving under repressive social conditions. After asking whether these codes might not be just affirming the world as it is rather than envisioning it as it might possibly be, Verwoert positively asserts the successful public staging of homosexual equality in Duwenhggers work, indicating that there is an imaginative concept of freedom, the liberating humour of a different universe which embodies a promise of other potential realities so that you cant help but smile at the heightened awareness it gives you the viewer of your theatrical presence on the stage of the exhibition space (Verwoert, 2004). The ambivalence felt toward all terms relating to homosexuality by those who undergo them is only too understandable given this problem of categorisation, a term stemming from the Greek kathegoresthai, which originally meant to accuse someone in public (Bourdieu, 1990: 27). It would seem that there is little choice but to recognize the tragically absurd double-bind of symbolic domination: the question of how one can revolt against a socially imposed categorization except by organizing oneself according to it, thus

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

implementing the classifications and restrictions that one resists as well as fighting for a new sexual order in which such distinctions would be indifferent (Bourdieu, 2002: 120). This is why Rancire stresses the refusal of identity and the significance of dis-identification for subjectivation, understanding politics as a process of declassification, of abandoning the identity one is given in the policing of the social order (May, 2008a: 50), and why gay and lesbian identification can only be made strategically and queer seen as a form of dis-identification or unbecoming. In the introduction to a journal issue devoted to unbecoming Jean Paul Ricco quotes a significant passage from Jean-Luc Nancy regarding the question of a communal space of politics where he suggests that a being-incommon would operate a transitivity, not a substantiality (Nancy, 1997: 90; Ricco, 2005: 1). For Rancire, Political being-together is a being-between: between identities, between worlds [] between several names, several identities (Rancire, 1999: 137-8). The beingin-common of queer is just such a transitive rather than substantive subjectification and it might well be added to Rancires statement about how the dissidents of the Eastern bloc adopting the term hooligan with which they were stigmatized by the heads of these regimes, and demonstrators in the Paris of 1968 declared We are all German Jews, thus exposing for all to see the gap between political subjectification and any kind of identification (Rancire, 1999: 30). For homosexuals to accept categorizations unequivocally would be to accept themselves in the police order as marginalized subjects. As Todd May puts it: The project of a democratic politics, a politics of equality, is to reject the marginalized position to which one has been assigned, not for the sake of another or different position, but for the sake of nothing at all other than one's own equality (May, 2008a: 49). One might see this non-identitarianism, as a Foucauldian desubstantialization of sexuality (Ricco, 2002: 19) reflected in the anonymity, indetermination and non-affirmative anybody-everybodyness (21) of the Interim 1992-93 and Songs of Sentient Beings 1995 series of photographs by Bill Jacobson (b.1955) or the promiscuous anonymity of Stephen Barkers photographs of nocturnal cruising in Nightswimming (Barker, 1999). As John Rajchman once put it: Once we give up the belief that our life-world is grounded in identity we may come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced as existential anxiety [] but as a freedom and lightness [] (Rajchman, 1998: 88). This problematic of queer identification has been expressed by the contemporary photographer Collier Schorr (b.1963). Schorr prefers not to be publicly identified as lesbian, not because she wishes to remain in the closet but because such identification adversely narrows the focus of how her work is read. Because of her assertive manner in dealing with male rituals and military and sport fetishes, her photographic concerns can be reduced to a homoerotic or queer perspective. One of her own best-known statements contributed to this. When she was asked why she photographed wrestlers and soldiers, but not girls, she answered: I do, I just use boys to do it (Schorr, 2004) and says she is interested in what her life might have

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

been like had she been a boy. She has problems when her work is ascribed a primarily gay context. The word queer has too much content in it and she would rather be seen as an artist than queer (Schorr, 2008). She, and her photographs can nonetheless be understood as queer in the sense that they subtly trouble normative notions of gender. Like Rancire, Schorr and fellow artist Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, USA), are more interested in the performative operations of subject formation (Hayes, 2006: 36): subjectification rather than identification (Rancire, 1992: 61; 1999: 36). Queer which initially freed homosexuals from the prison of categorization, in turn becomes overdetermined; there is the need again to neutralize language, release the prisoners: [] scatter the signified [] (Barthes, 1977: 50): it is within speech that speech must be fought, led astraynot by the message of which it is the instrument, but by the play of words of which it is the theater (Barthes, 1979: 6). This does not mean however that Hayes is not interested in political activism as her extraordinary Revolutionary Love project in which at the US Republican and Democratic conventions a group of between 70-100 people simultaneously spoke a text put together by Hayes about love, politics, gay power, and gay liberation, demonstrates; not to mention her other performative political projects in which she performs acts of appropriation in relation to political speeches of the 60s and 70s. Hayes is a contemporary artist inventing new forms of aesthetic/political intervention. After the failure of 20th century vanguards to place art in the service of ideology by homogenizing art and politics, we know that there can be no prescriptive agenda for either; so there can be no type of art that we recognize as 'homosexual.' There is only art that tacitly or explicitly relates to same sex experience that either carries aesthetic conviction or not, and thereby asserts the equality of that experience. In other words, art, indifferent to politics as such, may still have metapolitical effects. Rancire frequently cites Flaubert's aristocratic indifference to democracy whilst paradoxically writing democratically of the splendour of the insignificant.' What is distinctive about art is its capacity to invent new forms, at a disruptive distance from inherited norms and expectations, its capacity for active aesthetic provocation rather than simple recognition (Hallward, 2001: xx). The transformative joy of such provocation and its maintenance is central to Rancires thinking. In 1953 the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) acted in accordance with this, by painting Two Figures, which has been described as one of the most provocative homosexual images of our epoch (Farson, 1993). Though deriving from an Eadweard Muybridge photograph of wrestlers, it patently represents two male figures engaged in violent sexual activity; furthermore it did this when such acts even in private were a criminal offence; Bacon referred to it as The Bed of Crime. The production of such an image in 1953 was a brave aesthetico-political act painted some fourteen years before such acts (in private) were legitimized in English law. Then as if anticipating this law, in 1954 he painted Two Figures in the Grass: the same sex

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

act depicted in open public space. Identifying with the criminal underworld, Bacon famously and defiantly enjoyed his dominated deviant social status and cared little for liberalizing homosexual equality. Indeed one might ask exactly what sexual equality means? There is disagreement on this; there are assimilationists for whom homosexual equality represents consensuality with heterosexual normativity, legal parity, marital rights etc., and those who want none of it, asserting homosexual experience as fundamentally dissensually non-monogamously different. The staging of equality Against the imperative of propriety, the aesthetic regime of art asserts indifference of style in relation to the represented subject (Deranty, 2007: 243). Style no longer has anything to do with what is being represented in the hierarchical modes of representation of classical art but is a kind of absolute way of seeing things (Rancire, 2004c: 147). In the aesthetic regime, any object is worthy of artistic representation, down to the readymade: the Duchampian urinal and the Warholian soupcan or Brillo box (Deranty, 2007: 245). Here art is the concentrated expression of meaning that is already that of the world itself. The oligarchic hierarchy of perception: genres, subjects and media, categories that pre-ordered experience in the representative regime, give way to a joyful aesthetics of chaosmos: a stylistic explosion where meaning sinks into the rhythm of bodily states (Rancire, 2007: 45). Egalitarian society is only ever the set of egalitarian relations that are traced here and now through singular and precarious acts [] among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence inspiring courage, and hence joy (Rancire, 2006: 97). Aesthetic indifference to hierarchies of subject matter is evident in the vast range of subjects and the manner of installation of the wonderfully open and democratic contemporary photographic project of Wolfgang Tillmans (b.1968). Continuing the photographic project initiated by photographers like David Octavius Hill of the appropriation of the commonplace (Rancire, 2004a: 33) his photographic opus embodies the egalitarian spirit in the particularly vivid way that Rancire describes in The Politics of Aesthetics as:
the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass [] available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community [] as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by [] random circulation []. (Rancire, 2004a: 14)

Tillman invites us to share the equal power of visual intelligence with anybody and everybody; it has a special political and aesthetic resonance with regard to issues concerning freedom of expression, sensuality, sexuality, the body, and the ever-present threat of

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

extinction as a consequence of AIDS. The banal fact that he could place a photograph of two men kissing on the first page of his US tour catalogue is a freedom won for all who value the expression of equality whatever their sexual orientation. As Daniel Birnbaum put it so eloquently in that catalogue:
His work is always that of an embodied subject [] These phenomena are [] seen by someone, and this someone is a social being living in a body and relating to other humans. (Birnbaum, 2006: 24)

The strongest element of that embodiedness is his emboldened belief in conviviality, in a utopian ideal of to-getherness (Tillmans, 2002: 13), something he discovered early on in the gay clubbing scene in London. This sense of communal being-in-the-world is present at many different levels in his work, from his evident desire to share his lens based joys of discovery, to the single and group portraits of friends and acquaintances, to the erotically charged intimacy of his abstract works: Blushes, Peaches, Frieischwimmer; all this, as he has said, against the deathly background of personal loss from AIDS which makes companionship and comradeship all the more significant, enhancing the fragile intensity of life. AIDS has cast a long shadow over the art world, whilst at the same time demonstrating the extraordinary resourcefulness and range of abilities as artists have dealt with the issue of homosexual equality in a time of plague without succumbing to victimhood or giving way to self pity. In every sense of the word there is something more than a little queer about the work of Enrico David (b. 1966), one of the most engaging artists to have emerged in Britain in recent years. Nominated for the 2009 Turner prize for his solo exhibitions How Do You Love Dzzzzt By Mammy? at the Museum fr Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Bulbous Marauder at the Seattle Art Museum, his 2007 exhibition at Londons ICA was hailed as one of the best exhibitions that venue had had for decades. It contained many theatrical and musical references, and it is perhaps worth remembering that the terms theatrical and musical were once euphemisms for homosexual. Davids is a dandaistic world in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful (Thompson, 2009: n.p.). In his own words, his work borrows from traditional craft techniques and design styles, using their pre-given rules and functional potential in an attempt to organize and give structure to the often chaotic nature of [his] emotional response to reality. In embracing design and craft David joins the growing band of artists since the sixties who broke the modernist embargo on the divide between fine and applied art (Rancire refers to this in his articles The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes, 2002, and The Surface of Design, 2007). In the summer of 2007, David spoke about his work Chicken Man Gong (2005) shown at the Stedelijk, commissioned by Tate Britain in 2005. This two-part work, consisting of a gong and a display case, subtly questions accepted beliefs about authority and the gendered

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

identity of the artists relation to the viewer in a public art situation. In Chicken Man Gong, David has created a complex web of narratives and allusions to a variety of cultural sources. The gong stands on a leg that is clad in fishnet stockings, taken from the work of the French artist Pierre Molinier (1900-1976) known for his fetishistic photographic self-portraits in drag. In addition to this, the statue has a multicoloured tail and a head with an androgynous face. In short: Chicken Man Gong is an elegant hybrid figure dedicated to the spirit, joy and honour of Chickeninity or Chickenhood (Verwoert, 2009: 59). Chicken Man Gong plays a theatrical and ritual role in the museum; during the exhibition the artist telephoned a museum employee with the order to sound the gong, bringing the work to the publics notice. This work amply demonstrated the way David employs his own set of invented codes to subtly subvert established orders in life and art. The work also references what one might see as a queer side of the Bauhaus aesthetic manifest in the mechanized manikin figure work of Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) and his Triadic Ballet (1927). In fact David utilizes formal vocabularies from the past, particularly from the 20s and 30s quite knowingly but never totally nostalgically since he always injects them with a quirkiness of his own making. Staging is indeed the word to describe Davids modus operandi. The twentythree gouaches that make up the work entitled Shitty Tantrum 2006-7 is, according to the text that is part of the work, loosely based on the imaginative narrative of a play of his own invention. In his Spring 2008 exhibition at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery in Cologne entitled Bulbous Marauder he references the Commedia del Arte. The text accompanying this work (which can be found by following the links to Davids work on the Daniel Bucholz website) like that of Shitty Tantrum, invites the viewer to circle down queerly into its multiple levels of meaning. There is a not so innocent playfulness in all these works that engages the polymorphous perversity of childhood, hence the references to asses and anality both iconographically and in the titles of works like the fetishistic manikin Sodulator. Manikins and dolls feature in much of Davids work, evoking the mechanical dolls and toys in the tales of E.T.A Hoffman, Freuds unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature (Freud, 1990: 339-76). We might note the relation of uncanny to queer, as the name for everything that ought to have remained ... secret and hidden but has come to light (Freud, 1990: 345). Citing a paper by Jentsch, Freud remarks that waxwork figures, dolls and automata are liable to arouse an uncanny feeling, especially when there is uncertainty about whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate. Consciously or not, David invokes the unheimlich in his irresolvable visual narratives, of which one can make, neither head nor tail. We might ask ourselves whether the artist is unraveling some childhood trauma, for children experience the enigmatic signifiers of the primal family scene as incomprehensible and therefore uncanny (Laplanche, 1992). Davids work would seem to invoke childhood memories as with the tableau Ultra Paste 2007 which attempts to reproduce and thereby re-imagine some kind of queer anally related

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

sexual trauma in the paternally designed bedroom of his childhood, where a dark brown stain seeps across the floor of this hygienic space. To paraphrase Rancire, in Davids work the elements are always ambivalent because of meaning and its withdrawal; when we look at it, we see a politics of aesthetics using forms of disturbance or the uncanny (Rancire, 2008a: 74). As we have seen for Rancire subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of place (Rancire, 1999: 36) and David actively engages the spectator: art emancipates [] how we have to understand, how we have to see, how we have to read, and what we have to understand [] what emancipates is precisely the possibility of [] the viewer constructing or reconstructing that efficiency himself or herself (Rancire, 2008b: 180). Confronting history Finally, I turn to two artists whose work I can only inadequately touch upon in the space available. Their work challenges the ordered hierarchies of the classical representational regime by staging equality with regard to the hybridity of race, gender and sexuality with the hope of changing the world. Rancire has declared a discomfort with the notion of hybridity because it seems to refer much more to the constitution of a subject rather than to processes of subjectivization (Rancire, 2008: 74-5). This is true if hybridity is seen as a static mix of determinate identities but not if it is seen transversally as the dislocating motion of disidentification: Hybrid catches the fragmentary subject formation of people whose identities traverse different race, sexuality, and gender identifications (Muoz, 1999: 31-2). Hybridity coupled with disidentification have proved significant terms for postcolonial queer theory (Muoz, 1999: 31). Jos Esteban Muoz sees disidentification as a strategy situated between identification and counteridentification, a third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that opts for neither assimilation nor opposition, but uses disidentificatory humour as a mode of performance to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact a redistribution of the sensible a structural change [] valuing the importance of everyday struggles of resistance (Muoz, 1999: 15, 11-12). It can be understood as a way of shuffling back and forth between reception and production [] a mode of understanding the movements and circulations of identificatory force (Muoz, 1999: 15, 30). Juan Dvila (b.1946) was born in Santiago, but left Chile and moved to Australia in 1974, shortly after Augusto Pinochet seized power, and ever since his work has addressed this personal sense of rupture and the conviction that art should speak critically of those in power (Eichler, 2007). Dvilas work frequently reveals the sexual economy that underlies power, something his own homosexuality no doubt enabled him to understand from within. His work which is both shockingly carnal and extremely sophisticated in its play with visual codes, can arouse strong critical responses, one critic voicing the views of the silent majority in a right wing newspaper by repressively

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

describing his work as the high camp pornographic folk art of a political cartoonist undeserving of attention outside of Australia (Dorment, 2007). Such strong reactions can be seen as a measure of the aesthetico-political challenge of his work which disturbs the relationship that exists between the autonomy of the spaces reserved for art and its apparent contrary: art's involvement in constituting forms of common life (Rancire, 2009b: 26). This is why a seasoned and informed viewer, such as the writer on South American art, Guy Brett, believes that his work needs to be registered first for its visual impact, describing that impact as switching between refinement and tackiness, mimicry and invention, disgust and celebration, scorn and affection (Brett, 2006: 2). Brett goes on to describe the work as a battlefield believing that this is where its ethical core really liesin anger over injustice [] whether in lived life or in the mediating domain of visual culture. Much of his visual language is indebted to the quotidian world of comic strips and their incursion into the world of fine art through 1960s Pop. Since Dvilas work emerged in the 1980s in the wake of notions of postmodernism, it is perhaps worth recalling Rancire reminding us that: If there is a political question in contemporary art, it will not be grasped in terms of a modern/postmodern opposition but through an analysis of the metamorphoses of [] the politics founded on the play of the exchanges and displacements between the art world and that of nonart (Rancire, 2009b: 51). I first saw Dvilas work in 1994 in Juanito Laguna a memorable exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, which consisted of a huge hybrid floor piece, riffing on the narratives of the popular Argentinian artist Antonio Bernis (1905-81) poor boy of the Buenos Aires slums (Juanito Laguna), Bungaree (1770-1830), the Australian aboriginal who dressed in cast off European uniforms, entertained and acted as go-between for European settlers in Australia and the celebrated painting Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru (1855) produced in Paris by the Peruvian painter Francisco Laso (1823-69). In the same year Dvila was included in the international exhibition Unbound: Possibilities in Painting at the Hayward Gallery, London. It was there that he exhibited his depiction of Simn Bolvar, liberator of a number of Latin American countries, as a transsexual on a half fading horse, obscenely giving the finger to the viewer. This caused a major uproar in Chile in 1994 and even strained diplomatic relations with Venezuela, whose embassy issued a formal complaint against Dvilas image when it was circulated as a postcard. The Chilean Foreign Ministry itself formally apologized to the governments of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. It is through an analysis of Dvilas portrait and its iconoclastic challenge to all the absolutes represented by Bolvar (Conway, 2003: 2) that Christopher Conway discussed the cult of Bolvar, the conservative hero, who like all unmovable idols stands for reified and eternal values in need of transformation (Mejas-Lpez, 2005: 146-60). Dvila has said, that for him the question of sexual repression is as important as political repression and has tended to be ignored in the rhetoric of liberation (Brett, 1990: 106).

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is of mixed racial origins, half Cree Indian and half Anglo Irish and plays mischievously with same-sexuality, race, recreating nineteenth century romantic landscape representations of untrammelled sublimity, peopling his landscapes with natives and colonialists, reversing the roles of domination and exposing repressed homoeroticism in colonialism. Monkman trained as an illustrator and acquired the skills to convincingly mock the pretensions of the colonists genre of painting; and this is not all, for Monkman is a sophisticated conceptual post-performative artist utilizing theatrical talent as set designer, installation creator, film maker and performance artist. In a massive seven by twelve foot canvas entitled Trappers of Men, Monkman recreates a western landscape that the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt wrought in his 1867 canvas In the Mountains. But unlike Bierstadt's unpopulated original, this 2006 update is teeming with bodies. Barechested white pioneers talk and trade with dark, muscular young natives; the explorers Lewis and Clark wander through, lost and uncertain; and photographer Edward S. Curtis and painters Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian are shocked by the appearance of Share Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a glammed-up cross-dressing native character who stands on the surface of the water, voguing in a campy take on Botticelli's Venus. As Rancire attests humour is the virtue to which contemporary artists most readily ascribe (Rancire, 2009b: 54). In Robin's Hood the film of the performance he created as part of Jimmie Durhams exhibition The American West at Compton Verney in 2005, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a wandering artist from the Great Plains of North America, journeys across the seas to study the unspoiled European Male in his native habitat in the UK. S/he meets the handsome Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, but realises too late that one can never trust a white man, especially on his own turf! Miss (Share) Chief Eagle Testickle whose name plays on both mischief and egotistical is a towering, raven-haired transvestite in four-inch heels. Monkman has developed this persona in performance, video and photographic works as well as in his paintings. Rancire says that the place of a political subject is an interval or a gap: being together to the extent that we are in betweenbetween names, identities, cultures (Rancire, 1992: 62). In an interview for the National Gallery of Canada, Monkman declares that he is trying to define the space between two cultures. To conclude let us briefly consider aspects of Rancires theatocratic presentation of equality that might be considered problematic. Peter Hallward raised the question of the inability of theatrically sporadic and improvisational interventions to instantiate continuity of change, and asked to what extent Rancires conception of equality remains a merely transgressive one, and thus condemned to a variant of that same dialectic of dependence, provocation and exhaustion that he diagnoses so effectively in the logics of modernism and postmodernism (Hallward, 2006: 123). Hallward raises the common problem of the relationship between real world politics, social change and the kind of imaginative transformations that art projects, writing

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

that Rancires egalitarianism, no less than Schillers notion of play risks confinement to the unsubstantial kingdom of the imagination. It would seem that Rancire would be inclined to agree when he asserts that a significant question for the present time is whether the substitutive political role of contemporary art can reshape political spaces or must remain content with parodying them (Rancire, 2009b: 60). As he has said his enquiry has often been suspected of proposing a return to [] aesthetic utopias or of being out of step with the artistic practices and political issues of the 21st century, when all he has done is to point to the tensions and contradictions [] which sustain the dynamic of artistic creation and set up in a more accurate way the issue of what art can be and can do today (Rancire, 2008c: 14). As for artists, whether they are homosexual or not, there are challenges they face that only the performative political power of aesthetic experience itself can answer as they participate in le partage du sensible by staging equality as powerfully and theatrically as they can in the hope that they might decimate the oppressive sedimentations of established order. Postscript As Rancire sees it, the peculiar paradox of the specifically aesthetic revolution is that art is radically political not according to the ways it conveys messages concerning social or political issues or ethnic or sexual identities, but as it frames and reframes an indifferent convivium: the liberty and equality of a common aesthetic sensorium. In a talk launching the English translation of Le Partage du sensible: Esthtique et Politique (The Politics of Aesthetics) at the ICA London in February 2005, Rancire described the museum as an egalitarian space for the staging of this common sensorium: the place where spectators confront art works disconnected from the inequality of their former function as icons of faith, emblems of power, or decoration of palaces. I completed this paper in Southern Italy not far from the museum at Paestum, where the Greek mural paintings in the 475 BC Tomb of the Diver are displayed. One of these murals uninhibitedly celebrates same sex desire: specifically the socially circumscribed pederastic desire between a bearded erastes and a smooth faced eromenos. Today we as disinterested museum spectators within the purview of the contemporary convivium of the aesthetic regime can bear witness to the contemporaneity of the timeless pleasures of education and desire. Such desire continues to be denied free expression when its staging remains tied to ethical and representational rules and regulations. Today we identify with the spectatorial relish evident in the figure on the left of this scene, and take pleasure in this image as it traces the equality of its intelligibility to anybody and everybody as we are communally tied together by the sensory fabric of this distribution of the sensible (Rancire, 2008c: 4).

15

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Roger Cook initially trained as a painter at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and until his retirement in 2005 taught in the Fine Art Department at the University of Reading where he also taught Lesbian & Gay Studies on the Body & Representation MA. He has a PhD in the History of Art and since 2006 he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London where his research interests are contemporary art, French philosophy and the historical, social and political relevance of dandyism. Bibliography Badiou, A. (2003), Fifteen theses on contemporary art, accessed 5 August 2003, http://www.lacan.com/issue22.htm ---. (2006), Polemics, London: Verso. Barker, S. (1999), Nightswimming, Santa Fe NM: Twin Palms. Barthes, R. (1977), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. ---. (1979), Lecture, trans. R. Howard, October, no. 8. Birnbaum, D. (2006), A new visual register for our perceptual apparatus, Wolfgang Tillmans, Yale: Yale University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2002), Masculine Domination, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ---. (1990), The Logic of Practice, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Brett, G. (1990), Transcontinental: Nine South American Artists, London: Verso. Brett, G. (2006), Nothing has been settled, Juan Dvila, Sydney: The Miegunyah Press. Conway, C. (2003), The Cult of Bolvar in Latin American Literature, University of Florida Press. Deranty, J.-P. (2007), Democratic aesthetics: on Jacques Rancire's latest work, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, vol. 8, no. 2. ---. (2003), Jacques Rancires contribution to the ethics of recognition, Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 1. Farson, D. (1993), The Gilded Gutter-Life of Francis Bacon: The Authorized Biography, London: Century.

16

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Foucault, M. (1990), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, La Volont de Savoir, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage. Genet, J. (2003), Fragments of the Artwork, trans. C. Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gunoun, S. (2000), Interview with Jacques Rancire: cinematographic image Splendour of the Insignificant, Sites: Journal of the Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 249-58. Hallward, P. (2001), Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific, London: Manchester University Press. ---. (2006) Staging equality: on Rancires theatocracy, New Left Review, March. Hayes, S. (2006), Familiarity, irony, ambivalence (and love, hate, envy, attraction, revulsion, hubris as byproducts of performative act), email conversation between Sharon Hayes and Yvonne Rainer, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.shaze.info/assets/texts/sh_familiarity_irony.pdf Katz, J.N. (1995), The Invention of Heterosexuality, New York: Dutton. King, T.A. (2008), The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750: Queer Articulations, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Laplanche J, (1992), Seduction, Translation, Drives, ed. J. Fletcher & M. Stanton, trans. M. Stanton, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. May, T. (2008), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire: Creating Equality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mejas-Lpez, A. (2005), (Re)imagining Bolvar, A contracorriente. A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America, vol. 2, no. 3, Spring, pp. 147-60, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.ncsu.edu /project/acontracorriente/spring_05/Mejias_Lopez.pdf Nancy, J.-L. (1997), The Sense of the World, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Panagia, D. (2007), Youre eating too fast! On disequality and an ethos of convivium, Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 11, no. 3, July. ---. (2009), The Political Life of Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. Rajchman, J. (1998), Constructions (Writing Architecture),

17

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Massachusetts: MIT Press. Rancire, J. (1991), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. and intro. by K. Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press, Le Maitre ignorant. Cinq leons sur l'emancipation intellectuelle, Paris: Fayard, 1987. ---. (1992), Politics, identification, and subjectivization, October, vol. 61, Special Issue: The Identity in Question, Summer, pp. 58-64. ---. (1999), Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, trans. J. Rose from La Msentente: Politique et philosophie, ditions Galile, 1995. ---. (2000), Jacques Rancire: history and the arts system, interview with Jan Ciret, Art Press, no. 258, June. ---. (2001), Ten theses on politics, Theory & Event, vol. 5, no. 3. ---. (2002), The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes, New Left Review, no. 14, March/April. ---. (2003), The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. J. Drury, C. Oster & A. Parker, intro. A. Parker, Durham: Duke University Press, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris: Libraire Arthme Fayard, 1983. ---. (2004a), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill, London: Continuum. ---. (2004b), The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. C. Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ---. (2005), The politics of aesthetics, n.p., accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001877.php ---. (2006), Hatred of Democracy, trans. S. Corcoran, London: Verso, La Haine de la dmocratie, Paris: Editions La Fabrique, 2005. ---. (2007), The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliot, London: Verso, Le destin des images, Paris: Editions La Fabrique, 2003. ---. (2008a), Sudeep Dasgupta, Art is going elsewhere and politics has to catch it. An interview with Jacques Rancire, Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, no. 1, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.krisis.eu/content/2008-1/2008-1-09-dasgupta.pdf ---. (2008b), Aesthetics against incarnation: an interview with Anne Marie Oliver, Critical Inquiry, no. 35, Chicago: The University of Chicago.

18

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2008c), Aesthetic separation, aesthetic community: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art, ART&RESEARCH: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/pdfs/ranciere.pdf ---. (2009a), Notes on the photographic image, Radical Philosophy, no. 156, pp. 8-15. ---. (2009b), Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. S. Corcoran, London: Polity Press, Malaise desthtique, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004. Ricco, J.P. (2002), The Logic of the Lure, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ricco, J.P. (2005), Unbecoming, Parallax, April-June, vol. 11, no. 2. Schorr, C. (2004), Personal Best, Flash Art, no. 237, Jan/Feb, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.papercoffin.com/writing/articles/schorr.html Schorr, C. (2008), Deutsche Bank Artmag, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.db-artmag.de/2008/4/e/1/611.php Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1994), Tendencies, London: Routledge. Thompson, S. (2009), Enrico David, London: Koenig Books Ltd. Verwoert, J. (2004), Lukas Duwenhogger, Frieze, no. 84, JuneAugust. Verwoert, J. (2009), Ode to the Chicken Gong Man, Afterall, no. 20. Villalobos, C.P. (1994), Identity and scatology, Juan Dvila Juanito Laguna, Chisenhale Gallery, London. Warner, M. (2000), Queer world making: Annamarie Jagose interviews Michael Warner, Genders, no. 31, accessed 10 August 2009, http://www.genders.org/g31/g31_jagose.html#n11

borderlands ejournal 2009

19

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

Queer Aesthetics

Daniel Williford
University of California, Los Angeles

Queer Aesthetics argues for a mode of aesthetic enunciation based on the promiscuous image. It reads Rancires theory of the image in the aesthetic regime of the arts as a mechanism of discourse that is central to the process by which Art must distinguish itself as such. The image unbound is a symptom of what Rancire describes as the disease of democracy, where all things are equally able to be substituted for one another. As in politics, the egalitarian threat whereby art and life can be confused must be checked through mechanisms of ordering logics that keep things in their place. The essay understands the image as both the function of an order of things but one which fails to contain its excess meaning in a single aesthetic enunciation and it reads a contemporary photo by artist David LaChapelle as demonstrating a queer aesthetic that portrays the promiscuous image of art.

'The manifestation of politics only occurs via specific acts of implementation, and political subjects forever remain precarious figures that hesitate at the borders of silence maintained by the police.' -The Politics of Aesthetics (Rancire, 2006: 90)

'I never realized that people would receive [my look] as art. I just
thought that it was good grooming habits.' -Amanda Lepore (Lafreniere, 2006)

The queer aesthetic dimension Walter Benjamins founding essay on art and mechanical reproducibility makes a troubling assertion about the link between

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

politics and aesthetics. Advances in technology detached modern artworks from the aura of a unique art-object, Benjamin argues, offering an alternative to the fascist perversion of art for art's sake, within which the technology of war was a coercive aesthetic experience mankind experiences its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure (Benjamin, 2008: 42). Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism, Benjamin concludes. Communism replies by politicizing art (Benjamin, 2008: 42). In critically encapsulating the significance of the mechanical production of art, Benjamin expresses an axis of politics and art on which each is distinct from the other. Politics can use the principals of art just as art can participate in political discussions. Critical debates over politics and art depend upon understanding Benjamins separation in order to better understand how political regimes aestheticize the mechanisms of their power and how art can be politically efficacious. Rancire reframes this debate entirely when he asserts that political discourse participates in a basic ordering of the population that is primarily aesthetic. Rancire interrogates the way that art and literature of the past few centuries has been periodized around a concept of modernism, which disguises a major shift in a politico-aesthetic way of seeing/doing/being in the world towards which Benjamin gestures. Further, Rancire explores the use of photography as enabling a new way of seeing the relationship of artist and subject, art and non-art (Rancire, 2009a: 15). Rancire's theory of the aesthetic regime of the arts remaps visual and literary culture by undermining the distinction between acts of politics and modes of aesthetics. The stakes of this reconfiguration are stark in an analysis of those aesthetic modes and expressions that cultivate an ethics of ambiguity, whereby mechanisms of representation, such as the image, are privileged when they create rather than close the distance between an artistic construct and the truth of things. What I will call queer aesthetics constructs an ethics of ambiguity and artificiality in order to de-privilege the representation of things as they are and to instead suggest that all representation shows things as they should be. Categories of art are, after all, categories of fiction, or artificial constructs that are not true. Queer aesthetics puts into play assumptions of the real and true in order to suggest possibilities for reimagining the social world. For Rancire, politics, like art, centers on the possible ways that the world can be configured and represented. Politics is a disruptive act of re-configuring the world in terms of what can be seen, said, and done. As such, it rarely happens, since most of the time the actions of government maintain the stability of the dominant order (under the guise of keeping order as such). Similarly, self-declared political art rarely enacts politics. Any aesthetic act is political when it effects a reordering of the social world. Rancire's political writings make interventions at the level of representation as an aesthetic mechanism, whether challenging the tradition of Althusserian Marxist science in which philosophers must argue on behalf of the ignorant poor who cannot see outside of the system in which they are trapped, or theorizing a kind of politics that resists essentialist notions of the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

people. His analysis of art, film, and literature operates at this same level, since ways of representing populations happen among and between discourses, none of which stay within stable boundaries. Fiction, painting, philosophy, and political theses all include types of representation that partake of and participate in the ordering of the visible, livable, social world. When texts don't stay within the boundaries of their fields, when they wander, they threaten to confuse categories and incite questions about the world as it is. Rancire's theory of the image is, I argue, a theory of textual promiscuity, which is central to a specifically queer aesthetics. Much of Rancire's work on art and politics engages implicitly with traditions of queer art and queer representation. Queer aesthetics make use of the ambiguities that temper the politics of representation and bring about new possibilities for, as Rancire would have it, the distribution of the sensible world. I will take up Rancires understanding of texts and images as aesthetic modes and mechanisms, respectively, which cannot be bound to a medium or genre since we might read as a text any cultural product (advertisement, film, poem, speech) and we might see a particular image or figure move across texts (here invented, there appropriated; here vilified, there idealized). But I will resist seeing the proliferation of the image as a characteristic of postmodernism, merely. In his forthcoming book Aesthetics and its Discontents, chapter titles such as Politics of Aesthetics and Aesthetics as Politics suggest that Rancires might follow other post-Marxist theorists in asserting that political theory now must contend with a world saturated by the commodity (2009b). His efforts are not, however, towards purifying the two spheres, nor does he insist on blurring the distinction until art and politics are one in the same; instead, he tries to articulate the assumptions that are common to both in a given expression at a given time in a given place. For Rancire aesthetics is the study of the formative logics of a particular aesthetic enunciation and the regimes of being, doing or saying within which it is recognized. The common social world in which people are identifiable to one another and in which people speak, act, and do things is first a sensible world, that is, a world of the senses (Chambers, 2005). While Rancire discusses, separately, a politics of aesthetics and an aesthetics of politics, there is, in any political gesture, an assumption of the perceptible world in which the sensible social is ordered based on some sort of logic, be it a totalitarian regime or a government of, by and for the people; it is, therefore, an aesthetic gesture (Rancire, 2009b). And any aesthetic production takes place and takes part in a sensible social world through which it is perceptible; it therefore is only possible through a social order that is political (Rancire, 1999: 58). Rancire refers to this ordering logic as the distribution or partition of the sensible. So while ones first critique of Rancire might be on the order of a deficiency of attention to his task when he so readily moves from writing social history to political theory to philosophy to literary criticism to film theory to art theory one quickly comes to understand that to the extent that disciplines are a form of partitioning fields of study and roles of proper

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

authority, his intellectual promiscuity is a requirement and effect of his critical inquiry (Dasgupta, 2008: 71). Within disciplines, an important way of ordering cultural productions is through historical periods. Rancieres recent work in art theory has criticized theories of modernism which tend to both narrativize failed movements and ends (the end of grand narratives, the end of the image, etc) while at the same time positing a teleology that explains away subversive moments in art. Postmodernism might be understood as the break from a long tradition of understanding any modern art as complicit in bringing about a new world. Modernity has been discussed for centuries as either a coming into being of a radically new social world or the failure of those modern moments of the recent past to make any clean break. Postmodernist expressions tend to insist not only on that failure but also on the naivete of its underlying sentiment, and to mock the latter criticism for believing, still, in the potential efficacy of modernism. This is not to say that theories of postmodernity in the latter decades of the twentieth century were not themselves motivated by a belief in thinking through new possibilities to come, but that those possibilities would have to come out of the recognition of the failure of modernity rather than in renewing it in earnest. Twentieth-century critical theory is often marked by melancholy, failure, subjectivization, disease, systemic ills, entrapment, and the end of things. It is a post- world that must make use of advanced forensics to investigate criminal acts and must make novel use of the materials of wrecked or abandoned scenes (Dasgupta, 2008: 73). Rancire locates this tone of 'nihilist wisdom' in the post-Marxist critique of the failure of Marxism to lead to revolution; he is concerned that the critique intends to arrest the idea of emancipation. But nihilist wisdom does not merely give a phantasmagorical view of our world It also pictures the law of domination as a force that permeates any will to do anything against it. Any protest is a performance, any performance is a spectacle, any spectacle is a commodity, such is the grounding thesis of this postMarxist and post-situationist wisdom (Rancire, 2006b). Theories of postmodernism and postmodern art frequently portray a world where even genuine efforts, such as a protest, are made ironic by the debris of consumer culture that they seem never to be able to escape (Rancire, 2008). The possibility of revolution and emancipation is past, and even the most radical thinker or the angriest protester is disempowered inside the machine. Rancire is not interested in theorizing the subject or power relations. But this does not mean he is not interested in people or power. Within a certain framework of the political an understanding of the 'aesthetical dimension' of politics is the way by which the egalitarian assumption of democracy is re-inscribed as a harmonious community of consensual subjects. The aesthetical dimension is the way in which democracy is 'acted out' on the political stage. But since democracy can never be achieved as a form of government, it can only be staged in just such a way, which entails a portioning out of roles that allows the scene of democracy to be brought to life. To analyze subjects in

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

relation to power can assume that the agency of the subject comes out of a certain individual subjectivity that comes to be defined in myriad ways through power relations. This is not wrong, but Rancire is interested in a different understanding of the political subject that speaks to that hated, feared, dangerous 'unconditional character' of democracy: its 'indifference to difference' (Rancire, 2009c: 276-8). Subjectivity is the logic of distinction that attempts to correct the substitutability of anyone with anyone. A democratic political subject is, then, not a subjectivity but a political capacity: a capacity of anyone to 'act as if' they are on the stage of politics, to 'act as if' they have a part (Rancire, 2004b: 11-13). The image in the aesthetic regime of the arts The supposed new (read modernist) impulses of twentieth century art and literature, Rancire shows us, first appear in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century literature. The aesthetic regime is a way of doing art that requires a reinterpretation of the political/social world based on the destruction of hierarchies of genre, subjects, and language appropriate to literature and the visual arts. Common, everyday life could be represented indiscriminately and without a moral imperative; forms from different time periods and different social classes could coexist inexplicably. He locates this shift in, for example, the work of British Romantic poets and French realists, and argues against the supposed modernist break by showing that the aesthetic expression of modern life is the new form of art that enabled the work of Baudelaire, Proust, Woolfe, Warhol, and Godard (Rancire, 2006c and 2004). There is not a linear or harmonious trajectory across communities of artists in the aesthetic regime, but the Romantic poets common language and Flaubert's subtle innumerable embraces required a reordering in the distribution of the sensible and a new understanding of the possibilities of art and life. Indeed, there was no distinction between the two: any everyday life could be the subject of art (Rancire, 2008c). These possibilities of representation had, at the same time, to be sublimated to art or to aesthetics in order that art and life not become so confused that art ceased to exist. The critique of the vulgarity of the representation of common people and common objects comes from the disgust with the possibility that people of lower orders will be treated as equal to everyone else, thereby undermining refined beauty with something gross and thus disrupting the harmony of order that comes when things are in their proper place. Within the aesthetic regime, new technologies of narrative or of image-making signal that ways of portraying the world participate in the construction of the visible/thinkable world. In Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,' Rancire analyzes a number of texts that take part in the aesthetic regime of the arts and locates Madame Bovary as an early example of the shift toward a new regime that produced a literature that was a new art of writing' (Rancire, 2008b: 237). It is characteristic of this regime to posit that the subject of art no longer

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

would follow from its form, breaking from the representative regime. Madame Bovary was controversial for its seeming lack of point, where instead of writing a story about a figure of history or a social allegory, it portrays the common and banal through poetic language. It was a moment that instigated the anxiety of what counted in the sphere of art and what the social implications of turning non-art into art. The anxiety persists in Wordsworth's mad mother, Duchamp's fountain and Warhol's soup can. For Flaubert, it was an expression of art for art's sake, where art had no imperative to reveal anything other than the aesthetic experience of the common world. That Flaubert did not signal a moral condemnation of the sensuous Emma Bovary furthered an association of vulgar realism with social corruption (Rancire, 2008b: 235-8). Complicit in this new realist aesthetics was the political efficacy of the aestheticization of common objects and anonymous people. Any thing or person always exceeded him or her or itself through the mechanisms of art that re-imagined the world by re-imaging it in the work of art. The aesthetic regime of the arts is announced by the image unbound: the disordering effect of egalitarian democracy that introduces social angst when hierarchies are obliterated and things and people do not keep to their specific task dictated by their specific position. Literature is the voice and frame of modern anxiety, it is the difference between two equivalences, literature is the true life' (Rancire, 2008b: 245). The writers who take part in the new art of writing display symptoms of a disease of democracy, allowing any subject to be the subject of art, and yet they elect themselves as the healthy schizophrenic able to rationally order impersonal sensory events. The writers are those who can contain and consolidate true life into the domain of literature and thus construct themselves as its author. They resist falling into true schizophrenia. This is what is at stake in Huysmans' Rebours, Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and Virginia Woolf's The Waves. In each, the author attempts to construct him or herself as the healthy schizophrenic who can portray the threat of the temptation to confuse art and real life singled out in one character and sentenced to death (Rancire, 2008b: 240). Woolf, however, is only able to conclude that the writer as healthy schizophrenic is an impossible figure. Her schizophrenic character Rhoda, according to Rancire, dreams of breaking the fences of individual subjectivity and embracing the haecceities of impersonal life (Rancire, 2008b: 248). She, too, is sentenced to death she dies in a single sentence that has no story but is merely a speech act that announces her as dead. Killing off the schizophrenic who suffered from a dream of free will that only comes when the fiction of individuality is destroyed did not, however, save the artist (Rancire, 2008b: 248). This is the paradox of art: in order to reorder the sensible world and to introduce new possibilities in the ways of being, ways of doing, and ways of saying that are possible in it, its aesthetic enunciations must make use of the same ordering logics that foreclose new possibilities of life. In this way, it is always an act of violence that, for example, differentiates and individualizes the author as such through diagnosing the radical trace of democracy the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

indifference to difference as a disease in a character who then must suffer a literary death. To negotiate the authorial paradox through the violent act of reinscribing the ordering logics of genre need not be the only way to position the image of art. To exploit this paradox might be to emphasize the ambiguity inherent in imageness, even as it positions the author and the subject of a work in a less certain position in relation to the work of art. Foucault has pointed out that the aesthetic philosophy of the modern artist tries to escape the blackmail of enlightenment by the same logic that would create an authoritarian alternative. The dandy of the nineteenth century, for Foucault, exemplifies an aesthetics of ambiguity: The dandy combines the indolent and the fashionable with the pleasure of causing surprise in others while never showing any himself (Foucault, 1984: 40-43). There is a queer aesthetics that has a sense of the history of aesthetic ambiguity as the site of new possibilities of social experience. As with Oscar Wilde, whose social critique through Dorian Grays many ambiguous sins was effectively used to accuse him of crimes against nature, this guarantees nothing good. Nonetheless, aesthetic ambiguity is the site of a certain politics of aesthetics. The promiscuous text or the excess meaning of the image hint at the instability of any given distribution of the sensible. The political force of queer aesthetics lies not in a specific announcement but in an effort that keeps ambiguity at play in relation to social subjectivity, or perhaps even in an effort that merely remembers that aesthetic ambiguity is sometimes possible. The promiscuous text: reading ambiguity One of the queerest images I have seen or rather struggle to see is a portrait of transgender performer Amanda Lepore by fashion/celebrity photographer David LaChapelle. LaChapelles images are usually recognizable as commentary on the extremes and excesses of the celebrity culture in which they take part: they are all bright colors and shiny textures, populated by a famous face or a vacuous model coated in orange fake-tan or accentuated with plastic diamonds. A half-naked glistening body in a moment of dramatic (and often violent) action among absurd and highly-constructed backdrops; children in wigs and makeup, oily aged muscle-men, and massive blow-up hotdogs are commonplace in LaChapelleland. The photo, Amanda as Andy Warhols Marilyn, is a fantastically clever, circular image that portrays a series of images until it seems to disappear into its own void of meaning a postmodern ouroboros. The portrait features one of LaChapelles favorite models, the self-proclaimed number one transsexual in the world, Amanda Lepore. It depicts Lepore portraying Andy Warhols famous image Marilyn Monroe (1962). If the yellow wig, smooth blue backdrop and bright red lips do not clue one in that the reference is to, not Monroe herself, but Warhols print, black register marks are stamped on the side of Lepores face, dripping slightly down her cheek and neck. The photo

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

is immediately comical. Lepore is known for her extreme body modifications accentuated with her hyper-glam style (most notable are her enormous lips, petite sharp nose, large hard breasts, and full, round buttocks). She has described her look as a mix between Marilyn Monroe and Jessica Rabbit; that the latter is a cartoon is appropriate. Others have called her an exaggerated Jane Mansfield, a human art project, and a buxom, blond transgender icon, among many other things (Maldonado, 2008; New York Blade, 2007; Romano, 2004; Cahalan and Otis, 2007). If one did not know her as a transgendered person, one would certainly recognize that she has formed her unusual look through intensive plastic surgery. Lepore became well known through New York City nightlife culture in the nineteen-nineties, and she continues to work as a host, promoter, and drag performer in New York. She represents the importance of New York City life, nightlife, and art to what we understand today as gay culture.

Amanda as Andy Warhol's Marilyn, 2002. Image Courtesy Fred Torres Collaborations

But this gay cultural contextualization does not in itself make the image queer. Instead, it is its confounding ambiguity, indeed the way it teeters on the edge of legibility that exemplifies what I have detailed as imageness, following Rancire. To put it further in context, the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

image first appeared at a 2002 show of LaChapelle's photography titled All American. The following year it was printed on the side of a massive shopping bag as part of an art installation in the promenade of Rockefeller Center that was commissioned by Montblanc North America to promote the opening of a new retail store. The installation consisted of six ten-foot tall shopping bags, each decorated by a contemporary artist. LaChapelle's contribution featured Amanda as Andy Warhol's Marilyn on one face of the bag, and on the opposite face of the bag an image titled All American. In this image Lepore appears on the floor, she wears only high heels, and she is being crushed by a giant cheeseburger. At the opening, LaChapelle told The New York Observer that the bag was a tribute to Warhol, and that my dream was always to work for Andy Warhol. Amanda has always wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. She's the Marilyn Monroe of transsexuals. She never wanted to be a woman in the traditional sense (DiGiacomo, 2003). The tribute was the fantasy of both Lepore and LaChapelle, but then it was also the portrayal of the violence of consumption. I'm a vegetarian, and the idea is that we spend so much time shopping and consuming that it's a never-ending cycle. The photo also was shown that year at the Moscow Photo Festival and was included in the retrospective show Artists and Prostitutes 19852005. It is printed in LaChapelle's third book of photographs called Heaven and Hell. If it does not signify some movement in art, or if it cannot be discussed based on tracking its cultural impact, we can at least say that represents something important to LaChapelles artistic statement. At first blush, the image might read as a cheeky post-modern gimmick, devoid of any real meaning; or else, at most, it might depict the very excess of post-industrial globalized postmodernist affect, the boundless result of democracy as consumer culture (see Rancire, 2008). In all of its playfulness, however, the aesthetic of LaChapelles photograph is utterly queer, as is the topology of gay culture in the twentieth century that it maps. It is an image about imageness, where art consumes icons of celebrity culture as a way of participating in the vast proliferation of images in popular culture from which it is supposedly excluded that is, it represents the image as a marker of the social. The image portrays the potential threat of imageness itself: that it will continue to speak out of turn, to show up uninvited, to come alive, like some monstrous undead creature, at the very worst time. The illegibility of the image, the image of meaninglessness or depressing excess, to borrow from Rancires critique of the frames of postmodernity, is a way to contain the threat that the image poses its own promiscuity and its radical democratic accessibility (Rancire, 2008). LaChapelles photo is primarily a performance of Warhols print, which itself plays on the ambiguity of appropriation. Warhol's Marilyn was self-consciously derivative, merely reproducing an image and claiming it as its own. But the image was of many things: an iconic, beautiful Hollywood star; a celebrity who died from the excesses of the life that she represented; and finally, that twentieth-century phenomenon,

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

celebrity itself. Warhol's print neither honored the life of Marilyn Monroe, nor memorialzed her death. It was not an homage to the photographer, nor a representation of the original print as an artistic product. It refused to participate in any narrative to which the original photograph was affixed. Instead, it unfixed the image as a celebrity icon that circulated in the social world through the medium of popular culture, and it questioned whether the films and photos that featured Marilyn Monroe portraying some fictive character were any different from the replication of a carefully constructed personality who was a celebrity because of those works while also being a work of fiction herself. Warhol's use of the Marilyn icon while refusing to participate in the Marilyn narrative violated, in some small way, the rules of the economy of popular culture in its interest in celebrity. Celebrity status was as unstable as it was fantastic, such that it needed to be repeated, rehearsed, and reenacted constantly in public discourse in order to distract from its utter failure. The celebrity icon is the mediating placeholder that keeps pop culture from becoming an inculturation. Warhol's Marilyn was then something else from the actress or even the woman Norma Jean. It was, through appropriation, Warhol's own celebrity status and Warhol's own making (Flatley, 1996: 101-4, 109). It was a poetics of derivation whereby the ability to appropriate was equated with a claim to the economy of celebrity on the grounds that popular culture required the mass proliferation and repetition of certain images/texts at the cost of any one entity's claim of complete ownership or authorship. Warhol made use of the paradoxical logic of celebrity to claim insider status in the world of popular culture: the more fake something is, the more real it is. When something is an overt construction, transparently false, it becomes the prototype of itself, performing, as it were, its own blueprint. Amanda as Andy Warhols Marilyn Monroe exploits the ambiguous relationship of artist and subject to the work of art by making the subject of the work one who performs the image of the work of art. The image of a woman adored for her beauty becomes the image made monstrous, threatening its ability to be appropriated, resignified, indeed re-imaged. Lepore's swollen cherry-red lips hang open revealing flawless white clenched teeth. She looks through the feathery eyelashes that crowd around her eyes. They are barely open under the weight of heavy blue eye shadow. Above her left eye the messy uneven register marks are too densely printed, turning a soft shadow into something more of a bruise. The same black ink stains the edges of her perfect canary-yellow wig, dulls the shine of her lips, and drips down her neck like a hasty mark of illicit graffiti that announces the escape of the vandal. She brings to life Warhols crude silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe and then gazes into the lens with a look of contempt and humor a gaze of anger and vindication. The black ink that stains the perfect primary colors of her face become bruises, dirt, and dried blood. She is the victim left for dead who surprise shows up long after to say that the job was not finished after all. But while she presents herself with an aggressive direct eye contact that prevents a viewer from looking at her without being stared at him or

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

herself, she is entirely relaxed, threatening no movement, and suggesting no immediate future action. She presents herself as presence in a present that is not her own. She is The Image, that vague formulation that presents scenes in a story when it is the property of fiction or evidence of the crime if it is the property of the detective's file. Or rather it is the image of the promiscuity of imageness, the infidelity of the image to stay in its place: in time, in genre, in the order of things. Rancire has constructed a theory of 'the image' by which he does not refer to any particular mode of its enunciation. The image is a function within the sensible world, and the sensible world is not merely the static material world of people and objects. It is the thinkable, the sayable, the doable; it thereby constitutes the possibilities of aesthetic enunciations. If something affects a reordering of the sensible world, as Rancire says happens when politics take place, it is because there is an order inherent to the social world, which he calls the 'partition of the sensible' or the 'distribution of the sensible.' The sensible distribution is most evident when a disruptive force insists upon its reordering, or insists upon the possibility of its reordering. Indeed, these may be the same thing: the reordering of the sensible and the possibility of the reordering of the sensible have the same formative logic, which is the imagining of the distribution of the sensible as such. At any given time, the social world is ordered through the distribution of roles, positions, types, classes, occupations, and so on. It is an image of a whole in relation to parts that allow people to imagine themselves as subjects with a place in the social order. An individual acts and behaves in ways that are audible and visible only through these parts: otherwise, they may make noise which is meaningless or they may portray something which is, in effect, imperceptible. The possibilities for 'doing, saying, and being' are contingent upon the partitioning of the sensible world that includes speaking/doing 'subject positions.' While entirely real, this is a process of 'aesthetic enacting' that entails constructing a fiction based on what Rancire refers to as various 'logics.' The phrase 'the image' in its authoritative singularity is not meant to suggest some type of image-template, which, to theorize, would be the foundation of any real image. It is a function within the sensible distribution, meaning that it is a way of being, doing, or saying that happens through an aesthetic enunciation, which could be textual or visual. The image can consolidate possibilities into a representative 'as is.' It can authorize actions or organize structures through the performative 'is as such.' It can question those image effects through destabilizing its own imageness. The point is that the image is a function of the sensible order, and as such participates in ordering. The image is also the point at which the equality of things confronts the heterogeneity of things. In other words, radical egalitarianism does not lead to a harmonious that is to say homogenous body, but must instead be re-imagined as a whole in which things take part

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

through the partitioning of their functions (see Ranciere, 2009a). Since this is never a static re-imagining, it happens through functions that require its constitutive logics. The image is always a formation of reimagining, but one that only happens through the logic of the distribution or partition of the sensible within which it is an aesthetic event. The image can reify the dominant order of the sensible world, or it can radically call it into question, but only by participating in the foundational logic of the partitioning of that world. There's a certain play in the work of Rancire's discussion of aesthetics of the fictive or literary in relation to history, or the science of the truth of things or the doctrines of the social order. One could hardly say that some fantastic tale is no less real than some formal account of things, nor would Rancire go so far as to suggest that all 'real' or 'truthful' accounts are merely fictions. But he frequently gestures towards the latter, and does so, I would argue, in order to ask how some things are understood as real or true and other things as fantasy or fiction. This process hinges on the tradition of the contempt for art, a contempt that we see in Plato's denunciation of the trickery of mimesis, or Wordsworth's alternative to aristocratic 'poetic diction,' or the deflation of the National Endowment for the Arts in the nineteen-nineties. It is a contempt for the ambiguous function of art in relation to politics, which might be to say the function of art as social ambiguity. The anxiety of the effect of the fictive on the real seems to always be based on a certain confusion of the use of art. But it also constitutes the possibility of the confusion of the fictive or imaginary as serious (when it should be merely play) or the confusion of art with real life. Art is not a thing in itself, but a categorical error in negotio. This is why the aesthetic regime makes art always an art of ambiguity; non-ambiguous art ceases to be art and must be considered something else. Amanda as Andy Warhols Marilyn suggests that Warhol's queer appropriation was also marked by a certain failure of ambiguity to evade the consolidating effects of the image. But its queer politics is something less certain. LaChapelle's photograph portrays the queer notion that the promiscuity of the image is the promise of politics. It paradoxically recalls the uncomfortable impossibility of any police order to fully consolidate image and meaning, or language and image. When acts of resistance fetishize anarchy by imagining the threat of disorder, it makes available that threat in the sensible world and sends it, as it were, on its way. The suggestion of disorder has resonance only in relation to the contingency of order; the less contingent order is, the less useful or available are the suggestions of disorder. Queerness resists identification, choosing to play at the borders of the visible, attempting to assert the possibility of the unidentified or misidentified subject and to eroticize the threat that an action or condition may displace a subject from an identity/category. This is not to privilege the will of the subject but to draw out the fact that the logic of the police eludes representation. To represent

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

queerness is to represent police logic in a way that preconditions disruptive possibilities. The image is privileged in this configuration because it is always in excess of its own meaning. Anarchy is the absence of meaning. To fantasize emancipation as escaping a system is to invoke the logic of police as border control. The politics of aesthetics attempts to create a logic of queerness as vacant positionality based on opposition to the ordering logics of normativity. Normativity always fails to order fully there is always an excess, a logical remainder. Excess is the language of queer logic. Before making claims to equality or disindentification, which must happen by first acknowledging the dominant sensible order. Queer politics of aesthetics show that the compromises of ordering mean that possibilities of reordering exist. The politics of aesthetics strives to create conditions for disruptive assertions, sometimes by showing, simply, that ordering logics need border control; that meaning exceeds itself; that bodies are visible when they occupy a place; that the invisible, unsayable, and inaudible exist; that there are only surfaces of things. Queer appropriation makes images that linger precariously at the boundaries by invoking ambiguity. The less categorizable the work of art, the greater it impinges upon the politics of the aesthetic enunciations through which it was articulated. It may not demand a redistribution of the sensible, but it may create the conditions of possibility for that demand to be made in the sensible social world. The function of a straightforward portrait of Amanda Lepore might allow one to read, through her transgendered identity, an image of visibility that contests marginalization. Instead, her body modification and identity are aligned with processes of image-making that exist in aesthetic discourses, such as fine art photography and performance art. Visibility, it seems, is only one way of partaking in the visible: an alternative is to allow the image to speak to its own unwieldy, uncontained excess that reveals that visibility is less often concerned with the truth of things than about redrawing the boundaries of what is allowed to count. In questioning the political efficacy of identity politics, Jasbir Puar has remarked that identity is but one effect of affect, and wonders what a new queer politics might look like when we reframe the debate in terms of affective politics. If we transfer our energy, our turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of politics of the open end, might we unabashedly stumble upon? (Puar, 2007: 215). A politics that is not grounded in the truth or essence of a biological identity might allow us to get outside of debates over which marginalized populations are most precarious and to instead see the way that those figures who suffer the violence of illegibility also represent the threat of those queer figures who resist the consolidating effect that visibility violently imparts. The visible, sayable, and doable, are the possible aesthetic enunciations that circulate in a social world which is already the realm of the political, and every aesthetic gesture is either allowed or must insist upon its legibility. Amanda as Andy Warhols Marilyn makes visible operations of imageness and elides visibility as such.

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Daniel Williford is a graduate student in the department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bibliography Benjamin, W. (2008), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings On Media, Cambridge: Harvard UP. Cahalan, S. & Otis, G.A. (2007), Ugly people are models, too, New York Post, 2 December, accessed 12 December 2008, http://www.nypost.com/seven/12022007/news/regionalnews/ugly_peo ple_are_models_too_148122.htm?CMP=EMC-email_edition&DATE =12022007 Chambers, S.A. (2005), The politics of literarity, Theory and Event, vol. 8, no. 3. Dasgupta, S. (2008), Art is going elsewhere and politics has to catch it: an interview with Jacques Ranciere, Krisis, no. 1, pp. 70-76. DiGiacomo, F. et al. (2003), Jazzy forever, The New York Observer, 9 November, accessed 12 December 2008, http://www.observer.com/2003/jazzy-forever Flatley, J. (1996), Warhol gives good face: publicity and the politics of prosopopoeia, in J. Doyle et al. (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol, Durham: Duke UP, pp. 20-30. Foucault, M. (1984), What is Enlightenment? The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, New York: Pantheon, pp. 32-50. Lafreniere, S. (2006), Amanda LePorre [sic] interviewed by Steve LaFreniere, Sterile Cowboys, accessed 13 October 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBTAG-cJxMI Maldonado, J. (2008), Amandaleporeonline.com, accessed 12 December 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20061108071320/http:// amandaleporeonline.com New York Blade (2007), Editorials: diversity inspires, New York Blade, 16 February. Puar, J. (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke UP. Rancire, J. (2004b), The politics of literature, SubStance, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 10-24. ---. (2006), The Politics of Aesthetics, New York: Continuum.

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

---. (2006b), Film Fables, New York: Berg. ---. (2006c), Hatred of Democracy, trans. S. Corcoran, London: Verso. ---. (2007), The Future of the Image, New York: Verso. ---. (2008), Jacques Rancire and indisciplinarity: an interview, trans. G. Elliot, Art & Research, vol. 2, no. 1. ---. (2008b), Why Emma Bovary had to be killed, Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 233-48. ---. (2009a), Notes on the photographic image, Radical Philosophy, July/August, pp. 8-15. ---. (2009b), Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity Press. ---. (2009c), Should democracy come? ethics and politics in Derrida, in C. Cheah & S. Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political, Durham: Duke UP, pp. 274-88. Romano, T. (2004), New Years weekend, The Village Voice, 21 December, accessed 12 December 2008, http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-12-21/nyc-life/new-year-s-weekend

borderlands ejournal 2009

15

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s .n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

AFTERWORD

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside (Now Voyager) ... on misunderstanding Rancire and Queer Theory

Adrian Rifkin
Goldsmiths, London, UK.

So what I tried to do is to substitute teleological concepts and historical necessity, by categories that help us to understand the entanglement of different logics (Rancire, 2008).

It seems simple enough, and it sounds a little like the aims of QT, but let's now move on: What can we learn from the chapters that precede this conclusion? Or rather put it this way: what have they shown us, given us to see? I don't mean this in the sense of having demanded and then had, or not had, an epiphany; nor in the sense of requiring the miraculous, a conversion or an overturning. Yet the miraculous would indeed be if we had been taught nothing at all yet, after our reading, had set off somewhere else, turned aside or simply drifted off shore. Off shore in the breeze that blows across queer theory's shores, a zephyr named Rancire? (Botticellis Venus, blood and sperm and foam, some queer beauty came from this mixing yet strange is strong enough; enigma and queer are not the same word. Jean Genets thief arm in arm with Louis-Gabriel Gauny, treachery and fidelity together, though which is which we may never know? JR and QT side by side could be left enigmatic.) Beachcombing, to find a message, a bottle washed up with an enigmatic curl of paper bearing the name Rancire; or a footprint that would match our idea of his; queer Cinderellas of the demos, hoping our prince has come to these crowded shores, through their turbulent and dangerous currents? As if

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

either he or we were of the sans-parts; we have part enough in the formal, public discourse of the not included, the noise and the babble that is becoming sense or too much sense passes through our privilege. (After all as a number of these essays point out, QT has never been more popular as a mode of academic procedure indeed this book is a moment in its separation from gay sexual and gender specificity, and marks a leaning towards a philosophy that has never broached these concepts as its primary or even secondary archive. Queer theory comes to the shores of the workers' dreaming, of Emma Bovary dressing her illusions and desires for the sake of literature, and Western movies; bringing gifts without a future, splintered mirrors of identity, Bruce Lee dressed up as Jacotot, bareback porn and the never forgotten insults of the Church fathers, the travails of the Cities of the Plain.) Or might we have trekked inland, to cross the plains and foothills and even mountains or deserts of queer theory, refreshed from our moment on the shore, where were the message or the footprint or the breeze, or simply desolated to lose its freshness? (So which will we comb: Bersani's rectum, is it a grave? Or, that of videaste Steve Reinke; he declares that his is not. In Reinke's collection My Rectum is not a Grave video art has rarely come odder than this assemblage of folk fantasies, oxymoronic poetics of the vile, the beautiful and the unexpected. It unfolds in the space that QT insistently invokes, the space of separations between self and identity. But even as we see this, it no longer connects with theory, queer or other; beyond and beside the partition of the sensible may not be a concept at all, rather something that happens and that we sometimes see. Shall we wear our trousers rolled, or connect nothing with nothing, on the sandy shore of poetics, of turning aside?) (Bersani, 2000; Reinke, 2007). This metaphor on shores is extended, but at least it is not mixed. It consistently regards the oddity of a translation, that of Aux bords du politique into On the Shores of Politics. Of course all translations are odd and this one at least respects the plural. It's true that 'au bord de la mer' does mean beside the sea or on the water's edge, but it is impossible to imagine 'aux bords de la mer,' and, in French, all the other maritime meanings of 'bord' are resolutely singular. On the edges (of the abyss, of politics), beside the edges, alongside, on the brink, just outside, just before - I can multiply the possible translations but it's hard to bring 'shores' to mind. And yet 'shores' it is and because of this title, of Rancire's book in English, queer theory too gets to have its shores. Not shoals, nor reefs, nor shallows, not even edges - just shores, and now what to do on them? What or where are the shores of Rancire, does he too have shores? These, perhaps,

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

are the questions answered by our volume, from queer theory's point of view. In a gesture of a necessary and sometimes constructive narcissism the answer seems to be that these shores are in part co-terminus, that they emerge in view indeed only where they are so, and yet they are never identical. Their vistas open up to one another a possibility of reconfiguring if not the self, but then the processes or moments of subjectivation that occur in a being given-to-see one another in any singular moment of coexistence; narcissism, then, in seeing only oneself, but possibly anew. At the same time there is here, potentially, a wretched irony, for this can all too readily be brought about through two self-defeating modes of political and aesthetic formation; first the formulation of a queer canon and together with it a concomitant canon of Rancire, twinned terrains of mutual visibility that may become fixed as such, frozen as exemplary modes of the freezing of the sensible. Second the freezing of JR and QT in assumptions of their manifest differences, then of entrenching their overcoming as a mode of procedure. For example that QT is often psychoanalytic, and that JR is not, which has here been explored with some complexity. Of course a Q theorist such as Didier Eribon is as far from both Psychoanalysis and JR as one could imagine someone being distant from two such different moments in the turning of contemporary speculations on subjectivation (Eribon 2004); and that this in itself might make them seem closer by a parallax effect. But then again it might split them on the ground of Judith Butler and the insult in drawing our attention to the difference between the insult offered to the gay subject on the one hand and, on the other, the desire of the sans-part, the worker poet, to dream, which does not entail an insult a priori. The insult is not substitute for exclusion when, as an insult, it is constitutive of the one who offers it. This relation is not quite the same as that of the complex processes of othering and misrecognition that pass between the professional littrateurs and the worker poets. And again, what if we were to switch slightly our assumptions of what it is that psychoanalysis does and what it is that some texts do that might unexpectedly have characteristics of the psychoanalytic. For instance that Lee Edelmans structural recourse to Lacanian concepts constitutes a psychoanalytic discourse could be open to question (Edelman, 2004). Its curious, but when I read some Freud and some Pontalis and some Kristeva, to take but three names, or Lacan himself, I do not see a principle of the foreclosure of the future of a kind envisioned by Edelman as the necessity of the queer disinvestment in the social; nor in this disinvestment can I agree that this one reading of the death drive can allow us to constitute a negation that is the negating power of sexuality as such, as the character of queer that is not, finally, a tautology (Kristeva, 1987).

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

If I am not sure that Edelmans text does anything that psychoanalysis does as a practice in the world, than I am also more or less certain that his negation as a social practice derives from a formal strategy of the cultural avant-garde as it was once embodied in Italian futurism or Dadaism. That is, it sets out to destroy a particular humanism of completion or of the replete. Possibly it also has something to do with Theodor Adornos concept of the work of art as distinct from the work of culture and the significance of modern music in figuring the social at the limit of its being comprehensible. This notion gives Edelmans text a certain authority in its exploitation of Lacanian discourse, and the operations that it thus effects, but one that is distinct from its being 'psychoanalytic.' JR, meanwhile, writes texts that perform some of the functions of psychoanalysis. Its tempting to suggest, without suggesting a rule, that one of the processes with which analytic practice does not engage is that of foreclosure and rule-making and in this it could hardly be more unlike Edelmans No Future, or the ensemble of Bersani who makes self-shattering into an epistemological rule of kinds. JR likewise, in his sense of the singularity of events and moments and distributions, evades the foreclosure of methodologies and theoretical preferences while favouring conflict and working through conflicts and, at the same time, holding the reader or the spectator in engaging their autonomy even from his own positions and specific engagements. Jacotisme is possibly the only enduring principle of all his work, together with a poetic mode of seizing upon singularity as well as disagreement (with Braudel, for example in Les mots de l'histoire) that leaves his texts open to an affective discharge of the reader, a form of love. I am almost tempted to say that it doesn't matter if you don't get it; a pity, but there are plenty of other philosophers who do offer rules. In this sense its proper to think of his writing as having much more in common with an understanding of psychoanalysis as a social practice than anything in the rebarbative prose of Edelman. But this does not necessarily make him any the queerer, more or less, although it might lead to a self-estrangement of some of the methodologies we think as queer. In his Thalassa of 1922-28 Sandor Ferenczi writes of the prepuce as a form of womb, '... a reduced replica of the intra-uterine situation (Ferenczi, 2002). Inevitably this clinical insight leads to a strange figure of what is in and what is outside of itself and whatever it is that penetration does for or to the one who penetrates. In its old fashioned way, this is a queer set of ideas, just as were and still are those of Freud concerning infantile sexuality. Sometimes I think that these kinds of formulation of a sexual subjectivation are also forms of the distribution of the sensible. Once seen, as figures of a possible enunciation of the subject; a redistributing of the sensible in a way that renders any form of gender specificity queerly improbable and in this enables a means of understanding the possibility of a freer

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

subjectivation more generally. It is this freedom exactly that grows out of a holding of the past as a capacity to enable the future of a subject out of the exacerbation of the here and now, the moment of seeing, of enunciation. JR and Psychoanalysis in this sense share a sense of the future in a non-speculative and non-humanist discourse, and we might also go on then to say that the future of the worker poets turns out to have been what JR has written about them. In the work of the American social historians of modernisation they appear as a statistical blip in the teleology of class formation, in Rancire they remain to be read. The future is an ineluctable effect of our being alive, though what is the order of occurrence is hard to prescribe, and not a matter of the application of a rule that there is no rule. Deferred action may be as queer a concept of time as we can imagine, the possibility of the next moment, of redistribution. Where would these two forces, JR and QT, intersect in such a way as to undo their becoming canon in their intersection; to just drift into a new sharing of the fields of theory and philosophy and even action; how will a seeing-wrong occur, how will Rancire and Queer Theory throw one another's gaze aside, to see anew? Can they do it without the help of Lacan, or Derrida, and all the attendant risks of the highly polished use of hyperbole and oxymoron that so often attend their influence? QT, in its typically relentless insistence on its perfected anti-essentialism and non-belonging to identity or, indeed, any pattern of identification, sometimes seems to commit serial Cartesianism in the absolute authority of this self-dispersal. Best to admit that this is not prima-facie such a bad thing, this tendency to becomingCartesian, no guilt need attach to it, for what is there that cannot be queered? Being at once everywhere and nowhere, the queer illocution is as likely to swing to entropy as to singularity, and while this is difficult to admit, it is obviously tempting to imagine that the oneoffness of JR, his non-methodology, could offer a cure or an antidote to the self by which it is inevitably possessed, a self-reconciliation. So as JR and QT are trying to reach an arrangement, in the difficult world of aesthetics and politics that we both inhabit, what more could they want, what more could have been done here, even if it were only to loosen the new liaison just as it has been imagined? Of course in suggesting these things it is not, I guess, my intention to foreclose on the achievements of this volume, but rather to drift to an elsewhere that they have opened; the meeting of JR and QT is, ideally, also to be a parting of ways, a separation, or an impossible closeness - irritable as we have seen. Cast them both in a role and see how its been going:
Jerry: Shall we just have a cigarette on it? Charlotte: Oh Jerry, don't let us ask for the moon, we have the stars.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Now Voyager - of which these lines are drawn from its closing moments - could be an allegory of difficulty of subjectivation in the process that has been undertaken here in matchmaking between JR and QT. An impossible marriage takes place that is not in anyway a legitimate marriage, other than that it is sanctioned by a common love. But of what, as it all turns out? (Now Voyager, 1942) Here the voice of the sans-part hardly emerges from a predictable space, that of the proletarian for example, from below. Rather it's from the crme de la crme of Bostonian society, from the prototypical narrative of the ugly duckling, the sans-part who indeed owns the greater part of the space that does not allow her visibility; for even that is not enough to be a 'proper' self in the shadow of her mother's tyranny. And if she, Charlotte, wants to be a woman, and have a child, the child is already there, the child of another woman who is not a proper mother. And if she wants to be a beautiful woman and to have a husband, she can be so and do so only if she sets him, Jerry, aside, and, taking the already living child, his, and with her the stars, not the moon, she has to imagine herself more than the limits of her own desires, beside them and beyond. We see this, and that is all. Nor is this an ontology, but a mode of the intrigue, as JR would call it, an intrigue of endless musical innervations against which flicker the minutiae of Charlottes inner life, stark contrasts of black and white. It is the stifling police of the family drama that is split apart in psychotherapy, the intrusion of a psychoanalytic discourse into the kind of stuffy but violent oppressions that gave it reason in Freud's Vienna. This sundering, splitting of the family and recombination of Charlotte's depression with that of Jerry's child, Tina, generates the perverse generational production of the excluded part as a combination of visibilities where a kind of psychoanalysis and a kind of partition seem to need one another - pretty much! In writing this I am looking here and there, for something that looks like a partition of the sensible, or a division of the visible as I sometimes tactically mutate it but which is not what JR has seen; and I am looking for a perverseness that is not quite in queer theory. Even sometimes when I look at what JR has seen, I dont quite get it. Its not so much the scene at the end of the bus journey in Europa 51, where Bergman is undone, that I see as he saw, but rather the very closing shots; here the people whom she has seen at the outset of her journey into pathology have left her in the sanatorium, where she has decided to stay, and where they had come to meet her at her hoped for departure. It is they, not her family, who care, and looking back they can see her standing at the window of the first floor of the building. It is like levitation, a lay sainthood, a relic in a troubled present of an unwanted past, that redistributes the relation between a politics of the social and its manifest desires and purposes. And this is queer enough for me, queerly predicting the end of Pasolinis Theorem of 1968 where the maid floats above the earth and weeps, queer enough to make the queer seem normal in its way (Rosseline, 1952; see Rancire, 1992).

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

(A cartoon, distant, during the gay-blackmail spy scandal of Britain in 1961, the Vassall affair: two middle aged civil servants walk arm in arm and one says to the other But didnt you notice anything queer about him?' 'But no my dear', the other replies, 'he seemed perfectly normal to me. Now, I wonder, was this conventionally homophobic caricature after all a small splitting in the field of the visible, a moment when the sans-part was seen to speak? I recall it with affection, it helped me, but at the time I did not know how, or with what. Until then the word queer and the word normal had never occurred to me as a possible juxtaposition, though I already knew that they had a number of difficult implications for me. Was the insult an ironic redistribution of the see-able? )

So the substitutions go on and on, as our volume has suggested. For me not Rineke Djikstra and her girl on the beach in Kolobrzeg Poland, July 26, 1992, but Wolfgang Tillmans' image of a skinhead peeing on a green office chair; not Mallarm's involutions, but David Wojnarowicz's unmitigated fury in his Close to the Knives (1991); pensive forms of anger and angry thinking through what it is to desire a part; we look in different directions, sometimes and sometimes not, so these are not quite substitutions but other subjectivations, turning away from the letter of the text, touching upon who and where we are in the world, the theatres of a self; discovering a capacity not to have been stultified, and if it is too late for this, then there is nothing queer about it at all. At the same time these spaces of subjectivation, they are a condition of something I would call queer in its gayer sense, invested in or setting out from the specific sexual identities that asked for queer to undo themselves from a self-inducing suffocation. There is no solution.
Oh Jerry, don't let us ask for the moon, we have the stars. Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

AR is a professor of Art Writing in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, London. He first edited the work of Jacques Rancire in Voices of the People (with Roger Thomas), (Routledge, 1987), and he is author of Ingres Then, and Now, (Routledge, 2000). His most recent article is 'Dancing years, or writing as a way out', in Art History, 32-4, September 2009. His web site is www.gai-savoir.net Bibliography Bersani, L. (1987), 'Is the rectum a grave? October, vol. 43, Winter, pp. 197-222. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham: Duke University Press.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Eribon, D. (2004) [1999], Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, originally Rflexions sur la question gay, trans. M. Lucey, Duke University Press. ---. (2005), Echapper la psychanalyse, Paris. Ferenczi, S. (2002), Thalassa, Psychanalyse des origines de la vie sexuelle, Paris: Payot. Jordan, M. (2000), The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kristeva, J. (1987), Soleil Noir, dpression et mlancholie, Paris: Gallimard. Now Voyager (2002) [1942], dir. Irving Rapper, perf. Bette Davis & Paul Henreid (Charlotte and Jerry), music by Max Steiner, Warner DVD. Rancire, J. (1992), Courts voyages au pays du peuple, Paris. ---. (2008), 'Art is going elsewhere and politics has to catch it: an interview with Jacques Rancire, Krisis, no. 1, accessed 11 October 2009, http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2008/06/sudeep-dasguptainterviews-jacques.html Reinke, S. (2007), My Rectum is Not a Grave, to a Film Industry in Crisis. Rossellini, R. (1952), Europa 51.

borderlands ejournal 2009

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 3, 2009

REVIEW

The Re-turn to the Other: In Search of New Ontologies of International Relations


Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other, London: Routledge, 2007. Louiza Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Anatoli Ignatov
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

This essay places Carl Schmitt, Anthony Burke, and Louiza Odysseos into critical conversations about the structural relation between global politics and the production of otherness. Burke and Odysseos qualify Schmitts friend/enemy distinction by rethinking the complex relays between security, subjectivity and ethics. Once the 2008 US presidential election entered its final weeks, it took an increasingly negative turn through a series of intensified personal attacks by the candidates. Republican contender John McCain, his running mate Sarah Palin and countless surrogates on the right joined forces in a concerted campaign to portray his political opponent Barack Obama as Anti-American, exotic, unsafe, and the Other. As Election Day approached, at a town hall rally McCain found himself pressed to defend Obama as a decent family man and citizen against allegations that he is an Arab. McCains response, limited to saying he is not an Arab, was booed and jeered by his own supporters and later praised by the media. It was not until former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Obama that an eminent public figure openly questioned what was wrong with being an Arab and why McCain suggested that an Arab (or a Muslim) and a decent family man were mutually exclusive.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

Over the course of several decades this figure of the Arab as what we are not has crystallized as the paradigmatic Other and the civilizational enemy of the West. In this respect, the McCain example points to one instance of the intensification of this tendency under the Bush administrations war on terror. In an antagonistic relation to a packaged set of differences (non-Christian, irrational, immoral, violence-prone, fanatic, backward), American national identity has been consolidated and a series of unpopular and often illegal securityrelated policies have been formulated. Islam has been associated with holy war, male domination, and terrorism, and the Arab has appeared as the perennial aggressor in a monumental clash of civilizations, as a suicide bomber, hijacker, or oily sheikh who sponsors terrorist networks. The items on these lists are interchangeable, functioning as metonymic substitutes in this discursive matrix of othering. Economies of otherness such as these have become structural features of international relations. They work to transform cultural into ontological differences and present the latter as signs of pathology and lack. This propensity to convert difference into Otherness to address the threat of our constitutive heteronomy and to assure the certainty of hegemonic identitiesexhibited by us both individually and collectivelyis not new (Connolly, 2002). It has structured the ontological premises of a long tradition of Western thought, including much of modern social science in debates about security, violence, colonialism, conflict, war and coexistence. Yet, in spite of the legacy of some key texts in philosophy, political theory and psychoanalysis, interrogating the self in relation to the Other (Hegel, Lacan, Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Taylor, Connolly), recently the effaced and silenced Other has spoken out in the field of international relations. This has occurred through critical engagements such as postcolonial scholarship (Fanon, 1967; Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1979), feminist approaches to international relations (Enloe, 2000; Gatens, 1996; Peterson, 1992; Sylvester, 2002; Tickner, 1992), peace and conflict studies (Galtung, 1990), and poststructuralist approaches to security studies (Campbell, 1998; Dalby, 1990; Dillon, 1989, 1996; Walker, 1988, 1995). What is at stake for this diverse set of theorists is that most IR discussions of the complex relays between security, identity and ethics are overlaid with a discourse that conceptualizes the Other in terms of a two pole relation of the same and the other, identity and otherness, which tend to slide into one another. On the one hand, this discourse positions the stranger and the foreigner as a threatening, underdeveloped, primitive and inferior being whose voice can be silenced and whose knowledge and humanity can be denied on the grounds of this inferiority. On the other hand, the Other is conceived as potentially amenable to the universal possibility already lodged in Europe. The dehumanized Other is either sacrificed or reinserted into Western civilization and the global politico-economic order through technologies of colonization, modernization, development, democratization, etc. Such modes of construction of otherness enable systems of exploitation exercised in the name of security and a

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

geopolitics designed to contain the allegedly anarchical and dangerous space of international politics. The new expanded edition of The Concept of the Political, by Carl Schmitt, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other, by Anthony Burke, and The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations, by Louiza Odysseos are three books that each, to different degrees and from different vantage points, engages this complex figuration of the Other. George Schwabs translation of the original 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political includes Schmitts 1929 essay The age of neutralizations and depoliticizations, a thoughtful foreword by Tracy Strong, and critical notes by Leo Strauss. It highlights Schmitts presentation of the selfother approach, in which the construction of a friend/enemy distinction serves as the condition of possibility of politics, security and national unity. Both Burke and Odysseos carry the Schmittian imperative to its limit. They seek to rethink Otherness by problematizing the ontological commitments of international relations theory, in terms of security and the centrality of modern subjectivity, respectively. Burkes subtle theoretical work enables the Other of security to find its way back in through a new ethic of transnational responsibility and reciprocity, which undermines the modern architectonic of sovereignty and the state. Odysseos, in turn, argues that this intersubjectivity, heteronomy and interdependence between Being and the world has always been there, whether we theorize it or not. IR literature in particular has overlooked the primacy of this interinvolvement. Read together, these three books will inform scholars working at the intersection of identity politics, critical security studies and global ethics. The revival of academic attention to the political thought of Carl Schmitt in international relations in recent years has been largely associated with its notable engagement by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2005) in his work on the intersection of the state of exception, law, sovereignty, and biopolitics. With the Bush presidency and its global war on terror, interest in Schmitt has continued to grow. The new issue of The Concept of the Political explores the relationship between politics, ethics, democracy, liberalism and the significance of the identification of an enemy as the authentic political form of state legitimation. In the book Schmitt voices his concern that the experience of the political, a field of ultimate authority and final sovereign decision-making, has been dissolved into the modern conjugation of democracy and liberalism. In his view, this devolution emphasizes never-decisive compromise, moral universalism and procedure over determination, antagonism and struggle; it eventually leads to the depoliticization of the world. Moreover, Schmitt contends that any attempt to save the political through the extension of the state to encompass all domains such as the economy, religion, and culture must collapse into the complete identity of state and society; it will blur the lines between public and private interests and render the assertion of a distinct political dimension impossible (2007: 22).

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

Asserting that the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political, Schmitt sets to restore the political by discovering and defining the specifically political categories through a simple criterion: that the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy (2007: 19, 25-6). The friend/enemy antithesis of the political denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation (2007: 26). It defines politics as a certain mode of relationality to others where the Other can at any time become enemy and stranger: The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible (2007: 27). Out of this avowedly simple criterion emerges a complex and nuanced understanding of the figure of the Other as the enemy. On the one hand, this distinction is actualized only in the extreme case of conflict, in the state of exception to the norm. Furthermore, in this sense, it is of key importance that the enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general or the private adversary whom one hates: An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship (2007: 28). Hence, the collective nature of the friend-enemy grouping, based upon the political principle of such intense and extreme antagonism, denies liberal claims to speak in the name of humanity and the possibility of convergence of humanitys interests into any mode of universal rationality (2007: 29, 54). The enemy is both decided upon by the state and constitutive of a being that takes the form of a shared commitment to a homogeneous form of national identity. The enemy as such is outside the state. On the other hand, Schmitt insists that the extreme case appears to be an exception does not negate its decisive character but confirms it all the more and that the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy (2007: 35, 67). In effect, the stakes of politics are so high that each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponents way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve ones own form of existence (2007: 27). What follows then, is that responsibility is best conceived as a mode of being that is related to the preservation of the state, which can be transcended only through the existential identification and negation of the Other as an enemy. In the process, politics becomes a defining characteristic of what is to be human; to diminish the political and lose the enemy means to diminish the clarity of belonging to a state that is essential to human existence. Finally, in spite of Schmitts assertion that the definition of the political suggested here neither favors war nor militarism, neither imperialism

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

nor pacifism, the real possibility of physical killing and the potential for war and fighting persist as the most salient feature of the human condition: What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived (2007: 33, 35). This concrete and real possibility of war is absolutely critical to the organization of the domain of politics: a world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics (2007: 35). Schmitts concept of the political may be called into question on multiple grounds. I will mention three of them here. First, simultaneously a strength and weakness, his simple and lucid articulation of the political reduces it to a one-dimensional antithesis of friend and enemy, conceptually distinct from other domains such as culture, the economy, and religion. Such a simplification remains highly controversial and radically insufficient to account for the complex, multi-faceted and relational nature of international politics. Second, despite Schmitts claim that, as a precondition for engaging with the political, existential conflict and the moment of identification of/against Otherness do not presuppose hatred of an enemy, the relationship to the friend seems to be compromised by the very clarity of the enemy. In fact, it is ambivalent who or what the friend is apart from that which may turn into the Other and the enemy or gets incorporated in the self. The fact that the Other is encountered conceptually as an enemy structures to a significant extent expectations of how future encounters will unfold. After all, there is no clear reason provided by Schmitt why the Other cannot be thought as a peace-minded stranger, exceeding the bounds of national unity rather than someone whose potential to pose a threat to ones very mode of being is always so imminent. Finally, a related question may be raised with regard to Schmitts passionate and even aggressive form of writing. His mode of writing promotes affective dispositions on the part of the reader that he attributes to the necessity of the state. Perhaps, it can be described as the intensification of the possibility of conflict through writing itself. Schmitt creates a certain aura of a state of emergency of interpretation that parallels and aggravates his insistence on a set of ontological premises of politics, permeated by existential insecurity and ever-present danger of war. Nevertheless, introducing The Concept of the Political to more students of international relations, philosophy and the social sciences in general is of high exegetical value as the text renders explicit a range of implicit and often uncritically accepted assumptions of Western political theory. In particular, within the field of international relations, it draws attention to the building block of realist ontologies of the state of nature, structured by the Schmittian imperative of survival and the relational schema of simultaneous identification and effacement of Otherness always already at play.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

This view is shared by Anthony Burke, who in Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other contends that when Schmitt articulated his vision of collectivities of friends and enemies engaged in an existential struggle for survival in the international realm, he accentuated an entrenched system of western security thought (2007: 14). This system is rooted in the political economy of sameness and the negative imagination of the Other, within which the works of Hobbes, Locke and Bentham can be identified as the most prominent examples (2007: 39). Specifically, Hobbes and Locke conceived the modern political community, driven by a desire for security, as an organic unity of sovereign and subject constituted by a primal existential estrangement from the Other of the criminal, the subversive, the Indian and the minority directly incorporating an image of violence, otherness and fear into the very basis of modern political life (2007: 14). In other words, the constitution of modern notions of sovereignty often relies on the subsumption and suppression of a number of linguistic, cultural and social differences; its unity and completeness is attained through the discursive construction of the Other as a figure of securitys outside: As the image of conflict is seemingly eliminated from the inside of the sovereign body, it is reconstituted as its essential and threatening outside, its very condition of possibility and thus its interior (2007: 39). Burke traces this complex web of rhetorical forces that form the negative image of the Other to Hobbes divisions between the commonwealth and the state of nature, reason and unreason, criminal and society, savage and civilized man; to Lockes backward Indian who failed to exploit the earth through labor in opposition to the rationality and industriousness of Western man; and to Benthams notion of progress as movement away from a savage, noneconomic Other (2007: 39-40, 46). This is how, according to Burke, by the beginning of the 19th century the temporal possibility for the modern economy and civilization was thus secured by a long chain of oppositions. All the elements of the ontological architecture of security sovereignty, the Other, geopolitics, economic man were in place and finding productive new articulations (2007: 41, 46). In this respect, gender is another repressed organizing principle for the modern architectonic of security, affecting securitys figuration of self and Other (2007: 12, 49). Burke turns to the insights of feminist scholars Ann Tickner (1992) and Christine Sylvester (2002) who argue that global security politics has been dominated by an image of hegemonic masculinity, sustained through its antagonistic relation to various representations of devalorized insecure and vulnerable gender identities. From this perspective, another axis, this time between masculine and feminine, is added to Burkes chain of analogous oppositions. It equates maleness with reason, activity, objective truth and the mind, and woman with passion, passivity, subjective truth and the body realms and values constructed as perpetually threatening, backward and disruptive (2007: 50). Security takes the form of a powerful signifier of an ideal political, economic and cultural order, opposed to others designated as inferior or

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

threatening bound into a dependent relation with insecurity so it can never escape it it must continue to produce images of insecurity in order to retain meaning (2007: 51). Thus, at the individual level, security forms a powerful mechanism of subjectivity, enacted through the constant interplay between images of mens participation in war and battle, a masculine, parochial and protective state, and a feminized citizenry, plagued by existential fear and insecurity. This gendered enactment of subjectivity becomes expressed in realist political discourse about the anarchy of the international system and the necessity of the state as a masculine force: in this discourse one that imagines certain economic modes (indigenous or agriculture-based) and forms of identification (sub-state and local) as backward, and often also unstable and threatening Order becomes analogous to the taming of woman and nature, of the feminized and demonized, irrational and emotional Other (2007: 51-2). Burkes probe into the gendered constitution of the identity of bodypolitic around the threat of the Other reveals that at the ontological foundation of the modern architectonic of the nation-state lies a promise of security that is never realized. In short insecurity is the very condition of the nation state as a structure or promise of Being (2007: 5). Burke identifies two interrelated aporias of security: the first, manifested by recent scholarly shifts of attention from the abstraction of the state to the corporeal dimension of the human; the second is a growing sense of the impossibility to sustain discursive claims to universality in the light of realist assertions that security must be purchased at the expense of the insecurity and suffering of an-Other (2007: 27-32). Concealed under luminous formulations of sovereignty, safety and freedom, security operates on the underside as a subterranean political economy of pain, suffering and death for some in order to become a condition of possibility for the existence, wellbeing and prosperity of others. Burke calls into question this very ontology of security as a defining condition of human existence and container of being, premised on the conceptualization of safety through Otherness and the invisible and rarely examined nexus between violence and being, security and insecurity. One of the main objectives of Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence is to challenge the form and process of our thought about security, politics, and ethics, an integral element of which is to avoid critical inquiry into this very form. Burke insists on the need to resist the continuing power of political ontologies (forms of truth and being) that connect security, sovereignty, belonging, otherness and violence in ways that for many appear like enduring political facts, inevitable and irrefutable they condition politics as such, forming a permanent ground, a dark substrata underpinning the very possibility of the present (2007: 68). Drawing on Foucaults work on power/knowledge, subjectivity, and governmentality, Burke uses empirical cases ranging across

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia and Australia to retheorize security as a form of power and political technology rather than as the principal container of politics. Security is redefined as a political technology that mobilizes two linked techniques of social production and regulation: totalizing power, of the kind exercised by states over vast areas, economies and populations; and individualizing power, which works at the level of individuals and souls, on their bodies and minds (2007: 5-6). In this new context, the question becomes how to refuse security as a technology of subjectivity that structures available possibilities for being and to open up aporetic possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society and the international that security seeks to imagine and police (2007: 53). A new critical approach is needed to refuse our limits and imagine an unthought beyond them and to think our way out of the discourse of absolute security towards a new mode of shared security (2007: 22, 63). Burke suggests that one such move can be pursued through a critical engagement with political theory and continental philosophy: Through a critical engagement with this thought, I aim to construct a political ethics based not in relations between insecure and separated identities mapped solely onto nation-states, but in relations of responsibility and interconnection that can negotiate and recognise both distinct and intertwined histories, identities and needs (2007: 68-9). At least three instances of this critical engagement need to be noted. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Burke explores various ways to think their respective histories and incommensurable narratives together. He takes as a starting point Edward Saids call for the mutual recognition of the universality and integrity of the Others experience in order to begin to plan a common life together (Said, 2000: 208). As a potential ethical source Burke identifies the philosophical thought of Buber and Levinas, both of whom maintain strong notions of the relational nature of human existence, argue that the only mode of being is in the plural with Others, and insist on a sympathetic and existential turn to the Other. According to Burke, In their visions of identity and existence the Other is neither a threat, nor an alienated ground for identity, nor a moral object we can choose to assist. Rather the Other is the very purpose and condition of existence (2007: 82). This vision of interconnected identity, based upon a primary responsibility to the Other is further developed in Burkes discussion of the 1990s tensions between the strange neighbors Australia and Indonesia. He reads their complex historical interaction against Julia Kristevas invitation to welcome and embrace the strangeness within us in order to theorize a transnational ethic of generosity. This ethic recognizes differences that cut through identities and shape relations within and between identities that themselves are neither bounded nor whole (2007: 105-7). Finally, in the context of the Iraq war, Burke takes on the instrumental forms of strategy, diplomacy and technological enframing that underpin security as a Cartesian system of ontological certainty and truth. He turns to Heidegger to propose new definitions of humanitys relation to

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

itself beyond the relations of domination, instrumentalization of nature and society, and geopolitical control. Burkes lucid, well-structured and compelling argument would be of interest to a wide range of readership, spanning international relations, political theory, philosophy, critical social theory and cultural studies. In particular, his timely analysis and command of continental philosophy stand out. In this regard, it is important to reiterate that Burke does not seek to cast off the concept of security; instead, he denaturalizes it and extends its scope beyond the interdependent web of violence, coercion, and insecurity towards a new mode of being. He ties security to the Other through the grammar of Levinasian responsibility. As with any critical endeavor of such scope and density there are certain areas and pointers for further reflection. For instance, during Burkes examination of Buber and Levinas he points to their failure to account for the mediated nature of the self-other relation. Burke attempts to resolve this problem of the Third, of the Other of the Other, by addressing the social and discursive constitution of the intersubjective system of meaning, within which this relation takes place. Nonetheless, such a solution seems to furnish only a relatively thin notion of the Third unless it is supplemented by what Diana Coole (2001) calls the ontology of the interworld. An ontology of the interworld rethinks the plurality of subjects and the sphere of the political in terms of intersubjectivity by drawing attention to the complex interplay of interiority and exteriority in collective life and the multiple struggles for coexistence in the thick, adverse space between subjects (Coole 2001: 25-6). This notion of politics as an overdetermined field of forces may enrich Burkes understanding of the various types of terrain within which international relations must be reinscribed and renegotiated beyond the discourse of security. Since, within such a field of forces permeated with power, each political act is defined by processes of self-invention, the latter ontology may also help him to relate ethics to politics by eliciting an immanent ethics of openness to novel coexistential solutions and possibilities of critical political interventions. What is of concern here is that in Burkes book it does not become entirely clear what the relationship between ethics and politics is. Does politics precede ethics? Does Burke have a theory of politics at all? In this respect, Beyond Security may be better perceived as the first theoretical stride in a project to rethink the relationship between security, ethics and Otherness. Finally, there exists a plurality of valences of identity, one of which is Burkes congealed self with the Other, drawn from a Levinasian ethic of responsibility. Yet, another possibility is a proto-notion, an incipient identity in formation at an early stage of becoming, not fully transparent to itself and others. In this respect, the presence and the active constitution of an international space of critical responsiveness (Connolly, 1995) to engage such emerging formations is key to a critical study of international relations. This becomes evident in terms of the study of the birth of revolutionary and social movements,

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

transborder flows of refugees and bodies, and, perhaps, of the need to reconceptualize the relation between becoming and security. One way, in which this relation between identity formation, becoming, responsibility and security may be further explored, is through a possible alignment between the psychoanalytical insights of Judith Butler and William Connollys engagements with complexity theory. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, Butler argues for the impossibility of giving a full and complete account of oneself since subject formation implies ones own opacity, vulnerability and primordial dependency on the Other (Butler, 2005). Incoherence structures the way in which we are constituted in relationality and the default patterns of this relationality emerge as the opacity within ones account of oneself (Butler, 2005: 63-4). We are not only opaque to ourselves but to each other and becoming aware of one dimension of this opacity may often foreclose another. Our own foreignness to ourselves emerges as a source of our ethical connections to others; the acceptance of the limits of knowability of oneself and the other becomes central to the formulation of a certain kind of ethics that reinforces rather than breaks away with this relationality. Butler warns us that demands for coherence, seeking to reinstall the mastery and unity of the subject, according to narrow notions of responsibility as accountability, often force oneself into an artificial and violent existence. This form of ethical violence not only consists in the threat to ones own (or the others) intelligibility but can be also observed in judgments in the name of ethics and morality that distance the judging subject from the one being judged (Butler, 2005: 45; 63-4). Connolly concurs in advance with Butler that responsibility is a systematically ambiguous practice and standards of responsibility are both indispensible to social practice and productive of injustices within it (Connolly, 1991: 96). Both make the case for a suspension of the urge to judge and the importance of developing a new understanding of responsibility as responsiveness and openness towards others who exceed the bounds of ones own understanding. Yet, for Connolly this suspension of judgment and coming to terms with our own limits and opacity can also enable us to appreciate the unpredictable novelty, emergence and abundance of life in a world of becoming. Rather than recognized apodictically, now responsibility is best conceived as a second order formation, forged out of care for the world and the fugitive abundance of being that infuses it (Connolly, 1991: xx). Thus a Butler-Connolly augmentation of Burke may be pertinent to his discussion of the barriers to responsibility, especially in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. On the one hand, Butlers emphasis on opacity may buttress his critique of the limitations of a Levinasian ethics of responsibility in such cases and the temptation to slide into modes of citizenship-based ethical violence. On the other hand, Connollys attentiveness to novelty and becoming may enrich his engagement with Kristevas notion of the constitutive strangeness,

10

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

differences and conflicts that already cut through identities by opening up spaces of responsiveness to emerging constituencies that require new modes of recognition. The task, shared by Burke with all these thinkers, is to fold a larger degree of forbearance, gratitude for the abundance of being and presumptive generosity into our negotiating stances. It now becomes an indispensible element in transformation of global structures and technologies of power. All these themes and possibilities are already simmering in Burkes book. The point, perhaps, is to open a mutually illuminating conversation across which to bring them to a higher boil. In her book The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations Louiza Odysseos builds on these themes of the political application of the ethical return to the Other, the problem of the Third, and the issues of incipience, contingency, heteronomy and critical responsiveness. Like Burke, she questions the conceptual structures and ontological premises of international relations theory, this time in terms of their stabilization through the centrality of modern subjectivity. Odysseos argues that coexistence has been taken for granted and undertheorized as postontological for international relations, in the sense that it has to be derived from some prior purposive action or other sets of ontological assumptions (2007: xxiv). On the grounds of modern subjectivity, coexistence has been conceptualized and articulated through a logic of composition, which reduces it to a collection and copresence of already constituted or preformed subjects (2007: xxvi, xxxii). This logic of composition suggests that units or entities are nonrelational in their constitution until composed; it grasps collectivity through the conceptual lens of the modern observable and unitary subject:
It not only assumes that collectivities are made up of multiple individual subjects but also that as collectivities they behave as subjects, which works by a reduction of the we to an I just as individuals within the state are thought to coexist on the basis of preformed subjectivities, so too does much of international relations theory assume the state to embody a unitary, nonrelational subjectivity. (2007: xxvii)

What follows from such assumptions of nonrelational preconstitution is not that one does not enter into relations with others but that these relations do not flow into selfhood itself. The logic of composition structures coexistence as an afterthought; it tends to presuppose the Schmittian mode of conflict it seeks to rise above. In this way it effaces the constitutive role of otherness in the formation of the subject, which Odysseos terms heteronomy (2007: xxviii-xxix). This effacement makes it impossible to recognize that the self is always already thrown into a world of otherness and obscures the selfs otherness, how it is other to itself when it is grasped as a subject (2007: xxix, xxxii). This conjunction between the logic of composition and the effacement of heteronomy is illustrated in the Hobbesian account of the

11

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

anarchical state of nature, which constructs the self/other relation as self/enemy, enmity as omnipresent and survival as the predominant mode of relationality of the subject. The relation to the other becomes a relation of danger and enmity that can be overcome only through self-preservation and mastery over self and the other-as-enemy, framed as the Leviathans outside (2007: 21, 23). Otherness is reduced to the same(self) since the other is determined as, and represented to, the subject according to the attributes of the very same Hobbesian selfhood and knowable nature (2007: 21). What is of immediate concern for Odysseos is that this imaginary and pessimistic ontology of danger has informed dominant perspectives of international relations, which have established the realm of the international as presocially dangerous space, inhabited by nonrelational, belligerent subjects, lacking capacity to live with others without a rigid regulatory framework of rules (2007: 22-4). Thus in the heterology of the Leviathan only the civil commonwealth and the social contract can be constitutive of coexistence and polity. Odysseos turns to the thought and method of Martin Heidegger to retrieve an existential analysis that unworks this Hobbesian configuration of subjectivity. Her search for a methodology in Chapter 2 leads her to an experimental mode of phenomenology, characterized as a hermeneutics of facticity, whereby the latter term denotes how selves are manifested in their location in the world with others (2007: 26). Its purpose is to access the phenomena of existence by examining the being that philosophy had long captured under the heading of the subject (2007: 26, 179). In Chapter 3 under the heading optics of coexistence she examines four interrelated elements of Heideggers philosophy, which in the light of Levinass critique of Heideggers totalizing tendencies, demonstrate the ontological primacy of sociality, Otherness and coexistence for the formation of the self (Dasein: Being there) as Being-in-the-world. First, Odysseos reads the primary mode of Dasein as engaged immersion in its dealings with the world and argues that such an understanding challenges the assumption that reflection and knowing are the definitive modes of human relationality toward entities and the world (2007: 90). Second, thinking of being as engaged immersion points to a notion of the world as a web of interinvolvements with others and totality of meanings, assignments and relations that are not created but shared by Dasein. This dependence means that the access Dasein has to itself is mediated through otherness (2007: 59, 90). Third, Dasein is Beingin-the-world with others and for Dasein, existence is already coexistence, Being-there is always Being-with. Selfhood is coexistential but this is far from identical to composition or copresence assumed of the completed and autonomous subject of modernity (2007: 59, 90-91). Finally, Daseins attunement to the world and radical embeddedness in it can be best understood through the structure of thrown projection as it is being thrown into the world it projects itself onto future possibilities. Given this structure, Daseins existence is best conceived as care (2007: 91, 180-81).

12

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

Odysseoss creative reading of Heidegger makes possible the disclosure of the self as a heteronomous, coexistential being and a subject of coexistence. In accordance with this view, an inclusive ethics exceeds the simple idea of the universal as it opens to alterity. A recovery of ethical selfhood involves relational arts of the self and a cultivation of presumptive openness towards the Other. One such disposition of liberating solicitude is articulated by Odysseos with reference to recent theorizing of more inclusive approaches to community, advocated by thinkers such as Linklater and Habermas. She pursues a sensibility of liberating solicitude towards the other as a different path to think coexistence as the sensibility of a heteronomous being when it is understood not only as an expression of empathy and authentic care but also as a call for the other to face ones own contingency, heteronomy, groundedness and anxious Being-in-the-world and assume his fundamental mortal possibility (2007: 151). However, liberating solicitude is only one ethical dimension of the self, amenable to noninstrumental relations, whose heightened sense of awareness of contingency and non-self-sufficiency may need to be paralleled by some more positive ethic of affirmation of the abundance of being or attachment to life. While Odysseos herself recognizes this need, she takes a different direction and explores the possibility to develop a critical relation of questioning towards the community itself. Hence, she articulates the concept of critical belonging:
the ethical selfs openness to alterity is brought into the political by destroying inappropriate past possibilities and by retrieving those possibilities that ... might have been marginalized and silenced by dominant collective understandings at specific historical moments. This deconstruction liberates groups and others that were silenced by the tradition, making their voices heard. (2007: 184)

As critical belonging rearticulates and disturbs the repeatable possibilities of the particular historical tradition and brings difference and outsiders to act upon them, it becomes central for international relations theory in the age of globalization. It theorizes the agonistic encounters and negotiations of multiple emerging perspectives and minorities as we become more and more entangled with one another. It enables a movement from the communitys conceptualization as uniform and essentialist to its diversification, both from inside and from an outside that is already within (2007: 175-6). In spite of the overriding historicity of Odysseoss notion of critical belonging, it serves as the pivotal juncture of politics and new ethics of incipience, undertheorized by Burke in Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence. In turn, Burkes outstanding and insightful take on a wide array of philosophical approaches may diversify Odysseoss Heideggerian frame at the same time as her ethical explorations fill in the political vacuum of his otherwise impressive study. However, within these newly opened spaces for coexistence and shared

13

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

security in the international realm, both Burke and Odysseos seem to shift language from state to self effortlessly. These shifts would be sufficient if the focus of their investigations had been limited to crossstate citizen movements or transnational advocacy networks. But each has a larger agenda, to forestall strategies by realists to overwhelm the social dynamics of citizen life with the iron clad dictates of the state in an anarchical order. In this sense, it would be best to read the two books together while keeping Schmitts The Concept of the Political in sight as a prod to both. After all, Schmitt helps to activate the divisive passions he warns are always on the horizon, and states out loud what both Burke and Odysseos promise to rethink. Yet, as Burke and Odysseos explore dispositions, connections, and modes of engagement that reopen the doors Schmitt and other realists close, danger persists. There is the possibility that new dramatic events may occur, threatening personal and political landscapes and generating new tensions. There is the risk that, while some states and non-state actors accept the invitation to open these doors, others will not. The point is that the reorientations and practices Burke and Odysseos promote increase the possibility of productive relations and negotiations in global politics while the Schmittian imperative feeds the very dangers it identifies. Anatoli Ignatov is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research is focused on the intersection between politics, nature and ethics. Bibliography Agamben, G. (2005), State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, H. (1994), The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Campbell, D. (1998), Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, W. (1995), The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connolly, W. (2002), Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coole, D. (2001), Thinking politically with Merleau-Ponty, Radical Philosophy, no. 108, July-August, pp. 17-28. Dalby, S. (1990), Creating the Second Cold War, London: Pinter.

14

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :3

Dillon, M. (1989), Modernity, discourse and deterrence, Current Research on Peace and Violence, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 90-104. Dillon, M. (1996), Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, London: Routledge. Enloe, C.H. (2000), Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fanon, F. (1967), Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York: Grove. Galtung, J. (1990), Cultural violence, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 291-305. Gatens, M. (1996), Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, London: Routledge. Peterson, V.S. (ed.) (1992), Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner. Said, E.W. (1979), Orientalism, New York: Random House. Said, E.W. (2000), The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, London: Granta Books. Sylvester, C. (2002), Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tickner, J.A. (1992), Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, New York: Columbia University Press. Walker, R.B.J. (1988), One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner. Walker, R.B.J. (1995), Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

borderlands ejournal 2009

15

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

REVIEW

Settler Revolutions and Indigenous Dissolutions


James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Edward Cavanagh
Swinburne Institute of Social Research

James Belich has produced the most rich and comprehensive comparative history of white settler colonialism if only the settler side of it since the transnational turn of the 1990s. Above all else, this is economic history, and that of settlers and not natives. His thesis is composed with beautiful simplicity, and stands tangential, but not adjacent, to the existing scholarship on settler colonialism. James Belichs most ambitious book yet attempts to understand and explain this great Anglo explosion and to do so without fear or favour, celebration or denial (4). Confronting an impressive literature, and wrestling with new and old debates, Belich dismisses regional exceptionalism in favour of a meta-historical and categorical explanation of the Settler Revolution: the establishment and expansion of settler societies in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. On a certain level, Belich might be accused of exchanging one exceptionalism for another (e.g. 165-9, 187, 314), but for the most part, his (British) Empire chest-thumping is kept in check, and the comparisons made inside his Anglo-world are thoughtful and intriguing. The book is separated into three parts. A contrast can be made with his history of nineteenth century New Zealand, Making Peoples (1996), which was effectively divided into three equal sections on native society, contact, and settler society. However, Replenishing the Earth is concerned exclusively with the settler component. Part 1 is an outline of his thesis and an explanation of migration, in which old concepts are redefined and stood alongside his trademark neologisms. Readers familiar with Belichs other work will identify

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

several of these terms, and appreciate their elaboration and application here (Belich, 1996; 1997; 2001; 2005). Part 2 is a test of his hypothesis, showing how hyper-colonization operated in his different case studies. Part 3, presenting perhaps the most original conceptual contribution of this book, presents the recolonization of Anglo-Wests alongside the industrialisation and capitalisation of London and New York, focusing on the concept of Greater Britain and introducing its twin, Greater America. Belich argues that the real decolonisation of America came in the 1900s, not 1776, followed later by the Dominions. Decolonisation in settler societies, according to Belich, should be understood in cultural and economic terms, and not only as a transfer of political power. It is at the end of the book that Belich then applies his framework to non-Anglo settler societies such as Algeria, Manchuria, Siberia, Brazil and Argentina. Replenishing the Earth is, above all else, economic history: Political history has had to take a back seat, writes Belich in the conclusion, and social history has scarcely featured at all (548). His favourite sources are numbers of population, migration, and trade and his footnotes reveal that he has computed a great deal of them. He argues for a rhythmic understanding of the booms and busts of the Anglo-world, interpreting this data according to various stages of growth: incremental colonization, explosive colonization, recolonization and decolonization. His categorisation is strict, and I suspect regional specialists will be able to spot inaccuracies. I had trouble, for example, with his point that wool was insignificant in the New South Wales economy until after the depression of 1841-3, a point he makes to support his argument that staples were the result of busts, not booms (277-8, 364). But wool was surely important from at least 1833, especially when seen in relation to the colonys population (see McMichael, 1984: 262; Vamplew (ed.), 1987). That the Griquas thrived in South Africas Boom 2 (1872-82) is also incorrect (384). On the contrary, this was the period in which their economic and political autonomy was destroyed. The Griquas moment in the South African sun came in the 1850s and probably earlier, when they successfully combined pastoral, agricultural and middle-man pursuits, and the market value of their land surged, not later (Ross, 1976: 66-80; see also Waldman, 2007: 69-77). Belich distrusts the staple thesis, which he argues is unhelpful in explaining the patterns of comparative settler economics (96-8, 286-8, 339-45). Imports pumped the arteries of the Anglo-world, he argues, and exports were only as important as the infrastructural development caused by the import-oriented Progress Industry (a condition of highspeed growth or hyper-colonisation, and the ultimate gauge of growth). The argument is well developed if a bit pedantic, because trade is a bidirectional, not a unidirectional, relationship, and railways were always laid to import as well as export. Doubtless, though, Belichs anti-staple stance will earn him quite a bit of attention in economic history circles. More interesting than the reprioritisation of

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

staples in settler economics, I think, is his categorisation of them all together in one bundle: cotton, fur, meat, minerals, sugar, timber, tobacco, wool, whale oil and wheat (and others) are all seen as contributing to the one Settler Revolution. No distinction is made between the economic environments in which they were produced (whether mercantilist, plantation, colonial, settler colonial, or any combination of these). Yet every product harnessed for Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inside and outside of the Angloworld demanded different metropolitan attention and specific configurations of land, labour and capital. The suggestion that settler colonies could dabble in many arts is very important for writers of imperial history. But I believe that recognising how different products make settler families different to groups of sojourning traders, or teams of slaves, is fundamental in showing the difference between a colonial economy and a settler colonial one. This relates to how colonialism and settler colonialism are understood. Belich protests against the acquired schizophrenia associated with the dual meaning of the term colonization, that of the subjugation of distant peoples, and the reproduction of ones own people through far settlement, making clear that he is only interested in the latter (178, 209). Belich is right to make this distinction: colonialism (where the colonising enterprise relies, directly or indirectly, on the labour of native people or the networks they created) and settler colonialism (where, ultimately, only the land of native people is necessary) are not the same. Replenishing the Earth is a book about the latter phenomenon, written with a disregard of the economic activity of indigenous people a decision that reproduces the notion of native unnecessariness to the settler colonial project. Despite this consistent omission, Belich argues that [t]he Settler Revolution thesis promotes some indigenous peoples from historys victims to riders of the whirlwind (554). Yet it remains the job of other historians to truly test this claim. The one exception to this pattern of indigenous silences relates to Belichs insights on indigenous resistance. He argues that [e]xplosive colonization changed the nature of the problem facing indigenous peoples from a scale that they could often handle to a scale that they could not (182), concluding that [t]hese peoples could cope with normal European colonization; it was explosive colonization that proved too much for them (181). In general terms, he is drawing a link between intensifying patterns of settlement and increasing settlernative conflict a long-established axiom of frontier history but the link is better explained in some places than others. In South Africa, for instance, Belich does not sufficiently show how booms assisted some native Africans at the same time as they were cornering other indigenous peoples in the rest of the Anglo-world into an unwinnable fight. On top of the implication that settler violence and indigenous destruction belong in history as faits accompli (and therefore that settler colonialism is an event and not a structural continuum), there is something rather strange about Belichs concern with indigenous military victories. Although Belich might feel he is doing justice to the

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

precursor peoples, he may just be perpetuating a vintage militantimperialist discourse, that of the noble fighting savage. His narrative is rife with formidable natives who never went down without a fight. When explosive colonization came, he writes of Australian Aborigines, their resistance was intense, courageous, and wellorganised, though ultimately unsuccessful. [] Some European nations might well have put up less of a fight. In California, [s]ome groups, such as the Modoc people in 1872-3, put up a remarkable fight. A few years later in Oregon, a few hundred Nez Perce battled two thousand federal troops and volunteers, initially with amazing success. [] Yet again these groups [] had coped with decades of European trade and settlement before they were finally run down by explosive colonization. It was much the same in Canada for the Mtis and great Indian tribes such as the Plains Cree, whose resistance was determined and pan-tribal before being overwhelmed by money and numbers (180-2, 273, 316, 397, 407). This rhetoric brings out Belichs old military historian, presumably on display for the mainstream audience that OUP has earmarked for this book. But I suspect many readers will spot these inclusions a mile away. Perhaps the only reason they stand out so much is because they are the only references he makes to indigenous people. His chapter on settlerism presents a shift in approach away from the economy and towards the domain of culture. Settlerism was a powerful, even revolutionary, ideology, transforming the concept of emigration and giving the Anglo-world the human capital to rise [taking] place in a wider context of ideological ferment [from which] emerged socialism, Chartism, communism and new forms of evangelism, trade unionism, Utopianism, and racialism, as well as settlerism (163). This is an important chapter showing how emigrant guides, letters, promotional literature and word-of-mouth were transformed into a speculative and self-fuelling settler ideology during hyper-colonisation. Quoting primary material and displaying fascinating colonial etymologies, Belich sheds light on a transnational process that historians have typically considered exceptional (e.g. Owram, 1980). Yet here again the shortfalls of his all-settler approach are evident. After all, human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, and not in isolation, as Eric Wolf has written (1982: xi). What was the role of the native in expansionist ideology, and how did these differ across the Anglo-world? How did the cultures of the possessors lend from those of the dispossessed? Perhaps this criticism is unfair. Belich is, after all, quite frank in his decision to talk about settlers only in Replenishing the Earth and what he accomplishes in 550 pages is indeed remarkable. But pointing out that indigenous peoples have been largely kept out of this narrative is more than expressing a clichd demand that indigenous agents be rewritten back into white mens historiography. Belich misses a golden opportunity here. Recent scholarship, especially of the last decade, has persuasively shown how indigenous people, by their existence as Others, or sometimes even by their very absence, played a crucial

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

role in the shaping of settler identities. This body of work suggests that settler cultures, with their selective amnesia, their assumption of inevitable extinction, their aura of whiteness, their malleable conception of property law, their discourses of savagery and nomadism, and their science of biological racism, were perfect for the job of erecting a structural colonial system that destroys to replace (Wolfe, 2001). Belich can be forgiven for not plugging into this subdiscipline of colonial studies, since he is an academic content to reinvent the wheel every time he writes something and this is why he is such a captivating author to read. But elsewhere in his own writings, he has emphasised the importance of the Maori contribution to the making of New Zealand (Belich, 1996; 1997), and disappointingly, this emphasis is not transferred onto Replenishing the Earth. Belichs writing, as always, is refreshingly energetic, complete with booms, busts, explosions, -isms, megas and -manias. I must admit finding myself distracted at times by his inclusion of many fullsentence quotes, of other historians, that are often positioned back-toback without attribution, sometimes taking over entire paragraphs (e.g. 51, 360, 411). Perhaps he could have summarised in text and consolidated some endnotes instead. This, along with a handful of minor errors (like his inconsistent capitalisation of Aboriginal), should have probably been picked up by his editors. It is possible, too, that some scholars will have trouble with Belichs use of the label Anglo to signify the actors in these rather heterogeneous communities of settlers, but it seems in this respect he has just been let down for want of a better word. Belich here deserves praise for facilitating the interplay of South Africa, French Canada and the United States with the more British Australia, Canada and New Zealand a daunting task as those who have attempted it appreciate. Anglos, he carefully explains, were those people in the nineteenth century connected by a global network of economic and cultural ties, who were likely to speak English and practice Protestantism, but did not necessarily have to; the societies they created paralleled each other in their method of expansion and reliance upon a metropolitan Oldland unit, but boomed and busted differently across time and space (49-65). Although Belich displays sensitivity in submitting Anglo, both as noun and prefix, not all readers will be convinced especially given the disproportion of his analysis (for instance, settlement in the American mid-west and west receives well over a hundred pages while South Africa gets only thirteen). But this should not take anything away from his overarching thesis, which is quite something to behold at the end of it all. Ultimately, as he admits, the model he constructs is for other historians to apply for themselves: Histories of settler societies, and of their indigenous rivals, that ignore boom, bust, and export rescue are like rural histories without seasons. Factoring them back into history adds another whole colour to the historians palette (222).

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Replenishing the Earth is the most rich and comprehensive comparative history of white settler colonialism if only the settler side of it published since the transnational turn of the 1990s. A sequel on the rhythm of indigenous economies would spectacularly complement his thesis of incremental colonisation, explosive colonisation, and recolonisation. If this is Professor Belichs next project, I suspect he might reconsider whether or not settler colonialism has truly ended when dealing with the decolonisation stage. Edward Cavanagh is a student of historical and cultural studies at the Swinburne Institute of Social Research, Melbourne. His research interest is in the comparative history of the settler colonial projects of the British Empire. Bibliography Belich, J. (1996), Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Belich, J. (1997), Myth, race, and identity in New Zealand, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 9-21. Belich, J. (2001), Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Belich, J. (2005), The rise of the Angloworld: settlement in North America and Australasia, 1784-1918, in P. Buckner & R.D. Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 39-57. McMichael, P. (1984), Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owram, D. (1980), Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ross, R. (1976), Adam Koks Griquas: A Study in the Development of Stratification in South Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vamplew, W. (ed.) (1987), Australians: Broadway: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Ass. Historical Statistics,

Waldman, L. (2007), The Griqua Conundrum: Political and SocioCultural Identity in the Northern Cape, South Africa, Bern: Peter Lang.

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

Wolf, E.R. (1982), Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University Of California Press. Wolfe, P. (2001), Land, labor, and difference: elementary structures of race, The American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 866-905.

borderlands ejournal 2009

borderlands
e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009

REVIEW

Race, Racism and (Pedagogical) Rupture


Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism: An Introduction, Lanham: AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Mark W. Westmoreland
Neumann University, Pennsylvania State University-Brandywine, Villanova University

While race has certainly been an issue in the U.S. for several centuries, most of U.S. history has been filled with a majority of American citizens avoiding this conversation or even living in denial of its importance. On the one hand, persons in the U.S. must confront the oppressive history of explicit racism that has been employed throughout U.S. history. On the other hand, there is a need to understand and grapple with the history of the idea of race and its employment in various disciplines and its systematic role in the structure of society. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobbanss Race and Racism: An Introduction takes to task both of these projects in a succinctly informative way and offers practical responses of challenging both explicit and implicit forms of racism. The recent election of President Barak Obama in the United States has invigorated a public conversation regarding race. While race has certainly been an issue in the U.S. for several centuries, most of U.S. history has been filled with a majority of American citizens avoiding this conversation or even living in denial of its importance. This trend seems no longer possible for many. It would appear, however, that despite Obamas election, the U.S. is not fully coming to terms with its racist past, nor is it attempting to challenge the societal structures that allow for the continual racial oppression against many of its citizens. As a philosopher, I often incorporate discussions of the historical power-structures of racial oppression into my writing. As an instructor, I have seen race become a crucial theme throughout most of my courses. While reading Carolyn Fluehr-Lobbans Race and Racism, I became struck by how it is insightful, and, at the same time, how oversimplistic it is. Nevertheless, for those teaching an introductory course

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

and wishing to integrate the theme of race or for those who are unfamiliar with Race Theory, I recommend the text as a first steppingstone. Fluehr-Lobban, writing as an anthropologist, focuses her first three chapters on the pseudo-science behind race. As she defines racial categories, she wisely distinguishes between race, geography, religion, ethnicity, language, and culture, which are often conflated in public discourse. While each of these aids in the construction of identity, none of them fully accounts for the term race. The author succinctly presents the history of the idea of race, the theories expounded by Linnaeus and Blumenbach, and the construction of racial categories in the U.S. She also, reminiscent of Foucault, writes, As an ideology, racism belongs to the realm of cultural construction and power-politics, even as it is rooted in an erroneous biological foundation and a false belief that the determination of behavior can be reduced to physical, genetic attributes of race (4). While this presentation is much appreciated, it ignores many significant contributors to the idea of race, such as Bernier, Voltaire, Kant, Herder, and Hegel. On the one hand, Fluehr-Lobban accounts for the actual sources of racial ideology. On the other, she neglects the complexity of how the idea of race developed. Ideas are rarely cutand-dried and may need further nuance in order to accurately explicate their implications and horizons. We must be clear on how identity has been historically and socially constructed in order to come to grips with the ever-nagging quandary of race. When a group of persons are asked about the origins of racial divergence, a vague plethora of inadequate responses arise. FluehrLobban has discerned this inadequacy well and has provided an account of how human evolution, natural selection, and race are interrelated. While her descriptions of polygenesis, monogenesis, and polycentrism are well-described, her account of human evolution smacks of early twentieth-century evolutionary theory rather than contemporary theory. One need only look to Merleau-Pontys lectures on nature to see how complicated this can be. What I take from the second chapter to be the most beneficial for me as an instructor is Fluehr-Lobbans mapping of various phenotypes. Since race is most identified according to phenotypic characteristics, her descriptions are informative, albeit lacking in any involved connection with societal values associated with racial categories. Fluehr-Lobban briefly accounts for the rhetorical descriptions of savages, barbarians, and the civilized. Each one of these, according to the author, has been historically attached to a particular group or groups of persons. This attachment and consequent inequality happens to fall along racial lines in order to intimately associate the progression of civilization with European superiority. Tracing the influence of Gobineau, Fluehr-Lobban describes the manner in which the three great races became classified according to science. No longer did human difference remain in the realm of rhetoric; it now had

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

scientific backing. 150 years after Gobineau wrote his Essay on the Inequality of Races, many persons still adhere to his three-way division of human difference; e.g., Herrnstein and Murrays The Bell Curve divides human difference along these three lines. Concluding with remarks on race classification in the U.S., the author claims that many may believe that America has always employed a system of racial classification and that it has, since Negroes and Indians were differentiated and segregated from whites starting in colonial times (96). At the same time, what is remarkable is the amount of inconsistency in racial classification. This inconsistency, no doubt, is a productive force for the continuation of the misunderstanding of race and racial oppression. In her fourth chapter on racism/antiracism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Fluehr-Lobban compares two important influences on Race Theory: Gobineau and Firmin. The works of Gobineau and Firmin, according to the author, are divergent on every point regarding the unity of equality of all members of the human species The radical differences between the two might suggest that they belonged to different eras, but the truth is that in every era racist and liberal or antiracist writers have existed side by side (116). For Gobineau, the Aryan race is the superior one from which all civilizations are established. Being derived from Aryan people groups, Gobineaus ten civilizations exclude any positive influence made by Negroes, who, in Gobineaus opinion, are lacking any cultural, ethical, or political consciousness. While Gobineau may be the father of racism, Firmin argues for a racial classification rooted in equality. He strongly challenges both Gobineau and Broca, whose racist physical anthropology was grounded in phrenology. Furthermore, Firmin emphasizes the environmental influences on human biology and may, in fact, be the first one to reduce skin color to melanin, which is today taken as biological fact. He also stresses the effects of global interbreeding of human persons, from which no such category of the racially pure can be deduced. With the rise of eugenics, the twentieth century witnessed an assortment of (failed) attempts to establish a dominant racial group and/or to limit the promulgation of particular inferior groups. While describing the development of social Darwinism and the eugenics movement a la Galton, Fluehr-Lobban sheds light on the American eugenics movement. She claims that this movement had two goals: to restrict the immigration of non-Nordics and to have every state enact laws for the compulsory sterilization of people of bad heredity (119.) It may strike some, particularly my students, as shocking to read about the extent of this movement in the U.S., whereby the majority of states adopted such programs. The author also, as a contrast, describes the antiracist anthropology of Boas, who heavily criticized eugenics. The father of American anthropology emphasized the influence of heredity and the environment on racial, phenotypic characteristics. Perhaps Boas is the first one to give a rigorous, post-Mendelian, scientific account for the role of inheritance. While he stood in contrast to many of his racist contemporaries, Boas

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

remained faithful to the biological concept of race and the division of humankind into the three great races. Fluehr-Lobban finishes the chapter by concisely mentioning the influence of antiracist Montagu and racist Coon on mid-twentieth century anthropological accounts of race. She thinks it is quite notable how unsuccessful anthropologists and biologists have been in eliminating the race concept, now more than fifty years after Montagus call and the generally positive response from anthropologists (133). In fact, the idea of race is still used in accounting for differences in human intelligence, which is the focus of Chapter Five. The sixth chapter is devoted solely to the discourse on whiteness and white privilege: Whiteness in America is normative (168). While being socially constructed like the other racial categories, whiteness is unique in that it holds a privileged status. Most would agree that whites can live throughout a typical day while easily ignoring their own racial characteristics. However, non-white bodies are continually written upon and marked as deviations from the norm. The second half of the chapter focuses on Fluehr-Lobbans own experiences with her students and their discussions regarding race, particularly discussions involving antiracist methods that whites might employ in order to alleviate racial oppression. As someone who teaches on race, I have found that white privilege has been one of the most difficult topics for the students to accept. In the last two chapters, Fluehr-Lobban illuminates the wide-ranging perspectives on race relations on an international scale. More specifically, she emphasizes the role that race has played in Haiti, Brazil, the Cape Verde Islands, South Africa, Egypt, and Sudan. She also cites the oft used example of Jewish persons, who may be considered either Caucasian or Semitic. Likewise, the author diagnoses the failure of grouping all Asian peoples under the same race. The author, by looking at these perspectives, offers solutions for racial reconstruction and transformation. She writes, At the dawn of the twenty-first century, America is ripe for racial reconstruction (247). Perhaps the international community is ripe for this as well. The first step at reconstruction is to acknowledge the history of racial oppression and the current systemic and systematic racism that occurs in societies all around the world. Second, the nave attempts at color-blindness must be dismantled due to their own blindness of accepting the identities constructed by race. Racial categories have had effects on personal identity. The glossing over of these effects denies the experiential aspects of race and ignores human difference. Third, white privilege must be transformed in order to foster an egalitarian perspective of racial identity and equality. This transformation also includes the deconstruction of certain binaries, such as the black-white binary. Fourth, one must be willing to engage in both dialogue and practices that aid in the affirmative

b o rd e rla n d s 8 :2

transformation of explicit and implicit racism into an acceptance of human persons as equals. Fluehr-Lobban has written a broadly construed introduction to the subject matter that is filled with genealogical accounts of the idea of race, narratives illustrating the embodiment of race, examples of cultural practices that have aid in the development of both racism and antiracism, and positive solutions for moving forward in the twenty-first century. While I personally found nothing new or groundbreaking in this text, I will seriously consider incorporating all or parts of Race and Racism into the classroom. Mark W. Westmoreland teaches Philosophy at Penn StateBrandywine and Neumann University, both of which are located in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He earned his B.A. in Literature and Interdisciplinary Honors from Union University and his M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Memphis.

borderlands ejournal 2009

Вам также может понравиться