SubStance # 92, 2000
Jacques Rancière:
Literature, Politics, Aesthetics:
Approaches to Democratic Disagreement
interviewed by
Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh

“Pour que l’invitation produise quelque effet de pensée, il faut que
la rencontre trouve son point de mésentente.”—La mésentente (12)
[In order for the invitation to produce some effect of thought, the
encounter must find its point of disagreement.]

The Principles of Equality, Education and Democracy
SG In reading your work, one has the impression that you have had a
kind of revelation or “nuit de Pascal” in encountering that extraordinary

Le Maître ignorant

Nous sommes réunis ici pour parler de la vertu des maîtres . J'ai écrit un ouvrage qui s'appelle Le Maître ignorant . Il me revient donc logiquement de défendre sur ce sujet la position apparemment la plus déraisonnable : la première vertu du maître est une vertu d'ignorance . Mon livre raconte l'histoire d'un professeur , Joseph Jacotot , qui fit scandale dans la Hollande et la France des années 1830 en proclamant que les ignorants pouvaient apprendre seuls sans maître pour leur expliquer , et que les maîtres , de leur côté , pouvaient enseigner ce qu'ils ignoraient eux-mêmes . Au soupçon de faire commerce de paradoxes faciles s'ajoute donc celui de se complaire dans les vieilleries et les extravagances de l'histoire de la pédagogie .

The politics of aesthetics

I shall start from a little fact borrowed from the actuality of art life . A Belgian foundation , the Evens Foundation , created a prize called Community art collaboration . The prize is aimed at supporting artistic projects encouraging " the invention of new social coherence based on diversity of identities " . Last year , the laureate project was presented by a French group of artists called Urban Campment . The project , called"I and us" proposed to create , in a poor and stigmatized suburb of Paris a special place , "extremely useless , fragile and non-productive" , a place at remove , available to all but than can be used only by one person at once .

Cut

By the word “cut” I mean to reference a prominent tactic in what James Snead has called a black cultural insistence on repetition. In a passage on musical form Snead writes: “The ‘cut’ overtly insists on the repetitive nature of the music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already heard.” (1) In “cut,” then, I reiterate the repetition in difference that is both “again,” or the same, and “an other” – “another beginning we have already heard.”
In an essay published in 1981, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Snead warns readers not to prop up the false divide that articulates white cultural forms as devoid of repetition and black cultural forms as redolent with the repetitive. Rather, Snead asks that we interrogate what is at stake in different cultural stances toward repetition and their relations to the issue of origin – that is, that we examine attitudes toward repetition and “originality” as those attitudes take diverse cultural forms. Is it possible that panic about the ideality of origin and the fear of potential debauchery in the mimetic has more valence in white cultural approaches to repetition than in other cultural modes? (2) If so, looking to black cultural heritage in the widespread embrace of repetition as a key quality of postmodern performance may raise further questions about the drive to “legitimacy” that results in the isolation of white “fathers” of performance art. (3)

Perhaps one way to define modernity would be in terms of the spirit of criticism that animates it. To be modern is to be critical, and to be critical is to be modern. Criticism seems to the all-pervasive during modernity, the very engine of the modern project. Criticism presupposes questionalibility and a relentless quest for the conditions of emergence and existence of words ands things. It leaves nothing untouched by its spirit except for itself, since the spirit of criticism thrives on and presupposes its own unquestionability. Criticism questions, but cannot itself be questioned. Through such a denial of reflexivity by reflexivity, criticism can excercise and reinforce its own authority endlessly. Criticism forms an invisible empire to which everything that claims self-identity automatically becomes subject. There is no escape allowed, other than that which comes with the abnegation of all identity, which is exactly the prerogative claimed by criticism itself, which is faceless and omnipresent – as a possibility and as an activity. Criticism is to modernity what theology was to the Middle Ages: a concrete universality, without center or boundaries.

I shall start from a little fact borrowed from the actuality of art life. A Belgian foundation, the Evens Foundation, created a prize called Community art collaboration. The prize is aimed at supporting artistic projects encouraging "the invention of new social coherence based on diversity of identities". Last year, the laureate project was presented by a French group of artists called Urban Campment. The project, called "I and us" proposed to create, in a poor and stigmatized suburb of Paris a special place, "extremely useless, fragile and non-productive", a place at remove, available to all but than can be used only by one person at once.

The Flexible Personality:
For a New Cultural Critique
Brian Holmes

The events of the century's turn, from Seattle to New York, have shown that a sweeping critique of capitalist globalization is possible, and urgently necessary—before the level of violence in the world dramatically increases. The beginnings of such a critique exist, with the renewal of "unorthodox" economics.1 But now one can look further, toward a critique of contemporary capitalist culture.
To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social relations and their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it points to the specific discourses, images and emotional attitudes that hide inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of consent, by flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it tolerates the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into practice because it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips with the complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough expressions of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe—those upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo depends.

(Written for the "Yugoslav Biennial of Young Artists" 2004)

Emancipation

L'amour est la seule passion qui se paye d'une monnaie qu'elle fabrique elle-même.
Stendhal

The "world market." Never have two words encompassed such promise. Power. Pleasure. Ubiquity. Freedom. And it’s no illusion. The world market can get you that – if you obey its injunction. To distinguish yourself from the others. To stand apart. To rise above. To become the sovereign individual.
What is the paradox of the market individual?
To conform – through uniqueness and originality – to the perverse law of value which gives rarity its price.