From “The Idea(s) of Politics”, undergraduate thesis by Patrick Harrison, Brown University

51 From “The Idea(s) of Politics”, undergraduate thesis by Patrick Harrison, Brown University CHAPTER UNIVERSALITY: THE POLITICS OF SAMENESS Totality does not equal universality If late capitalism has produced a global commonality of social and power relations, it has produced nothing universal: no equality other than equality in exploitation; no freedom other than freedom to consume and to be consumed; no truth other than the empty decree of the end of history If capital has created a mass situation or community, then there is no Sameness to this community, no universal belonging, but only the privileged belonging of the virtuous bourgeoisie, and the non-belonging of the wretched of the earth We should carefully distinguish, then, between universality and totality to show that questions of universality are equally at play in local struggles as in global ones Implicit in our preceding discussions of totality were two distinct assumptions about the relation of politics, universality, and totality First, in Fredric Jameson’s Marxism, there is the assumption that radical politics must address itself to some narrative of totality in order to be truly universal This attitude is implicit in Jameson’s argument “local struggles and issues are not merely indispensable, they are unavoidable; but as I have tried to say elsewhere, they are effective only so long as they also remain figures or allegories for some larger systemic transformation”.i For Jameson, totality and universality are two sides of the same coin: because we exist in a socio-economic totality, local political action only has universal import when it is an allegory of the main narrative of this totality—class struggle Furthermore, this conceptual schema implies that local struggles that not function as allegories for the single narrative of class struggle are not properly political struggles, but are rather instances of “false” or 52 “paranoid” consciousness that must be read as indexing the truth of class struggle precisely in their failure to properly express it Ultimately for Jameson, in order for a political struggle to have universal import, it muse function as an expression of a contradiction in a pre-given totality Second, in the later Foucault’s concept of totality as that which is produced by massifying power relations, such as biopolitical power, that operate by producing humans as mass species-subjects or “populations” (rather than just as individual subjects), it becomes possible to think of universality and a universal politics as struggles that divide this artificially produced (rather than pre-given) totality in half Foucault calls such a situation “race war”, a term that has nothing to with bio-medical and cultural discourses of “race” but applies to any situation in which a social totality is divided in half against itself: class struggle, colonial occupation, etc In race war, “a binary structure runs through society”, splitting society into a superrace and a subrace, and inaugurating a permanent war of society against itself for racial purification.ii It is in such a war that, for Foucault, a truly universal truth and right—truth and right that speak to the whole of the totality—can arise: The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the perspective of the sought-for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject himself […] The more I decenter myself, the better I can see the truth” […] Truth is an additional force, and it can be deployed only on the basis of a relationship of force The fact that the truth is essentially part of a relationship of force, of dissymmetry, decentering, combat, and war, is inscribed in this type of discourse.iii We should reject the model of the race war as the only possibility for reconceptualizing universality, truth, and right Race war does not produce truly universal universals The right of the race war is the right of the superrace to dominate or destroy the subrace, and its truths are statements predicated on the superiority of one race over another Racial truths are not really 53 addressed to the opposite race, but only to one’s own race; they are not truths of equality and belonging, but of destruction of the racial Other In short, racial truths are truths that seek to complete and close off the totality by the genocidal elimination of internal impurity or foreignness What is common to both different conceptual pairings of universality and totality is the predication of universality on a relation of antagonism: class antagonism in Jameson, and the antagonism of race war in late Foucault In all but instances, the universal is a disputed universal, rather than simply that which is most common; truth is a disputed truth, a weapon in struggle In other words, universality is that which is brought forth and embodied by the antagonism of engaged subjects Let us recall our assertion in the previous chapter that politics is the confrontation of engaged subjects, and nothing else; that the space in which political confrontation takes place is always (pre)constructed for every engaged subject; and that there exists no non-subjective, non-political position from which one could opt-out of, transcend, or claim to objectively represent the space in which this confrontation of engaged subjects takes place With this definition in mind, then let’s connect the dots and hazard the following hypothesis: that there is politics only where the stakes are universal, that there is only politics proper where there is struggle of universal import The critical question is this: can we think universality without totality? Or, must the “universal” be defined as that which addresses a totality? Certainly for both Jameson and Foucaul, any concept of universality is predicated on a prior concept of totality For Jameson, there is universality because there is a pre-given universal For the late Foucault, universality is made possible through a produced totality We should them better, then, and begin our discourse on universality the thought of universality to be 54 independent of and not identical to totality We need a thought of universality against totality Only through such a thought of universality can we think of both singular, local struggles and struggles against totalizing forms of power—such as global capitalism or State biopolitics— as equally universal in their import and, thus, as equally political struggles And we must furthermore stipulate that, insofar as the universal is brought forth in a produced-totality, the universal does not close off and complete this totality by purging the Other, but rather adds to the totality, expands it, and brings forth Sameness from that which was excluded Only under these suppositions will we create a thought of the truly universal, of a universality that consists in the equality of all, or rather, of a non-totalizable non-all in freedom and belonging In the preceding chapter, our discourse set the stage of contemporary politics by investigating whether there existed a political totality Having cautiously affirmed through an extensive historico-theoretical discussion that international biopolitical capitalism increasingly brings about a global social, economic, and biopolitical commons that can be thought of as a political totality, we must now proceed forward through a more formally philosophical discussion of principles of politics, universality, equality, and truth Further analysis of present history will only lead us to contemplate possibilities for action that remain within the facticity of what-there-is In a political moment as urgent as this, after the historical failure of the worlds most ambitious radical political projects of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, we must wager that our current situation requires a rigorous process of thought concerning basic philosophical and ontological questions—thought about thought—to conceive of the possibility of new possibilities That is, by thinking about how we think about politics, universality, truth, etc., we can hopefully open up new possibilities for radical forms of political action by understanding what is meant by these terms in a fundamentally different way By this I not at all propose a 55 return to the notion of the autonomy of thought; thought remains eminently conditioned by history, and historical practice is constitutive of thought Rather, what I am proposing is that through thinking about how we think about politics, we may be able to produce concepts of equality, truth, and freedom that are fundamentally heterogeneous to those found in hegemonic capitalist, liberal-democratic ideology, and that are not mere reiterations of the concepts handed down to us from the orthodox Marxist tradition, either We proceed forward, therefore, in two parts First, in Chapter 2, we will proceed through a close reading of Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics-as-disagreement and Etienne Balibar’s concept of equaliberty to articulate new concepts of universality, freedom, and equality and contrast them with contemporary approaches to politics in the current intellectual Left, especially those influenced by Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau We will define the engaged subject of politics as the part-of-no-part whose appearance inscribes the principle of equaliberty and creates a community divided in itself Finally, we will briefly discuss the movement of shackdwellers called the Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa as an instance of radical, egalitarian democracy In Chapter 3, our discussion will proceed to an even more formal exploration of the ontology of Alain Badiou to rearticulate Rancière’s concept of the appearance of the part-of-nopart as a meta-ontological Event Badiou will enable us to clarify the meaning of some of Rancière’s terms and even improve on Rancière’s theory of politics by allowing us to think of how to extend the liberatory effects of the Event beyond the moment of initial rupture through what Badiou calls a truth-procedure More substantively, however, Badiou will allow us to conceive of politics as an ontological activity that fundamentally restructures collective being and Symbolically mediated reality by “touching” the Real and bringing forth a radical equalityin-belonging or generic humanity 56 RADICAL EQUALITY: RANCIÈRE & BALIBAR Rancière summarizes his theory of politics in Disagreement thus: “politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part”.iv To understand what Rancière means by the “part of those who have no part”, it is worth rehearsing his reading of Aristotle’s Politics Aristotle divides the polis into three “parts” each with a different entitlement to the “good” of the community—meaning not only property, but also a “proper” social place in the community as a speaking subject: the oligoi, whose entitlement to political power and wealth is self-legitimated by their inherited wealth; the aristoi, whose entitlement to representation and wealth is founded on their virtue or excellence of character; and the demos or “people”, whose proper lot in the community is only their freedom Whereas the oligoi’s wealth is self-legitimating, and the virtue of the aristoi legitimates their superior share of property and power, the demos has no proper lot of anything but their freedom, which, Rancière points out, is not even proper to them, but which they rather share with the other two non-slave parts of society Whereas the oligoi and aristoi are defined by positive attributes —wealth and virtue, respectively—the freedom of the demos is a purely empty attribute: it is nothing but the freedom not to be enslaved thanks to the sheer contingency of their having been born to “free” citizens in Athens after the abolition of debt slavery It is in precisely this sense that the demos constitutes a “part-of-no-part”, a part of society which not only has “no part in anything”—no guaranteed political role or property—but is also not really a proper part at all, has no positive identity in the social order This non-role of the part-of-no-part originated by the ancient Athenian demos can be remapped throughout history up to the present to include women, the colonized “the wretched of the earth”, the postcolonial poor of the global South, immigrants 57 in the contemporary developed world, and, most importantly for Rancière, the proletariat, not in the sense of the word as the 19th century industrial working class, but as a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class 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.v Politics proper, from ancient Greece through industrial England to the globalized contemporary, consists in the tension between the official hierarchy of society and the structural vacuum of the part-of-no-part whose very existence threatens the naturalness and coherence of the existing order At stake in politics proper, as Marx immediately allows us to see, is universality itself Rancière argues that the political act proper is the polemical identification of the particular of the part-of-no-part with the universal of the community on the basis of their equality in freedom with all other parts of the society Rancière describes this movement by which the “nothing” of the part-of-no-part polemically identifies itself with the “everything” of the community itself: Not only does freedom as what is “proper” to the demos not allow itself to be determined by any positive property; it is not proper to the demos at all The people are nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification—no wealth, no virtue—but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest Now it is this simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them in all things that gives them a specific qualification The demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens In doing so, this party is not that one identifies its improper property with the exclusive principle of community and identifies its name—the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position—with the name of the community itself.vi By recognizing that the demos is equal to the oligoi and aristoi in freedom, if only “in principle”, 58 Aristotle lets the cat out of the bag, allowing the demos to directly identify itself with the freedom shared by the community as a whole The part-of-no-part thus constitutes a “singular universal”: a singular historical entity that embodies a universal principle of equality in freedom and inscribes this principle into community through the disruption of the existing order vii This freedom in equality is nothing less than the radical equality of all in “the sheer contingency of any social order”,viii and its disruptive inscription reveals that “there is no natural principle of domination by one person over another”.ix Rancière’s subversive reading of Aristotle recalls Marx’s own ambivalent appreciation for capitalism: capitalism’s declaration of the equality of men, women, and children in the freedom to sell their labour (i.e to be exploited), cruel as it may be, nonetheless breaks feudal bonds and opens up the space in thought for the development of much more radical conceptions of equality and freedom to be realized in communism.x But whereas Marx’s concepts of equality and freedom are arguably bound up in a substantive notion of human nature that is fettered and alienated by capitalism and could be actualized under communism, Rancière’s notion of equality in freedom rejects any substantive, positive definition of the human and is non-founded only on the empty potential for the social order to be different than it is Equality in freedom is nothing less than the lack of any natural reason for domination —that the order of things should not be different than they are Etienne Balibar has helpfully theorized this radical equality in freedom as the proposition of the direct identity of freedom and equality as a “self-evident truth” or, rather, a “truth [that] cannot be put in doubt”.xi Balibar calls this equality-in-freedom “equaliberty.” At stake in Balibar’s discourse is the creation of a principle with all the prescriptive force for political action of a universal truth without any of the mystificatory, Enlightenment baggage usually associated with the term “truth” Thus, it is important for Balibar not simply to posit that equaliberty is 59 universally true, but to articulate how it is universally true—that is, to ask in what precise sense is it a “true” proposition, and what is the form of the universality of this truth Balibar insists that freedom and equality are not ideal essences, but consist in material historical practices and discourses: not “Freedom” and “Equality” in themselves, but the practical, historical “freedom to” and “equality in” Therefore, the proposition of equaliberty must be proved through the rigorous historical demonstration that “the (de facto) historical conditions of freedom are exactly the same as the (de facto) historical conditions of equality”.xii Such a demonstration can only be the negative demonstration that there is no historical evidence to contradict the identity of freedom in equality, since where and whenever freedom has been impinged so also has been equality, and vice versa In this sense, equaliberty is a properly “experimental” proposition, the “truth” of which is thinkable only retroactively as the historical “truth-effects” of concrete, historical events that enunciate it Furthermore, Balibar argues, if the proposition of equaliberty can only be negatively proven, then the substantive “content” of the proposition of equaliberty is fundamentally indeterminate That is to say, the proposition of equaliberty contains no substantive prescription for the realization of maximal equality-in-freedom in practice, but is supplied with substance only by concrete historical enunciations with finite demands, the performative effectivity of which is derived precisely from the indeterminacy of the “content” of equaliberty: All the force of the statement [of equaliberty] comes form its indeterminacy, but this is also the source of the practical weakness of the act of enunciation, or rather, of the fact that the consequences of the statement are themselves indeterminate: they are entirely dependent on ‘power relations’ and the evolution of a conjuncture in which it will always be necessary in practice to construct individual and collective referents for equaliberty.”xiii The indeterminacy of equaliberty—the “emptiness” of freedom in Rancière—should be 60 distinguished from pure negativity Historical inscriptions of equaliberty not function only to disrupt the social order, but also to create a new order The historical enunciations that inscribe equaliberty into the community may be either negative—“Why should women not vote? Why should conditions at the workplace not be of public political concern?”xiv—or positive—“All men are created equal” Strictly speaking, nothing either negative or positive is prescribed by the proposition of equaliberty The indeterminacy of equaliberty means that it is a purely formal principle, empty in itself of any concrete prescriptions for political action, but one that is nonetheless indispensable for political action to refer We can illustrate the consequences of this highly philosophical “formal turn” for political thought with the example of rights The proposition of equaliberty sweeps aside traditional distinctions between “real” rights—defined as the “rights of man”, “universal, inalienable, subsisting independently of any social institution”,—and “(merely) formal” rights—defined as the “rights of citizen”, positive and effective legal institutions that are ultimately restrictive and inadequate to the former.xv The discourses of both the political Right and the vulgar Left adopt this model: the vulgar Left will say that real rights can only be adequately expressed through the revolutionary transformation of society; the Right insists that any social orders is adequate to defend our real rights, and then defends any oppression in the existing as a kind of necessary evil, or as an inevitable “reality” that cannot be eliminated but only reduced to acceptable levels The weakness of both positions is that they rely on a substantive conception of “human nature” which “real” rights express and “formal” rights defend.xvi Against this, Balibar argues that there is no human nature prior to any (contingent, constructed) social order, displacing the binaries of “real” and “(merely) formal” rights, and “man” and “citizen”, entirely.xvii In the place of this discourse, he posits the principle of 72 illusory sphere of political conflict and the objective conflicts of socio-economic groups; disagreement is reduced to tension between “false consciousness” and science This theory, however, cancels out politics itself, since what it declares to be “real” politics—the conflict of objectively knowable socio-economic groups and forces—involves only the policing of the distribution of goods and things, and not real political contestation Metapolitics’ two incarnations, according to Rancière, are capitalist democracy, which reduces politics to managing the economy and ameliorating of social conflicts, and Marxism, which reduces politics to the objective contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production In short, metapolitics depoliticizes politics, reducing the irreducibly subjective antagonism of politics proper to a matter of objective knowledge in which, as in archipolitics, every party is accounted for The objectifying of social conflict in metapolitics leads to ultrapolitics, which declares that there is no common ground whatsoever between two opposed subject positions in an objective socio-economic conflict, and that one party must destroy the other.lv Michel Foucault’s theory of race war belongs properly to this model of false-politics, as does the Manicheanism of many anti-colonial struggles, described by Fanon, that precedes a second, more humanist, universal, and Rancierian moment in which all who struggle for liberation are considered part of the nation For ultrapolitics, the wrong designates an absolute, objective, Manichean division of the community, and each party confronts one another as an absolute Other that must be annihilated For politics proper, however, the wrong is an internal division of the community, and each party confronts the other in an argument about whether or not they are the Same in equaliberty We could distinguish the dualism of ultrapolitics from politics proper numerically by saying that ultrapolitics consists in the antagonism of the absolute Two, but politics proper in 73 the antagonism within a One that is always in itself Two Whereas ultrapolitics speaks of the enemy, of “us and them,” politics speaks of a single “sphere of appearance of a subject, the people, whose particular attribute is to be different from itself, internally divided” lvi Fourth, and finally, there is parapolitics—associated with Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Habermas—which presents the self-difference of the community as a pluralistic agonism of individual persons or social groups in a “war of all against all” lvii Parapolitics proposes to create order through establishment of clear procedures of legitimating rule through processes of representation, such as the delegation of authority to the Leviathan or through contract-based parliamentary democracy The essential move of parapolitics is to suture shut the open wound of the wrong through the constant interchange of power between representatives of the people in a process legitimated democratic consensus The most sophisticated Leftist version of parapolitics today is Laclau’s theory of hegemony It will be useful to contrast at length Rancière’s theory of politics to Laclau’s, not only to further clarify Rancière’s concept of universality, but also to develop a new idea of democracy as radical egalitarian rupture in contrast to the democratic socialism promoted by Laclau and which dominates left-liberal political movements today Finally, we will look briefly at the political self-organization of shackdwellers in Durban as a possible example of such radical democracy *** Both Rancière’s theory of politics and Laclau’s theory of hegemony can be read as rethinkings of class struggle as developed in Marx’s Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but the two reinterpretations of Marx are essentially different on two points: the form of the “general wrong”, and the form of universality embodied by the proletariat Universality 74 Laclau models society in duly post-structuralist fashion as a system of differentially defined elements Laclau, like Jameson, assumes that universality is predicated on the existence of a totality In properly deconstructive fashion, however, Laclau assumes that society is not a pre-given totality, but an infinite expanse of differences A totality can only be formed out of this expanse of difference if all elements can be equivalently differentiated from some absolute, antagonistic Other Laclau’s absolute Other is not the ontological limit-exteriority or infinite alterity of Derrida, but an other “inside” the field of differences that is produced as absolutely outside through ideological and political processes of exclusion This absolute other may be ideologically figured as an absolute outside (Nature or the Foreigner), or it may be an element within society that is depicted as the tyrannical, common enemy of all other parts of society (e.g the bourgeoisie as the “notorious crime of the whole of society”).lviii Politics would then consists in the agonistic struggle of elements “within” society to represent, with their own signifiers, this shared difference between all the elements of society and society’s other In this way, a particular part of society can occupy the position of the singular universal This is, however, an impossible task, since this shared difference, qua difference, is nothing but a pure negativity The position of the universal is necessarily an empty one, then, the particular content of which is determined through the struggle between the various elements in society to hegemonize the role of representing “the impossible fullness of society”.lix We can make three essential distinctions between how Laclau’s and Rancière’s conceptions of universality First, as we said, Laclau predicates universality on the existence of an ontologically prior totality The fact that both universality and totality are both (im)possible for Laclau does not change the basic onto-temporal relation between the two concepts For Rancière, however, the universal only comes into play in the resistance of totalization: only 75 when the part-of-no-part rises up and refuses its place in the totalizing system of police knowledge does it become a singular universal The universal, for Rancière, is precisely what creates a fracture in any police totality, and divides totality into twain between those who see only the totality of objective knowledge with nothing unaccounted for, and those who see a void that must be made Same in equaliberty with all The “one world divided into two” that politics creates is not so much a “renewed” totality, as it is a totality that is always incomplete, a non-all, always marked by an internal void, or supplemented with an illegal, internal surplus subject Second, Lalcau and Ranciere have slightly different conceptions of the form of political antagonism Laclau is very insightful to argue, against the left-liberal politics of recognition, that universality comes into play only when the banal difference of everything with everything is turned into a binary antagonism However, for Laclau, the struggle to embody this universality is characterized by pluralistic, agonism For Rancière, however, the embodiment of the universal by the part-of-no-part is immediately antagonistic Against the universality of compromise— each element finds its interests more or less represented in those of the hegemon—Rancière posits a universality that is always a disputed universality, one that cannot be compromised but must be wholly either affirmed or denied Either the part-of-no-part belongs to the community or it does not; either there is a community of equals, “a world of reciprocal recognitions” of mutual Sameness in equaliberty, or there is not.lx This leads directly to a third, crucial difference between Laclau and Rancière: whereas Laclau’s universality is not truly universal—it always excludes a manufactured Other, the “notorious crime of socity”—Rancière’s is a truly universal universality precisely because it is predicted on internal difference rather than exclusion Precisely because the part-of-no-part is an internal void, its declaration of belonging, of equality in freedom, is addressed to every one The 76 part-of-no-part represents the whole of the community because it embodies the zero-degree of membership in the community It expresses the one attribute that is universal in the community —pure belonging, shorn of any other positive feature or qualification Rancière’s model of universality is the inverse of Laclau’s: it is the universality initiated when the internal void or Other declares itself to be Same, that there is no outside-the-community Therefore, as Rancière says, “The ‘world’ can get bigger”—we can include ever more people into the fold of the community—but “the universal of politics does not get any bigger” lxi The Wrong On the question of the form of the “general wrong,” the key difference between Laclau and Rancière is that whereas according to Laclau posits the “general wrong” as an injustice (imaginary or real) committed symmetrically against all parts of society by their common enemy, Rancière posits that the wrong is committed asymmetrically against the part-of-no-part For Laclau, the general wrong cuts across all parts of society For Rancière, the part-of-no-part is the locus of the wrong This difference has to with the question of counting Earlier we said that Rancière’s theory of politics was the inverse of Laclau’s, but this is not exactly precise The partof-no-part is not really an Other because in order to be an Other, one must be counted as excluded, but the part-of-no-part is precisely not counted at all The part-of-no-part is more properly a void in the count, and the thought of such a void is precisely what escapes Laclau’s model of society Thus, Laclau’s model of society is really only a police model, in which all the elements of society are always-already present and accounted for Rancière shows that what is at stake in politics is the presentation of a void in the model of society as a differential system, and of making this void belong to society as an internal supplement What else is this void that the order of signifiers misses but the Real itself? In the following chapter, we will devote extended 77 discussion to the idea that the part-of-no-part inscribes the Real into the social-Symbolic order of a political community For now, however, it is pressing that we conclude with some observations on how Rancière’s theory of politics should make us re-conceptualize democracy and political practice Laclau’s theory of hegemony leads him to define democratic politics as the agonistic succession of finite and particular identities which attempt to assume universal tasks surpassing them; but that, as a result [of this impossibility of fully representing the universal] are never able to entirely conceal the distance between task and identity, and can always be substituted by alternative groups” lxii For Laclau, a radically democratic society is one in which a plurality of public spaces, constituted around specific issues and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instills in its members a civic sense which is a central ingredient of their identity as individuals Despite the plurality of these spaces, or rather, as a consequence of it, a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific identity.lxiii It is quite clear that this model of society as an order of spaces is not a model of politics but of police, and that Laclau’s concept of democracy is not one of democratic politics but of parapolitical policing The “democratic culture” or “civic sense” ostensibly created in this space is nothing more than the deconstructist’s utopia, in which “all sides fully accept the radically contingent character of their endeavors.” lxiv Such an order may indeed be an acceptable police order, but it is not democratic politics proper Against this, Rancière argues that there can be no “democratic society” as such, but rather that democracy is what upends the order of every society: Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life It is the institution of politics itself, the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions corresponding to their ‘nature’ and places corresponding to their functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency lxv 78 Democracy, for Rancière, is not a term for any order of society, but the very name of the procedure by which the part-of-no-part declares its equality in freedom with all A properly political, democratic struggle consists not in the agonistic competition of pre-deconstructed groups within a multi-institutional framework, but in a binary, antagonistic struggle of the One against itself that explodes all frameworks The binary inscribed by politics cannot be deconstructed, but only “eclipsed”, through the victory of one side or another.lxvi So called “liberal democracy” has no intrinsic relation to democracy at all, but constitutes a form of policing Rancicere calls “postdemocracy”: … a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests Postdemocracy is not a democracy that has found the truth of institutional forms in the interplay of social energies It is an identifying mode, among institutional mechanisms and the allocation of the society’s appropriate parts and shares, for making the subject and democracy’s own specific action disappear It is the practice and theory of what is appropriate with nothing left over for forms of the state and the state of social relations.lxvii In a word, postdemocracy is not politics at all, but metapolitical policing; it is not the preservation of politics, but its ossification We should maintain, however, that State institutions are always anti-political It has sometimes been the case that States have been a central battleground of political struggles Throughout the 20th century, voting rights were critical points of contention for genuine political struggles, most dramatically in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa However, the infinite demands of equaliberty cannot be satisfied by any single right, and politics can never become frozen in any form of State Furthermore, if democratic State institutions once proved key for political struggle, they cannot be confused with politics itself, and today they very often prove to be the enemy of genuine politics, as liberal 79 postdemocracy establishes an ideological monopoly on the signifiers “democracy” and “politics”, turning every discussion of democracy into a banal question of elections, of State affairs, and of the governmental management of power relations The continuation of genuine politics in South Africa since the end of apartheid in the movements of shackdwellers offers a possible example of what radical, egalitarian democracy might look like Michael Neocosmos has diagnosed the failure of the anti-apartheid struggle to bring about a substantive economic and political change for the most excluded and impoverished in South African as a consequence of a confusion between democracy as “people’s power” and democracy as State: The binding of the mass movement around the idea of the coming to power of the exiled leaders of the ANC was its undoing The sites of embryonic people’s power never fully matured and were rather still born, as the democratic politics of the mass movement more or less rapidly collapsed into authoritarianism as a result of internal contradictions and external pressures lxviii The “people’s power” to which Neocosmos refers is the autonomous, self-organization of people’s courts, schools, and “street committees” during the period of 1984-86 when the ANC famously called upon South Africans to make the country ungovernable Neocosmos sees to the ongoing self-organization of residents of shantytown—particularly, to the alliance of settlements near Durban called the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM)—as the continuation of people’s power today Those still excluded from economic security and legal rights even after the end of apartheid surely constitutes, for South Africa, its part-of-no-part Since 2001, the municipal government of Durban has pursued a program of slum clearance by withdrawing basic services and utilities such as electricity and toilets in settlement areas, and evicting shackdwellers to sell land to private development projects.lxix In 2005, the AbM coalesced around a 750 person demonstration that barricaded Kennedy Road, a major highway near a large shack settlement of 80 the same name, to protest efforts at their eviction Since this originary event, the movement has expanded into an alliance of settlements from across the Kwa-Zulu Natal province and also in Capetown.lxx With few employment possibilities, no healthcare, no financial safety net, no basic utilities, and even no policing (except when the police arrive to forcibly evict the poor and bulldoze settlements), the urban poor of the global South exist in a vacuum in which the State has withdrawn control (only, of course, to brutally reassert it through evictions, etc.) The AbM have managed to carve out a space of communal solidarity in the absence of any support by the State, organizing schools, community gardens and kitchens, and community councils that operate through collective decision making lxxi Though the AbM has some elected leadership, they are held to strict procedures of accountability through reports to collective decision making bodies and mostly function as organizational officials with little independent decision-making authority.lxxii The AbM has organized mass election boycotts and demonstrations that have successfully prevented evictions, but have gained few positive concessions from the city government in the way of basic utilities Perhaps most crucially, the AbM is an entirely nonprofessional and non-party movement that has refused both financial aid from international NGOs and refused to present candidates for local municipal office in order to preserve the autonomy of their self-organization.lxxiii In their actions, the AbM has renounced the pursuit of State or representational power and focused on a politics of “the transformation of the lived experience of power”.lxxiv It is worth inquiring if today the urban poor constitutes a part-of-no-part of global capitalism—deprived of a place in the national legal, supranational legal, and economic orders 81 Today over half of the Earth’s population—3.2 billion—live in urban areas, and urban areas are expected to account for virtually all of global population growth “which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050”.lxxv The very existence of the urban poor is due to both the massive expansion of cities as centers of commerce and manufacture as “undeveloped” nations are integrated into the global market, and to the decimation of agricultural economies in the undeveloped world caused by subsidized over production in the developed nations The urban poor furthermore contribute to the global economy indirectly by acting as the base of unskilled, informal labour in urban areas Žižek has mused on the political potential of shantytown residents: One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealize slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called ‘symbolic class’ (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists etc) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus) Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘symbolic class’ inherently split, so that one can make a wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the ‘progressive’ part of the symbolic class? The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’ […]lxxvi If Žižek’s comparison of the modern globetrotting immaterial labourer to the slum dweller seems a bit vain, it is worth nothing that many of the shack-dwelling leaders of the AbM are intellectuals who have published rich theoretical papers on their websites, and that intellectuals from around the South African academy have allied themselves with the AbM’s cause (including 82 the two South African scholars, Richard Pithouse at University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Michael Neocosmos at University of Praetoria, cited in this chapter) It is also encouraging for the possibility of international solidarity that the AbM has held demonstrations against the deposing of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, successfully courted the sympathetic attention of international news media, produced a documentary film about their struggle,lxxvii and a website rich with documentation of their activities as well as journalistic and theoretical papers produced by their intellectual leadership.lxxviii These tentative international identifications and exploitations of new media have both enabled the world at large to take notice of the struggle of the AbM, and created for its members a degree of ideological solidarity with disenfranchised poor in other parts of the world Given the limited means and the immediacy of the concerns of AbM, it remains to be seen what a shared sense of struggle with the people of Haiti, or with the youth in the Parisian banilieus could mean for the poor of South Africa However, communication with similar struggles in other countries, and with those who are willing to engage with the AbM on their own terms, has already had a profoundly encouraging ideological effect for the struggle What practical effect such cognitive mapping has, beyond bolstering the confidence of organized struggles that manage to make contact with one another, remains to be seen The struggles of the AbM are predicated on the immediate conditions of both their local situation and their existence in the margins of the global economic order The AbM has no means of production to seize except their very bodies, and no weapons of struggle except their capacity for disciplined, mass, coordinated action Their politics is radical egalitarianism at work And yet, the direct democracy advanced by the AbM is by no means an alternative to the State, which continues to lie at the horizon of all their activity: their primary project is still to prevent eviction and gain basic services to their settlements from the city government If the AbM provides us 83 with at least one example of radical egalitarian political ruptre, then the crucial question is what kind of police order should result if the demands of the AbM were met Is the extremely localist, direct democracy of the street committees of 1984-86 and the self-organization of the shantytowns usable model for a more egalitarian order, a kind of soviet for the age of immaterial production? Probably not; they are transitional, ruptural forms of organization that by necessity leave untouched the much larger questions of what is to be done once a new order is established What remains to be thought is how the liberatory effects of the politics proper can be extended beyond the initial rupture If politics and genuine democracy is precisely not a permanent order of being-together, but the instance where police orders are disrupted, then how can we ensure that politics will bring about a more just and egalitarian order once its sequence of confrontation has been eclipsed and victory achieved? It is here—what comes after the rupture of politics— that Rancière’s thought on politics comes to a stop i Jameson, Fredric “Marxism and Postmodernism” New Left Review vol I/176, July-August 1989: p 33-45 p 44 Foucault, Michel Society Must Be Defended trans David Macey, ed Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and Francois Ewald New York: Picador, 2003 p 51 iii Foucault Society Must Be Defended trans David Macey, ed Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and Francois Ewald New York: Picador, 2003, p 53 iv Rancière, Jacques Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy trans Julie Rose Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 p 123 v Marx, Karl Early Writings trans Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton New York: Penguin, 1992 p 256 vi Rancière, Disagreement, p vii Ibid p 23 viii Ibid p 15 ix Ibid p 79 x Marx Capital Vol I trans Ben Fowkes London: Penguin Books, 1990 About capital’s creation of “free workers,” see p 874 About equality, Marx writes “… since capital is by its nature a leveler, since it insists upon equality in the conditions of exploitation of labour in every sphere of production as its own innate right, the limitation by law of children’s labour in one branch of industry results in its limitation in others.” p 520 xi Etienne Balibar Masses, Classes, Ideas trans James Swenson New York: Routledge, 1994 p.47 xii Ibid p 48 xiii Ibid p 49 xiv Žižek, Slavoj The Universal Exception ed Rex Butler and Scott Stephens New York: Continuum, 2007 p 190 xv Balibar, Masses, p 44 xvi Ibid p 40 xvii Ibid p 44 xviii Balibar “Universalism”, lecture at University of California Irvine, Februay 2007 Text online at http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=171, April 2008 xix Balibar, Masses, p 49 xx Badiou, Alain Metapolitics, trans Jason Barker New York: Verso, 2006 p 112 xxi Rancière, Disagreement, p R14 xxii Balibar, Masses, p 50 xxiii Rancière, Disagreement, p 28 xxiv Ibid p 29 xxv Foucault “Governmentality” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader ed Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006 p.131-143 cit p 143 xxvi Rancière, Disagreement, p 27 xxvii Ibid p 31 xxviii Ibid p 32 xxix Ibid p 10 xxx Ibid p xi xxxi Ibid p 50 xxxii Ibid p 39 xxxiii Rancière “Ten Theses on Politics” Theory and Event vol 5:3, 2001 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html, April 2008 xxxiv Laclau, Ernesto Emancipation(s) New York: Verso, 2007 p 77 xxxv Derrida, Jacques Specters of Marx trans Peggy Kamuf New York: Routledge, 2006 p 82 xxxvi Ibid p 112-3 xxxvii Ibid p 81 xxxviii Lyotard, Jean-Francois The Lyotard Reader ed Andre Benjamin Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1989 p.132 xxxix Foucault, Society, p 268 xl Žižek writes about this point in Rancière, reading him through Badiou: ii To be proletarian involves assuming a certain subjective stance (of class struggle destined to achieve redemption through revolution) that, in principle, can occur to any individual; to put it in religious terms, irrespective of his (good) works, any individual can be touched by grace and interpellated as a proletarian subject The limit that separates the two opposed sides is the class struggle is thus not objective, not the limit separating two positive social groups, but ultimately radically subjective; it involves the position individuals assume towards the Event of universal Truth Again, the crucial point here is that subjectivity and universalism are not only not exclusive but are, rather, two sides of the same coin It is precisely because class struggle interpellates individuals to adopt the subjective stance of a proletarian that its appeal is universal, aiming at everyone with no exceptions” (Žižek, Universal p.199.) In Chapter we will discuss precisely what Žižek means by “Event” xli Rancière, Disagreement, p 58 xlii Ibid.104 xliii Ibid p 87 xliv Rancière, Disagreement, p 35 xlv Ibid p 40 xlvi Ibid p 36 xlvii Ibid p 36 xlviii Badiou, Metapolitics, p xlix Rancière, Disagreement, p 36 l Ibid., p 50 li Ibid., p 39 lii Rancière “Ten Theses on Politics” Theory and Event Issue 5.3 Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3Rancière.html, April 2008 liii Rancière, Disagreement, p 65-70 liv Ibid p 82 lv Rancière, Disagreement, p 85 Though Rancière only mentions ultrapolitics in passing, Žižek is quite correct to point out that ultrapolitics can be considered a fourth archetype of false-politics, filling a structural relation with the other three archetypes in a classical Greimasian: Žižek, Universal, p 187 lvi Rancière, p 87 lvii Rancière, p 70-81 lviii Marx, Early Writings, p 254 lix Laclau, Emancipation(s), p 55 lx Fanon, Frantz Black Skin White Masks trans Charles Lam Markmann New York: Grove Press, 1967 p 218 lxi Rancière, Disagreement, p.139 lxii Laclau, p 15-16 lxiii Ibid., 121 lxiv Žižek “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”, http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm, April 2008 lxv Rancière, Disagreement, p.101 lxvi Rancière, Disagreement, p 139 lxvii Ibid 102 lxviii Neocosmos, Michael “Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today” http://abahlali.org/node/1429, April 2008 p 45 lxix Pithouse, Richard “‘Our Struggle is Though, on the Ground, Running’ The University Of Abahlali baseMjondolo” www.abahlali.org/files/RREPORT_VOL106_PITHOUSE.pdf, April 2008 p 15-19 lxx Ibid p 23 lxxi Ibid p 47 lxxii Neocosmos, p 51-55 lxxiii Ibid 28 lxxiv Neocosomos, p lxxv Davis, Mike “Planet of Slums” New Left Review vol 25, March-April 2004, p 5-34 cit p lxxvi Žižek, Slavoj “Knee Deep” London Review of Books September 2004 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/zize01_.html, April 2008 lxxvii Kennedy Road and the Councillor dir Aoibheann O'Sullivan, 2005 http://www.archive.org/details/AoibheannOSullivan_0, 9April 2008 lxxviii “Abahlali baseMjondolo” http://abahlali.org, April 2008 ... exploration of the ontology of Alain Badiou to rearticulate Rancière’s concept of the appearance of the part -of- nopart as a meta-ontological Event Badiou will enable us to clarify the meaning of some of. .. order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of. .. within a hierarchical regime of propriety The “wrong” by which this governance of appearance disguises the part -of- no-part is necessarily invisible from the point of view of the existing order, or