"Consider la crueldad de la necesidad de amar. Consider la malignidad de nuestro deseo de ser feliz.

Consider la ferocidad con que queremos jugar. Y el nmero de veces en que mataremos por amor...." (Clarice Lispector. "La mujer ms pequea del mundo")
An Afterword: For those who want More: provides some useful summaries and reformulations Philosophy from its beginning defined itself by its other. Those who had a right to think have to be defined by those who had no rights to think because "they worked with their hands". As if that was a reason. As if working with our hands occludes thinking. As if the thinking being or 'nature' of those who worked with their hands was inferior to philosophers. Afterword from 2002 Rancire writes that Proletarian Nights "endeavoured to reveal the specific nature of the intellectual revolution assumed by the emergence of working class thought. But it opposed at the same time a counter discourse, flourishing in that era, that valorised an idea of workingclass thought rooted in craft traditions or the forms of popular culture and sociability," p.219. He doesnt make it clear what he means by these discourses. Rancire theorises that working class emancipation assumed a rupture with working class identity and the craft and popular sensibilities associated with it ie the representation of working class people from above. It was not about an affirmation of the nobi lity of labour or anything like that, but rather a dreaming of what is possible beyond work. And in particular against the supposed division of thought and making. What he observed amongst the working class intellectuals he studied was a will to appropriate "the language and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were indeed real and effectual" p.219. At the time he was writing 'The Philosopher and His Poor' in the early Eighties there were two prevailing ideas of how inequality had been maintained: 1. By the imposition of Good Taste. 2. By maintaining an elite control of the acme of thought and language whiles assigning to the poor an 'autochthonous' or inferior culture. There were also two pathways that progress towards 'equality', both erroneous: 1. Aspiration to citizenship status via instruction the justification given is that it is an effort to raise everyones status, but in middle class terms. 2. Adapting education to the 'disadvantaged sectors' to reduce inequality. Rancire objects: equality is not a goal, it is a presupposition, an axiom. "To call equality a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish Equality has been the main principle of social and governmental progress and also that which it endlessly excludes from its normal functioning Equality is fundamental and absent, current and untimely" p.223. And here of course he is reiterating arguments from the Ignorant Schoolmaster. To reach equality we need dissensus. "Dissensus is not the opposition of interests and opinion. It is the production in a determined sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it," p.226.

My conclusion on the whole book Plato deserves all the criticism he gets from Rancire. What we need is a class analysis of the influence of the rediscovered ancient classics by the Humanist scholars in their role as the managers of the new city states of Europe and how this heretical force played within the Christian hegemony to produce the mind that freed itself from Christian mystical fatalism and gave rise to the Enlightenment and the coherence of the bourgeoisie as a class. What I am indebted to Rancire for is in showing the key role that Platos ideas played in the c onstitution of or at least the justification of European class separation.

The criticism of Karl Marx that follows seems almost theatrically overdone - when he clearly an admirer. I think Marx can still give us the reference point that sees the capitalist system producing poverty, famine, war and environmental degradation rather than negative conditions being seen as localised and reformable. At the same time Marx was of course limited by his class position and time period. Though it is good that Rancire points out these limitations with such force, we can still appreciate that Marx struck a red wedge into the heart of European philosophical discourse.i[xi] Marxism as a field of discourse however has become overly academicised and out of touch with struggle since Lukacs and Gramsci were active revolutionaries. His criticism of the communist party route to socialism resonates with my experience. All my intuitions about Jean Paul Sartre from my youthful period of radicalisation in the late Sixties were brought into focus here. What I felt as his overbearing and out of reach presence was not just my own ignorance reacting from its subaltern position. He actually was out of touch with the class that I was part of! It is the critique of Bourdieu in the third and last section that for me is most useful. Distinction shows how society as a whole was structured by a set of aesthetic values - good taste that had morphed from the mores of aristocratic court society. However it had struck me in the early Nineties, in complete ignorance of Rancire's The Philosopher and His Poor (which was only published in English in 2004), how Bourdieu's method was limited to measuring norms and culture didn't evolve in that way. The new can only begin with the idiosyncratic. It was these actions on the borders of the normal distribution curve that mattered in terms of cultural resistance - things that Bourdieu failed to capture.ii[xii] On top of that Bourdieu seemed to have little detailed understanding of working class culture(s). For him working class culture was entirely dominated. Rancire is also himself prone to a kind of blinkered view of what is considered valid culturally. He doesn't go to where working class people invest most of their attention. 'Scourge though he may be of those Marxists contemptuous of the peasants taste for ugly trinkets and calendars, his universe of refer-ence is not that of Britney Spears, Roland Emmerich or J.K. Rowling, but that of a legitimate culture, a culture legitimated a posteriori by the critical and academic institution." p.31 Nicolas Vieillescazes Radical Philosophy 177 2012 Rancire opens up an incisive critique of Bourdieu's method that I had felt but been unable to articulate. But there is a bigger aim here in The Philosoher and His Poor than the debunking of a few stars of Humanist philosophy. The bigger idea is that philosophy and European literary history is complicit in the reproduction of the mental systems that both maintain the 'poor' as a class. A reifying concept of intellectual inequality that allows the system of gross economic equality to seem natural. To me it is becoming clear this was formed by the 1000 year formation of the European Humanist/bourgeois class and is deeply embedded in the functioning of the state. Material wealth is justified on the basis a class separation of intelligence and a profound disentitlement of the thinking capacity of working class/poor people.iii[xiii] The key to our escape to a more rational way of living on earth is the human ability to think clearly. It is not about the reiteration of knowledge as accretions that reinforce the throne the oppressor. It is the idea that the poor could get make the tools to thinking about liberation on their own terms. Perhaps led by the work of some unpredictable vagabond intellectuals that overcome their embarrassing awkwardness with words, persist in blurting out their thinking and insist on being heard. Economic inequality has a corollary that is our perceptions of who is intelligent and able to think about what might be possible.iv[xiv] Rancire ends the book by summarizing his arguments in a sentence: "For me, this was not a question of opposing voices from below to discourse from above, but of reflecting on the relation of division of discourses and division of conditions, of grasping the interplay of borders and transgressions according to which the effects of speech that seize human bodies becomes ordered or disturbed" p.227.

The Philosopher and His Poor: part 2 Rancire's critique of Karl Marx in Part 2 of 'The Philosopher and His Poor' 1983 - 2007..
SECTION 2 - MARX'S LABOR

Karl Marx sees the modern proletariat, who are defined by the rigid constraints on their time, as the hope of the future. A hope based on the injustice of the exploitation of their labour value and their potential solidarity. But Rancire argues that it is the ability to think as individuals that is as much key to a new world as is solidarity of action without an emancipation of thinking. Without it any action is led by the inheritors of 'Plato's Lie'. Before getting to his critique of Marx there is a long preamble about the figure of the shoemaker.

chapter 3 The Shoemaker and the Knight: In Wagner's 1868 opera 'The Mastersingers of Nuremberg' the shoemaker Hans Sachs proposes that 'the people' should judge music once a year. He names a Knight-poet as his choice of master singer and in so doing introduces the artisans of Nuremberg to high art aesthetics and so threatens the order of discourse. Wagner was dealing with a perennial theme "the invasion of shoemakers into domains reserved for learned connoisseurs and lovers of beautiful forms" p.57. "The fierce pride of these skilled workers and their uneasiness over the new world of unskilled labour would strengthen the spirit and arms of the shoemakers as well as their inseparable acolytes, the tailors" p.58.

There is little in printed matter to reclaim the supposed low status of the shoemaker. It is supposed that he has nothing to do with the sophisticated geometry that the salvation of the value of the carpenter. "He is the dwarfish man ridiculed in journeyman songs for his huge apron, crude tools, and smelly pitch. He is the usurping slave fraudulently initiated into the secrets of the guild" p.59. Shoemakers were even killed for their pretensions to organise as a guild. Shoemaking was both at the bottom of the trades and seen as the threat of lower class creativity.

From the time of Paris Salon of 1845 writers are 'bothered by shoemakers writing tragedies'. Rancire finds that the upper class were outraged by the

intellectual creations of their artisan subjects. "Order is menaced wherever a shoemaker does something else than make shoes" p.61. But by 1868 Wagner reckons the threat posed by the shoemakers is over and artists are securely back in the controlling arms of the elite. "Just long enough to restore the supremacy of genius over technique, inspiration over mnemonics" p.61. Wagner evokes the operation to inscribe a modern version of 'popular culture' that is led by those from above in the figure of the Knightly poet, who becomes an 'artist of the people' leading them in popular rituals like the Nuremberg Carnival. The guardians renew the legitimacy of their power over the masses using the 'peoples artist' as a model.v[i] This is basically the same as the middle class mediation of British working class or 'popular' cultural forms that I tracked in 'The Conspiracy of Good Taste' (1993). From William Morris leading the people into retrogressive cultural forms based on Medieval fantasies, through Cecil Sharp's baudlerisation of working class song to Clough Williams-Ellis putting paid to an urban workers vernacular. vi[ii] Marx's saw artisanal work as "a mixture of two contradictory natures, industrial activity with artistic creation" p.65. It was facing back to a Medievalist guild past rather than forward through the productive potentials opened up by capitalism. vii[iii] The artisans struggle is a grotesque battle against the inevitability of technological progress and more efficient production. For Marx to overcome Plato's edict that the worker can do just one thing - his job - the worker has to go through "the purifying hell of the textile mills set up on the shores of the sea of exchange It is not, then, by becoming a poet or an industrial ar tist that the shoemaker escapes his curse, but by inventing the machine" p.66. Artisans abandon their competence and relative freedom of working practices to sacrifice their class to 'the frenzy of the bourgeois factory'. In 'German Ideology' (written 1846 but first published in 1932) Marx discusses how workers "must leave behind in the 'archaic' distance the divine life of leisure in order to recover that life through the sacrifice of machine, science and combat" p.69. Marx is profoundly unsympathetic with a liberation praxis that is directed from below in multivarious directions. For him there are certain logical steps that seem to be necessary. chapter 4 The Production of the Proletarian: A singular idea 'resounds' through the The German Ideology that echoes Platos commandment of nothing else. There is no choice to be had on developmental paths. But at the same time Marx famously says that people are the producers of their representations and ideas and so also of human consciousness p.71. But he does not see that as the way to make a decisive break with the capitalist ontologies. "In the gold of thinking there will never be anything but a certain transformation of the iron of production" p.72. The question is to what extent is the production of thoughts tied down in Marxs thought to the logic of capitalist production? p.74. Marx is charged with projecting future outcomes that in Rancire's view need to be given over to a process of democratic dissensus. Thinking is production but its outcomes do not obey scientific laws. What conditions allow the General Intellect to begin thinking beyond the constraints of capital? For Rancire

innovative thinking does not happen on an even front that equates with a reductionist image of materialist conditions/ stages of technological development. In the reality of mixtures there are all kinds of breaks and special lacunae within which there can be breakouts of thought taking its liberty. What constrains these breakouts linking together is the operation of the old blueprint that relates more to orders of discourse that it does means of production. "Any opposition between the 'intellectual creations' of the worker and the wild imaginings of the philosopher in chains is completely illusory Industry may well be 'the open book of man's essential powers', but the letters that compose it cannot read themselves" p.75 (JR quoting Marx's Manuscripts of 1844).

Rancire confidently believes that "workers can do as well or better than the professional ideologues" p.75. And that, after all, "ideology is just another name for work" p.76.
Science will attempt to verify all stages of an argument empirically, but it is unable to answer this question: what makes it possible for science to tear the tissue of the production of material life as well as of its imitations?" p.76. Rancire argues that Marxism's claims to think scientifically are no more than "an extravagant geology".viii[iv] He quotes Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto of 1848: "A small fraction of the ruling class. . . specifically, the portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole" drop into the militant proletariat to provide intellectual leadership. This implies that the workers are incapable of both leadership and thinking p.76. Rancire later returns to the 'The Manifesto' with the question of: What party? He points out that there was no party to speak of, not one of proletarians anyway. He says that the slogan Proletarians of all countries unite! really meant 'Workers of all countries divide!'. The proletariat being a division of the working classes. Another quote by Engels from February 1851 shows his contempt for the communist party faithful when it is time to wind up the 'party'. He calls them 'a herd of jackasses' p.87. In Rancire's view what is needed in a history of production is not a theory of the progressive development of forms of labour (pre1844 Marx) but rather instances of decisive justice p.78. "A history of production, then, must be cracked in two. One the one hand there is the labour of generations, the accumulation of transformations, compost and grime. On the other there is revolutionary justice that 'gets rid of' labour - a justice executed by a class that is no longer a class" p.79. It gets rid of the ruling class in order, also, to rid working class of all the muck of ages (to use a phrase from Marx). Proletarianisation, however, leads to the worker to lose control of his labour power and become 'dispossessed of everything' p.80. My view: Writing works on a level of association was well as argument. After the

Blair era in which the elimination of the working class became an erasure of solidarity, rather than a overcoming of the limitation of class, this idea is fraught with negative association for me. Rancire seems against any sort of strengthening of class identity that could be a basking in victimhood or celebration of being oppressed. Working class identity is not going to dissolve so thoroughly at any moment - only the conditions that bind us. I suppose that Rancire does refer to the oppressive internalisation of limits that defines 'worker' as a lesser being. I agree that this definition could usefully be dissolved and perhaps thats what he means. Rancire is not clear that there would not be the same reason to give up working class cultural identities and language. Engels was willing to wait for his modern proletarian to start glowing with a certain class consciousness but Rancire argues we need to aim directly for a "dissolution of all classes" p.86. According to Rancire's reading Marx talks about the proletariat as if it is without ability or agency. It is mostly compelled by the greater forces at work. Rancire reasons that this is a contradiction because Marx also expects those who have lost everything, who have few resources under their control, to take on the most ambitious and challenging of tasks. He resorts to enlightened middle class leaders like himself and Engels to manage and lead p.80. Rancire compares Marx's proletarian to Meno's slave, whilst all the other forms of labour are left without consistency or role in finding a way to go beyond capitalism and its work. "Artisan, petty bourgeois, lumpen: these socio-historic categories are merely masks disguising the distance between worker and proletarian, the non-coincidence of the time of development and the time of revolution" p.81. To reach the position of philosopher the worker must first negate himself and take part in a revolution led by progressive men from the upper and literary classes. Meanwhile some artisans are left to their dreaming in a past world that is considered irrelevant and anachronistic. "The Marxist tradition identifies that heterogeneity with the simple weight of the past, with the hold of the dead on the living" p.82. Engels writes about the London Communists in December 1846: "Nothing can be done with the Straubingers".ix[v] Rancire expresses his exasperation: "It is too hard a task, even for the best dialecticians, to prove to communist proletarians that they are not communist proletarians by evoking a communist proletariat whose only fault is that it does not yet exist" p.85. But, Rancire argues, the reason workers want to be communists is not because they want a new order of work - it is more that they want something else. Which even Marx himself noticed was a desire for conversation and association for its own sake. The 'problem' was that such activity produced a satisfaction in the here and now p.83. This rings true with my experience with artists groups and collectives. It is difficult to press the collective beyond the programme of their own selfrealisation. e.g. Working Press not wanting to challenge the Arts Council on its institutionalized classism.

chapter 5 The Revolution Conjured Away: He says that Capital can be seen to describe "the work of a grave-digging proletariat produced by a bourgeoisie destined to be buried as if by an earthquake" p.90. The Communist Manifesto's optimism is not founded on experience but on theorising. Ranceire suggests that it is a theory that does not emerge from the actual power of a proletariat but rather from the power of the contemporary bourgeois class. The action it addresses is bourgeois "action and passion". The power of the Communist party and its legitimacy is based on the fearful reaction of those in power (i.e. the 'Spectre of Communism'). "The power that invents the communist spectre is the same power that invented the railroads" p.91. It is this Bourgeois passion that sustains a fear of communism and it is bourgeois action that sustains the proletariat as an idea. Rancire presses the point and for him Marx's idea of communism is deeply bourgeois: "For in the Manifesto the bourgeoisie alone has the power of agency. It is the agent of a civilisation of the universal whose cities, factories, railroads, ships and telegraphs are breaking down all barriers of caste and nation and wiping from the earth all traces of primitive savagery and peasant backwardness The Manifesto is an act of faith in the suicide of the bourgeoisie In this drama there is no way that the proletarians can be gods. At most they might play bit parts. Gravediggers, not even assassins. Everything they do they owe to bourgeois action or passion. They are mere soldiers of industry, instruments of labour, appendages of the machine." p.92 By this token they would also owe to the bourgeoisie their growing unification, their status as subjects with a vote, and the leadership of bourgeois radicals that makes their social progression possible. The confidence of the Manifesto was disappointed after 1848 by the actuality of a 'dictatorship' of the bourgeoisie as a class unified under a dictator. Rancire argues that each class becomes 'decomposed' by its own derided sub-class: its lumpen p.95. The lumpen is a myth that reoccured in reaction to the recent British riots. The lumpen are the workers that spoil the purity of the proletarian idea. Artisans were considered by Heinrich Heine in 'De La France' (1857) as "medieval manure" or 'a mere aggregation of individuals' p.96. Parasitical financial buccaneers are described as 'a class of conjurers'. They are a lumpen bourgeois that erode value won through actual material production p.97. We can now think of the antics of the bankers and stock brokers since this book was published. "The modern bourgeoisie is still merely a backward mob replicating the villainy of the criminal underworld, the rottenness of the Middle Ages, or the pigsty of peasantry" p.98. Our own unlovely coalition seem to fit this description alright. Classes always dissolve into the collection of individuals that make them up; on the one hand the small-holding peasant and on the other the Napoleonic mobster. "The so-called materialist analysis of different social classes is thus a myth manifesting the perpetual flight of identities and the common dereliction of

classes" p.99. Rancire seems to have no faith in the force of class action per se. For him it all comes down to individuals deciding to reclaim their thinking and engage in disensus. Rancire probably wouldn't think much of my promotion of categories like 'working class artist'. Or of a distinct historical class consciousness with its own set of values and cultural reference points like the British Chartists. Its all very well to emerge from an oppressed group in the sense of not to be forelock tugging any more, not to be thinking your own class as inferior any more, but there is still the cultural identities that provides us with various senses of community and even solidarity. You like being in the presence of working class people and are enervated by the pretence, duplicity and arrogance, that make up so much of middle class manners. He discusses Marx's boho/lumpen milieux to show how little he is embedded in class struggle on a daily basis and that the supposed beneficiaries of his theory are always postponed into the ideal future for their reward and rarely appreciated in the all to real present. He reminds us that it is the employee's of Engels factory that provide the profit that buys Marx's time to write Capital. chapter 6 The Risk of Art The convicts of Australia and prospectors of California demonstrated actual economic triumphs of the lumpen contra Theory. This is what Marx called the backwards march of the decomposed working class. Their emigration also causes the British workers left at home to become more bourgeois. Making their advance happen on the back of imperial exploitation rather than through becoming the ideal suffering proletarians. Individual interests provide a complex picture of humanity rather than an illusory unity of class interests. The Communist Party cadres that are meant to spring up and brush aside all existing working mens associations and groups of activists, to take their leadership positions can only serve as the comedians of history p.111. Rancire really takes the piss out of the Marxist idea that "Revolution is a purely natural phenomenon which is subject to physical laws rather than to the rules that determine the development of society in ordinary times" (letter 1851 p.111). The "risk that menaces revolutionary action is not the threat of defeat or death in combat but the threat of comedy" p.111. Marx's method of using 'science' to overcome narrow baseness of bourgeois self-interest and at the same time transform the motley mass of workers into steely proletarians with a single purpose is idealistic at best and comic at worst p.114. "This science is not the master of any object or the formulation of any subject. By proclaiming the primacy of production, it paradoxically shuts itself up in the solitude of an art henceforth situated at an infinite distance from all technique" p.118. It destroys 'the space of practice'. I have to say this equates with all my experience with various communist parties. The correct slogan on a mass-produced placard - no active participation or self-thinking required.

Rancire provocatively holds out a banner that: "Everything is a matter of individuals. Marx's theory is not a guide for any sort of action, be it violent or peaceful" p.120. 'Capital' is for Rancire a great work of art or criticism that is the reminiscence of the great bourgeois/humanist revolution of the C16th started by the likes of Leonardo, Durer, Machievelli. "In the final analysis, the pedagogical value of Capital in 'raising consciousness' by unveiling exploitation and its mystifications is a very impoverished virtue. The great virtue that must be learned by the public with the actor is humour, the art of performing on stage where opposites never cease to interchange themselves" p.121. Here we see him refer directly back to the Ignorant Schoolmaster. The actor can be the artist or any communicating human. We must all learn 'the art of becoming historical agents. Until we learn how to become comedians in the public sphere "history will be ironic" p.122. "The heirs (of Marx) definitely have no humour" p.123. And finally, even "Artists do not escape the power of comedians" p.124. Again this accords with my recent thoughts that intellectuals are wound up in a 900 year old neo-classic Humanist mind cage and that the way out is to burn the barriers and licenses to communication. Too many of my thinking friends are intimidated by left ideologues and by most philosophy. We need a communication of thinking that can release laughter or tears as much as it is an ever more intricate and encoded explication of our predicament. My Conclusion: For Rancire Capital is a great work of criticism but not of science. It is flawed and does not provide templates for revolutionary action. Its powers of prediction have proven to be limited. Marx himself was inevitably limited by his class position and unable to appreciate working class realties. For me a homogeneous attitude to the cultures/identities of class can usefully coexist with a heterogeneous reality. Rancires emphasis on the individual versus collective is I feel, to provoke rather than being a Thatcherite use to signify competitive self-interest. Unfortunately such speech carries these associations. To oppose individual to common is inherently confusing because both states are self-evidently true and necessary at any moment. There is the individual's cranium as a private place of contemplation and judgement. At the same time humans are social beings who communicate with each other in fine detail and negotiate their common culture and language. We dont make language and culture as individuals, we make it socially. Each culture and language has a ragged edge of dissensus (that includes making art and comedy) and that is where people evaluate and change their collective states of mind. The other open debate is the extent to which we all (secretly) desire the progression of productive efficiency that capitalism has driven. Capitalism makes efficiencies to increase profits at any human cost, but increased efficiency in general holds out a hope of a life with less work. Marx seemed to be holding out for a highly mechanized communism. Our current love of smart phones is surely a reason we stick with capitalism, but then artisans of today use smartphones. Maybe concerted action can come from places other than proletarianised workplaces?
SECTION 3 The Philosopher and the Sociologist - A critique of Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu from 'The Philosopher and His Poor' 1983 - 2007

In 'The Philosopher and His Poor' the core argument revolves around the question of what assigns the philosopher and the artisan to their mutually exclusive roles in the order of power. For Rancire the 'philosopher' stands for any thinker and writer legitimated by established Society, as well as the canonic literary elite. The artisan is a figure that stands for any working class person who relishes freedom to think and act. The Shoemaker is his archetypal worker, who has in particular been targeted for abuse in philosophy.. chapter 7 The Marxist Horizon He goes on from his earlier discussion of Marx the man to discuss Marxism. "The Marxismhorizon is pre-eminently the imperious decor of production The victory of the hard over the soft and of the straight over the curved" p.128. Robbie Lockwood just reminded me that this hard edge can be useful when we are getting lost in a flow of alienated imagery. When the report on famine in a colour magazine is followed by an Oxfam appeal, the hard edge of marxist analysis reminds us that the famine is structural to the system and cannot be ameliorated in the longer terms by petty donations. The hard and soft, the straight and curved analysis can probably co-exist. Rancire even describes Marx as a 'fecund author' at one point, although you might not have thought as much from the previous section. (p.210) Rancire declares that in Marxism the education of the soul is no longer the job of philosophy. Production is the determining field, rather than human thought. He had learnt in the archives that what workers actually wanted were forms of soulful expression and freedom of thoughtx[i]. The Shoemaker (i.e. the artisan) when faced by Marxist critique "finds himself endowed with a soul which is without value, which now is backwardness" p.129. Marxism pours all its hope into the factory machinist, the proletarian, who as he operates the new machines with their superhuman productivity is destined to be become a liberator that would, through his suffering, free us all from the drudgery of work. The idea that science will supplant the irrationality of doxa is central to Marxist thought. "In their rising, the sun and moon appear to us as enlarged discs. Whilst the scientist may know that the disk is the same at its rising and its zenith, the peasant nonetheless continues to fight over the reasons for this appearance" p.130 (referring to an example of Bishop Berkeley's). Rancire defends each version of knowledge or truth: the peasant, the scientist and God each have their own spheres of knowledge.xi[ii] "The crucial question, in effect, is not the criterion of the true but the nature of the visible, and the main evil to be repulsed is not error but passivity" p.130. "At this horizon where a larger sun rises that also does not, in this place where science will never replace doxa, is set the modern stage of the conflicts and complicities between philosophy and social knowledge" p.131. The meeting point between the peasant (or worker) and the scientist (or Marxist) is practice not ideology.xii[iii] In spite of the many dictionaries, books that advise us on proper pronunciation and elegant books written on communication theory the literary class do not control language. The ideas expressed by writers have to enter oral circulation before they can become part of the doxa what people do and speak of. This 'public opinion' is susceptible to mass media bias, propaganda, cultural resource management and plain coercion but it retains the power of final judgement. Just as working people make the material world so do we make the worlds spoken languages and semiosis. Literary discourses and ideas can make a bid for influence but, at the end of the day, they still have to submit to the sovereignty of the common will if they are to achieve be widespread influence in the population. The currency of common meanings is continually re-formed within the realm of oralacy. A system of oppression obfuscates the autonomy of this will formation - but the reality of the democracy of language seems to continue unabated.xiii[iv] chapter 8 The Philosophers Wall. Rancire argues that the powerlessness of the worker is explained in bourgeois discourse by his 'fatigue'. The generalised concept of the exhausted worker becomes taken as real by the bourgeois theorist. "What would speak in the worker whom one could always question would only be the absence of the worker. But they do not speak in any case. They have no time. They

are too tired" p.137. In reality the intellectual play of the autodidact occurs within 'elastic intervals' that are available in work routines p.147. The Communist Party promotes "the pure and simple negation of worker-being fashioned by bourgeois mourning and the snows of fatigue" p.139. The bourgeois exterminate knowledge of an autonomous worker to produce the image of the non-being of the proletariat. If one opposes this monopolistic idea of the proletariat one is derided as standing in the way of progress, and is seen as attempting to turn back the clock of history. A worker who opposes the Communist Party is made to appear to be rejecting his own class. In spite of the fact that the CP clearly has no executive power over the working class as a whole any more than the literary class has over how we all speak. The bland example that barges into my mind is that of the manufactured banners and slogans that appear at every major demo, sometimes outnumbering self-made banners by a long chalk. They always depress me. People do pick them up and carry them because once they are there they want to carry a placard. They didn't have the materials to make one themselves or perhaps it was not easy to carry one on their journey. For most people the party producing them seems distant but on the media they present themselves cadres for something they dont believe in. Rancire is good on the absurd circular logics that left-parties use to justify their existence - in effect they create a barrier to actual worker self-realisation by providing the simulacra of a workers organisation. The job is already done, all you have to do is join, agree the ideological package and keep your thinking to yourself and submit to the discipline of the party. He moves on to the writings of the Marxist star, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980), and puts his attention onto Sartre's classic Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), in which Sartre rejects the complexity, hybridity and ambiguity of doxa. "The future comes to man through things in so far as it previously came to things through man" (quoting CDR p.178) p.143. Rancire hones in on a key image used by Sartre to analyse the separation of workers. "From my window I can see a road paver on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge of each others presence." (CDR p.100) The philosopher is here criticised as imagining himself to be a 'transcendental subject constituting others in his own perception'. In this way Sartre "seals meaning in consigning backward workers to their solitude. their aphasic dialogues" p.145. Rancire's argues that this figure stands for a Marxism that assigns a hierarchy of value to different types of worker and in so doing "disallows room for another thought in the body that it subjugates" and workers who follow (this) marxist orthodoxy cannot "earn the least liberty by themselves" p.145. "The praxis incorporated in things never has reason to make the leap that would turn it back to needy, working people" p.146.xiv[v] The literary thinking of the bourgeois graduate makes and limits the world of intellectual possibilities and so chokes the meaning of freedom. At its most radical it says: 'Wait for us to lead you from the desert, for you are politically impotent.' Rancire argues that this impotence is the product of the philosophys limit rather than a real world condition. Philosophers at their most arrogant have seen themselves as operating 'the lever'. "The power of the lever commanding the whole ensemble is the absolute dialectical weapon which, since Hegel, has been called the negation of the negation. This power, breaking down walls and chains, is one that the workers remain forever incapable of forging in their relations to themselves and to things." p.148 Rancire also suggests that revolutionary violence is a Bourgeois directive, theorised as a pure act and the only way they can envisage achieving "a flight of meaning through the barrier of the negation of the negation" p.151. This is conclusion is likely because they do not perceive the micro processes of communication and the gaps and intervals in exploitation that working class people make use of to enact their own agency. "The party of the working class will always be a lie. It cannot be born of the working class. And the dictatorship of the proletariat is a contradiction in terms" p.152.

This makes a lot of sense to me as the most dramatic large-scale social transformations during my lifetime have been surprisingly peaceful and the result of such micro processes, and have not been predicted by Philosophers or the Media. Rancire is also profoundly against political representation as a goal of class emancipation. Working class power will be enacted directly from people doing things. A 'party' can only get in the way of this. I think that this is what many working class people intuitively feel about Marxist ideology. It tries to force a unity on us, it wants to bury all existing associations and dissensus under the fatigue of maximal proletarian exploitation so we will explode as one under the pressure. But such explosions only deliver us all the more easily to the destructive power of the military. A lasting revolution must be achieved by thinking subjects. Is he missing the catharsis that a certain gestural 'violence' can offer a generation? I can be a salvation of personal honour - to have physically fought back makes losing on a daily basis more honourable or at least more bearable. A generation who took part in such street fighting can feel that they did at least physically retaliate. They did not just take the humiliation that is daily class exploitation and oppression without murmour. The humiliating force of oppression only crushesthe human spirit if we do nothing, if we acquiesce. The glory of revolutionary action may not be accessible, or even if it is, not be long lasting. But an uprising may do much for the self-esteem of a down-trodden generation. Later in his life Sartre 'falls silent as a philosopher' whilst continuing to speak and act in favour of the most disadvantaged. "But this reasoned activism leaves open, and more unresolved than ever, the question of how we are to move from series to group without a takeover by force" p.156. Sartre writes about the painter Jacopa Tintoretto (1518 - 1594). The C16th painter is seen by Satre as limited by his role as an artisan. In Tintoretto Sartre imagines: "a perfect figure of proletarian life" p.159. Sartre sees in his works a world deserted by divinity and of being eaten away by nothingness.xv[vi] In Sartre's representation of the painter, "sumptuous disenchantment is corrupted by technological prestidigitation, production by imitation, and the justice of the profane world by the over-healthiness of the workers social-climbing" p.160. What Sartre the marxist is caught between is his "fascination for the machines of all productions and perplexity before the artisan's disturbing hardiness" p.164. The Kantian idea of beauty held out a promise of equality that Rancire sees as transcending the class frame in which it was proposed p.163.

chapter 9 The Sociologist King - Pierre Bourdieu (1930 - 2002) Rancire challenges philosophers to think about their own place in the system of rule. Especially with regard to the 'order of discourse' and the hierarchy of who can think about what. Sartre revealingly writes that "the whole man as defined by the aristocracy is the sum of opportunities taken away from everyone"(1965). And these opportunities include the opportune thoughts we might all have. Bourdieu critiques philosophy with his analyses of reproduction and distinction. Rancire quotes Sartre to summarise the argument of Distinction: "The productions of the elite are, for the majority of people, rejection, want and boundaries. The taste of our 'art lovers' forcibly defines the bad taste or lack of taste of the working classes, and as soon as refined minds consecrate a work, there is one more treasure in the world which the worker will never possess, one more thing of beauty he is unable to appreciate or understand" p.166 quoting Sartre from 'The Artist and His Conscience', 1965. Rancire then looks at the difference in their positions. He decides that Sartre is cloaking his elite orthodoxy, his right opinion, with the suggestion that it is a strategy. Right opinion is defined as: "knowledge adapted to object but unconscious of itself" p.167. It is this right opinion that Bourdieu wants to unveil with a science of rankings that includes everyone, from the precariat to the philosopherxvi[vii]. He goes on from Marx's economy of production to propose

an "economy of symbolic practices" p.168. According to Rancire the tools of opinion polls and statistics that Bourdieu uses to provide evidence for his analysis only averages and formulates what 'everybody knows' with sociological cliches. Bourdieu quotes the brutal statistics about entry into higher education: Just 0.89% of farmworkers sons get in, whereas 58.9% of executives sons get in. Two explanations for this prevailed: 1. It is the parents fault, the school system itself is not exclusive. 2. The system demands that children give up working class culture and speech and prepares them for military or work discipline. To this second Bourdieu adds that school persuades people "to eliminate themselves spontaneously - to judge by themselves that they are not gifted" p.171. Schools are unable to immerse their pupils in 'the infinitesimal nuances of good taste' whilst all the time pretending the exclusive world of good taste is open to all. The result is widespread class shame. Rancire does not believe that the mystification of 'equal opportunities' and the evident inequality of giftedness is believed anywhere but in theories which 'explain' society to the poor! p.173. He suggests that what actually happens is that the 'habitus' is reproduced as status quo, so that everyone continues to do 'his own business' and nothing else. Bourdieu expresses the hope that the poor can appropriate his 'science' of their dispossession but Rancire questions whether this could ever be useful? In truth the "symbolic game is reserved for the rich and is merely the euphemising of domination" p.183. "Bourdieu wants to show that the social reality of exercising the judgement of taste is the exact opposite of Kantian theory, which he sees as the quintessence of philosophical discourse" p.184. Kant described aesthetic pleasure as arising from both beauty and from sensory pleasure. Bourdieu shows that these two are the same. At the heart of Bourdieu's scheme is a three way 'game' between: dominant, dominated dominant and dominated. The dominated fractions of the dominant class are only rich in symbolic capital whilst the Dominant, are rich in economic capital. Rancire criticises Bourdieu's methodology of asking people about their music preferences with words rather than playing people actual music. "Music is the art which resists most resolutely the empire of commentary" p.187. It is the question that identify the answers that the researcher expects rather than a response to the actual music. So people are simply judging 'the meaning of the inquiry' p.187. It is not a test of their taste but of their knowledge. This is also true of the responses of the cultural cognoscenti. "What should be done, then, in conformity with the project of an economy of practices, is to shift the perspective from judgements concerning legitimacy towards forms of legitimation in actu; to grasp in their positivity the perceptions that constitute the aesthetics of the dominant, the dominant-dominated and of the dominated," p.188. The aesthetic value of photography, which is investigated in another set of Bourdieu's survey questions, is criticized as 'artificial and fictitious' for the working classes. The questions are only allowed to confirm Bourdieus preconceptions. "Everything must work according to right opinion" p.189. "In the aesthetic universe, there must only be distance. The world of being must be separated absolutely from the world of appearance" p.190. Everything that is not reducible to the schema of distinction, of demystification, is expelled. The distinguished person feels repulsion for the vulgar or popular realm. This is something Bourdieu recognises but is caught in. Rancire reckons it all boils down to a conflict over two different ideas of the use of leisure. 1. 'Incorporated leisure'; which is all about the conversions of capital between symbolic and economic forms. 2. 'Intention of distinction'; a compensation for lesser holdings of economic/political capital by the pretentious class competing in the war zone of the "imperialism of aesthetic intention that takes hold of every object" p.192. Rancire says this "struggle of the pretentious challengers against the distinguished possessors is basically only a family affair, a quarrel between generations" p.193. It is not even open to attempts at upward mobility between class fractions.

Bourdieu has it that those who do not aspire to compete in this system are classed as nonbeings. The point Rancire angrily makes is that they only come to appear as non-beings to those completely enclosed in the game. Its a subtle argument; my own working class English family were closely wrapped in the game of acquiring taste which it seems began with my grandmother Daisy's time as a house servant for the high and mighty of the North of England. And it also might be seen to be true of what the writers in Proletarian Nights read. Rancire argues that these writers, and I'll add in my mother, subvert this taste with their own autonomous thinking. This results in them being active cultural agents rather than, in Bourdieus account, non-beings "One must read, in these tastes, expressions of disgust perpetually haunted by the fascinated horror of a swarming and boisterous popular body covered with marks of adhesion and fed with the ragouts of mixture. A popular unconscious that would force the flight of the refined actors into an infinite vertigo of delegation" p.195. Rancire pursues Bourdieu about the absence of adolescents "from the optic that returns the repressed" as wells as the absence of immigrants "who form the core of our proletariat". Who, he quips, are 'not miserable enough' for the sociologist, p.197. Rancire then attacks Bourdieu's use of Kant. He claims that Kant refused a gap between working class nature and that of the elite. Kant saught an "anticipation of the perceptible equality to come". Bourdieu takes Kant's idea of disinterested taste as ahistorical. In the end Bourdieu is accused of being a determinist. Rancire writes with admiration about the art produced in the period when artists like Mozart first won some autonomy from "displays of domination and rules of certification," p.199. "This art that detached itself from its old functions and judges but has still not closed itself up in its autonomy then offers itself as the aim and privileged support of strategies of reappropriation" p.199. To illustrate this he goes back to the working class writer Gauny and his image of the worker taking a moment off from laying a floor in a bourgeois house to look out across the landscape. Believing himself to be at home, he loves the arrangement of a room so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out on the garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences.xvii[viii] This is a figure of an aesthetic outlook that can look at art made for the rich, but in the process of looking, reappropriate it from a working class viewpoint. He calls this reappropriation of the bourgeois aesthetic a 'torsion of habitus' that a worker can impose on cultural material of any sort. This could be a critique of my theorizing (1993) that good taste is simply used as a mark of superiority, a claim that is nigh inaccessible to lower classes, and as a place from which to judge all others as inferior and vulgar. What I missed was a taste as an act of perceiving that is separate from ownership. The act of looking appropriates and be used to fuel a subversive intellectuality even.xviii[ix] I am reminded of my recent efforts in reinterpreting the National Gallery for undergraduate visits. At first I was resistant and then I found a way of re-ordering the collection to provide an insight into my own ontology of western art history.xix[x] Rancire asserts that "fields of symbolic relations take shape at the limit of classes," p.200. Through taking on forbidden intellectual identities such as 'poets, knights, priests or dandies' working class intellectuals have borrowed words to make heretical discourses. He accuses 'Distinction' of distributing the materials that are seen as appropriate for each class rather than allowing for a radical appropriation and mixing that is happening below his radar. So instead of a misinterpretation of Flaubert we get the 'proper' reading of Flaubert. Instead of equivocality we have the reinforcement of an endless intellectual hierarchy. Rancire still seems to consider writing the main way that intellectuality is to be articulated. It is

still a very literary vision of intellectuality, one enclosed in a Humanist tradition in spite of his earlier remarks about peasant doxa. He seems out of touch with discourses on the oral that have been going on in anthropology and post-colonial or subaltern studies.(is this resolved but his later idea of the distribution of the sensible?) Bourdieu's discourse acts as a veil to hide working class realities even as it seems to explicate, theorise and demystify them. In the process proving only that the reader has no business going there and so should only do-one-thing!

i[xi] In his review of Jonathan Sperbers new biography of Marx, Tristram Hunt writes: In the rest of the world, where capitalism is exhibiting exactly the same kind of energies it did in early-19th-century Britain, the relevance of Marx's critique retains its potency. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/26/karl-marx-nineteenth-century-life-review ii[xii] An recent example of this was the Diran Adam action that swept through Turkey and around the globe within hours of performance artist Erdem Gndz taking his stand. http://kellyhevel.com/tag/protest-art/ iii[xiii] This simple statement has been confused by an enlargement of higher education and the upward mobility this has seemed to make possible. I intend to explore this in a future blog. iv[xiv] If you find my notes a bit joyless or pedantic try: http://critical-theory.com/who-the-fuck-is-jacques-ranciere/

v[i] Richard Wagner, 'Opera and Drama' 1851

vi[ii] http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/taste/CGTindex.html vii[iii] Marx referred to the figure of the shoemaker in a review of a book by Friedrich Daumer 'The Religion of the New Age' 1850 viii[iv] This has to be seen in the light of his later critique of Bourdieus pretensions to be scientific see my next blog entry. ix[v] A Straubinger meant a travelling worker who was not to be trusted. This derogatory label was used by Marx and Engels to denote proletarians who took up the banner of communist ideology. He makes fun of Marx's taste for Greek art and classical masterpieces p.67. Examples of Marx's classism are given as when he describes the conservative rural poor as a mass of savage beasts, reproducing like potatoes (Letters) p.99.
x[i] See my previous blog on Proletarian Nights. xi[ii] By god he of course means religious thinking. See also Peter Worsleys 1997 book Knowledges. xii[iii] This relates directly to the argument in The Ignorant Schoolmaster about our equality of intelligence. See previous blog. xiii[iv] It was only a few years ago that a student told me about the Welsh Not. A lump of wood that Welsh children had to hold in their mouths if they were caught speaking Welsh at school. I experienced a long campaign from my own poor mum to stop me saying aint and fings which she was convinced was incorrect speech. xiv[v] Rancire admits that Sartre's working women come over as more alert and erotically charged xv[vi] Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology, 1943. xvi[vii] The latest BBC sponsored research finds that there are now seven classes and the lowest of these, beneath the traditional working class, is the precariat. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22007058 xvii[viii] Rancire gives the reference: Gauny, Le travial a lat tache in Rancire ed. Le Philosophe plbien, pp 45-46, in Proletarian Nights 2012 p.81 (add accents..) xviii[ix] http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/taste/CGTindex.html xix[x] In short this was a matter of distinguishing the symbolic sets of Christianity, Neoclassism, Enlightenment, and folk/popular and discussing the gaps left like the emergence of town and country landscape painting.