Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Editorial collective
Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
SYMPOSIUM
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Thomas Kuhn, 1922–1996
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott,
Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Ted Benton, Steve Fuller and Helen E. Longino......................................... 2
Kathleen Lennon, Joseph McCarney,
Kevin Magill, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, Kate Soper ARTICLES
Issue editor The Rhythm of Alterity: Levinas and Aesthetics
Kevin Magill Gary Peters..................................................................................................... 9
Reviews editor
Sean Sayers Analytical Marxism – An Ex-paradigm?
The Odyssey of G.A. Cohen
Contributors
Marcus Roberts ........................................................................................... 17
Ted Benton teaches sociology at the
University of Essex. His books include
Philosophical Foundations of the Three
Sociologies (1977) and The Rise and Fall INTERVIEW
of Structural Marxism (1984). Democracy Means Equality
Steve Fuller teaches in the Department Jacques Rancière interviewed by Passages ............................................. 29
of Sociology and Social Policy at the
University of Durham.
Helen E. Longino is the editor, with REVIEWS
Evelyn Fox Keller, of Feminism and
Science (Oxford University Press, 1996). Ronald Aronson, After Marxism
Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millennium
Gary Peters teaches aesthetics at the
University of the West of England.
Jules Townsend, The Politics of Marxism
Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener, eds,
Marcus Roberts teaches philosophy at Marxism in the Postmodern Age
the University of Essex. He is the author Suke Wolton, ed., Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory
of Analytical Marxism – A Critique
(Verso, 1996). Terry Eagleton .............................................................................................. 37
Jacques Rancière is Professor of Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams
Aesthetics at the University of Paris-VII,
Jussieu. His books include On the Shores Graham Dawson .......................................................................................... 40
of Politics (Verso, 1994) and The Names
of History (Minnesota University Press,
Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia
1994). Paul Hockenos ............................................................................................. 43
Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem
Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster
Tel: 0181 341 9238 David Macey................................................................................................. 45
Layout by Petra Pryke Daniel Burston, The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing
Tel: 0171 243 1464 Janet Sayers ................................................................................................ 46
Copyedited and typeset by Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality
Robin Gable and Lucy Morton
Tel: 0181 318 1676 Rosalyn Diprose........................................................................................... 48
Design by Peter Osborne Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations
Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill, Chris Brown ................................................................................................. 49
Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HJ
Alison Assiter, Enlightened Women
Bookshop distribution Susan Mendus ............................................................................................. 50
UK: Central Books,
99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time
Tel: 0181 986 4854 Brian Dillon ................................................................................................ 51
USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre
Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100,
Tel: 201 667 9300; OBITUARY
Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw
Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217, Raphael Samuel, 1934–1996
Tel: 718 875 5491; Carolyn Steedman ............................................................................. 53
Fine Print Distributors, 500 Pampa Drive,
Austin, Texas 78752-3028.
Tel: 512-452-8709 LETTER
Cover: Ruth Collins, Bad Planning, 1997. Jason Gaiger ................................................................................................56
See also page 39.
Thomas Kuhn,
1922–1996
K
uhnʼs The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, despite the modesty of its
author, a revolutionary work. Like Darwinʼs Origin of Species (with which it
shares many other likenesses), its wider cultural and political resonances far
exceeded the intentions and expectations of its author – both in scope and in direc-
tion. Developed through painstaking scholarly work in the history of science, Kuhnʼs
concepts of ʻparadigmʼ, ʻnormal scienceʼ, ʻanomalyʼ, ʻcrisisʼ, and ʻscientific revolutionʼ
itself, exploded their initial disciplinary confines. Throughout the humanities and social
sciences, and even in some heretical margins of the natural sciences, the implications
of Kuhnʼs arguments were intensely debated. And, beyond the classrooms and librar-
ies, Kuhnʼs ideas became commonplaces in the intellectual and cultural ferment of the
1960s and early 1970s.
Why was this? The most obvious answer lies in the key words of Kuhnʼs title.
ʻStructuralismʼ had already gained an exotic presence in Anglophone culture through
the work of a Francophile intellectual vanguard. ʻScienceʼ was an important site of
cultural and political contestation, both because of the challenge to scientific authority
mounted by the emerging counterculture, and because of the more circumscribed battle
for scientific status going on in the social sciences. And the word ʻrevolutionʼ! Here the
resonances are far more complex and mediated. The word had a place in the popular
music and youth culture of the time, as the generation of the 1960s defined itself in
opposition to military power, imperial domination and rampant consumerist ʻmaterial-
ismʼ. Some among the generation of ʻpeace and loveʼ were also revolutionaries in a more
self-consciously political sense, and it was perhaps in these circles more than elsewhere
that Kuhnʼs ideas were taken up and debated. Increasingly, as revolutionary practice
was seen to require revolutionary theory, the status of Marxism, in particular, became
a central issue. With that, as the work of the French structural Marxists became better
known among English-speaking radicals, the question became: ʻscientificʼ or ʻhumanistʼ
Marxism? The nexus of structure, revolution and science seemed inescapable.
This was the wider context within which Kuhnʼs new view of science was intro-
duced into the more specific and localized disputes occurring within the academic dis-
ciplines. As a graduate philosophy student at Oxford in the late 1960s, I had managed
to suppress my growing scepticism about philosophical orthodoxy sufficiently well to
get that far, but felt unable to carry on doing it. Luckily, I wasnʼt the only one, and,
equally luckily, it was possible to find like-minded sceptics among the staff – or at
least those who were prepared to hear their professional assumptions questioned by
mere students. Kuhnʼs characterization of crisis in the history of science seemed to fit
our situation all too well: a dominant paradigm (ʻanalyticalʼ philosophy) faced with
F
rom a distance, the legacy of Thomas Kuhn to academia appears to have been
a radical one. After all, isnʼt he the person most responsible for overturning the
positivist philosophical orthodoxy by defining science so that the social and
natural sciences could both be seen as forms of organized enquiry or ʻparadigmsʼ?
And didnʼt his definition stress the social dimension of science to such an extent that
he breathed new life into the sociology of science, starting with the Edinburgh School
and eventuating in the professionalization of ʻscience studiesʼ? And hasnʼt the advent
of science studies paved the way for a radical reconsideration of the place of science
in society, leading to the ʻScience Warsʼ that have periodically erupted on both sides
of the Atlantic over the last five years? The presuppositions informing each of these
three questions are false, as Kuhn himself has been at pains to point out since the
introduction to his collected essays, The Essential Tension, in 1977. Indeed, as I have
stressed in a set of essays and a forthcoming book, Kuhnʼs influence has been a pro-
foundly conservative one, but one in keeping with the setting in which The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions was written.1
The key to understanding the impact of Kuhnʼs work is the dedication of that classic
work to Harvard President James Bryant Conant, an administrator of the US atomic
bomb project, staunch cold warrior and Kuhnʼs early academic mentor. It was Conant
who conceived of the courses, ʻGeneral Education in Scienceʼ, in which Kuhn devel-
oped his famous conception of science as iterated cycles of paradigms and revolutions,
in the decade following World War II. The constituency for Conantʼs courses was the
returning soldiers whose education was funded by the US government. They were
expected to become managers who would be increasingly asked to decide on projects
containing a strong scientific component. From Conantʼs standpoint, it was important
that they remained friendly to science, despite public calls for greater regulation of
scientific research in the wake of the US atomic bombing of Japan (which Conant
strongly encouraged).
Conantʼs pedagogical strategy was to show that the scientific mindset has remained
constant from Galileo and Boyle to Einstein and Heisenberg, changes in the material
conditions of research notwithstanding. Kuhn was among a number of Harvard gradu-
ates who had become disillusioned with their career prospects as scientists while
serving in World War II. Nevertheless, they sympathized with Conantʼs attempt to
No turning back:
Kuhn and feminist epistemology
F
eminist epistemology may owe more to Quine and Wittgenstein philosophically,
but Thomas Kuhnʼs dramatic delineation of the differences that ʻparadigmsʼ
could make in the sciences gave content and material consequence to the philo-
sophical ideas. This emboldened feminists to articulate the kinds of difference feminist
inquiry might exhibit by comparison with the mainstream.
Kuhnʼs work was important to feminists in several respects. It was first invoked as
a way of articulating convictions about the role of gender ideology in the content and
practices of the sciences. I can recall taking Kuhn as my legitimating text in the first
public lecture I ever gave (1973), on masculinist bias in biology and psychology. And
Ruth Hubbard, in her classic essay ʻHave Only Men Evolved?ʼ, also cites Kuhn as
offering a framework within which to place her critique of the representations of the
roles of male and female organisms in evolutionary theory. What Kuhnʼs ideas offered
were ways to make sense of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in an arena alleg-
edly governed by objective, empirical methods. The notions of the theory-ladenness
of observation and of paradigm made it possible to see and say how careful scientists
could nevertheless persist in treating certain kinds of human variation as falling into
bivalent and exclusive categories of masculine and feminine, or even in seeing varia-
tion where there was none. But Kuhnʼs insistence that elements other than empirical
evidence and logic were required for theory-choice facilitated even stronger views. As
Evelyn Keller put it in the introduction to Reflections on Gender and Science, ʻthe
direct implication of such a claim is that not only different collections of facts, differ-
ent focal points of scientific attention, but also different organizations of knowledge,
different interpretations of the world, are both possible and consistent with what we call
scienceʼ (p. 5). So, interpretations of the world expressive of a feminist sensibility, or at
least of a non-androcentric and non-masculinist sensibility, should also be possible and
consistent with what we call – that is, should be recognizable as – science.
Even those philosophical positions opposed to this conception of the sciences were
transformed by Kuhnʼs powerful and influential challenge to mid-century orthodoxy.
This transformation meant an intellectual opening of varying degrees of breadth for the
ideas feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science would later go on to develop.
What it gave them permission to explore was not just the ways in which gender ideol-
ogy could enter explicitly and through metaphor into the content of scientific theory, but
the manner in which gendered ideals of scientific practice and inquiry could shape the
very contours of the knowable. Feminist epistemology has by now gone in too many
directions from these beginnings to try to characterize any single line of influence from
An opportunity to study
Modern European Philosophy at post-
graduate level, in London, in a struc-
tured programme.
One year full-time / two years part-time.
Following a compulsory course on
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, options
include: Adorno, Derrida, Gadamer,
Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl,
Kierkegaard, Marx, Schopenhauer and MA
Wittgenstein.
Modern
Programme leaders: European
Peter Osborne and Jonathan Rée Philosophy
Write to:
Admissions Enquiries, Middlesex University,
White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR
Telephone: 0181 362 5000
Gary Peters
The evocative remarks of Emmanuel Levinas on art pre-eminence and instates the Other as primordial.
and rhythm have received little attention. In opening As Otherness is here understood as occupying the
the question of the aesthetic, indeed the questionable fissures upon which rhythm depends, it is of interest
nature of the aesthetic for Levinas, the intention here to note Levinasʼs subsequent denial of the aesthetic in
is to redress the balance at a time when the ethical the name of an ethics which, while purporting to take
dimension of his thought is being privileged. responsibility for the otherness of the Other, refuses
There are three main reasons for doing this. First, to allow the aesthetic its own alterity or rhythm, its
in both Levinasʼs early phenomenological writings own irresponsibility. In other words, it would seem
and his brief excursions into aesthetics he makes a that the aesthetic origin of some of Levinasʼs ground-
significant (if overlooked) contribution to the under- ing ideas ultimately endangers the ethical purpose
standing of modernist art practice. By challenging the which they are later made to serve. Accordingly, the
dominant metaphysics of continuity at the level of ʻthe following essay concludes by placing a question mark
instantʼ, he articulates a radically discontinuous logic over Levinasʼs own questioning of the aesthetic, the
of interrogation which matches very effectively the intention being to open up, in turn, a discussion of the
creative strategies of many avant-garde artists. While questionable nature of ethics.
the following essay is mainly concerned with situating Third, during a period in which the literary and
Levinasʼs thoughts on rhythm within the philosophical rhetorical dimensions of philosophical discourse have
traditions upon which he draws, it is clear that he been particularly emphasized there is some merit in
offers a very powerful analysis, which, in the case of reconsidering not only what might be called the music-
music, for example, would allow a fruitful investigation ology of the text but also the musicality of being. In
of the ʻnew musicʼ. In particular, the compositional this regard the following thoughts, while beginning
discontinuity of Webern, Stockhausen, Cage and Nono, with the metaphorical use of musical terminology
for instance, would be much better understood in the within philosophical discourse, are in fact primarily
terms outlined below than through the aesthetics of concerned with an investigation into musicality (spe-
continuity which remains dominant in western musi- cifically, rhythm) as a means of approaching the vexed
cology. To that extent the following investigation might question of alterity understood as the breaching of
be seen as a contribution to the development of what different totalities – literary, linguistic, poetic, narra-
might be described as a Levinasian aesthetic. tive, rhetorical, etc. – of the word. Such an approach,
Second, although given primacy in his thought as largely ignored since the philosophical musicality of
a whole, ethics for Levinas depends upon a notion of Nietzsche, does not offer any simple solutions to the
alterity which is arrived at by way of a prior interro- problem of accessing the ʻoutsideʼ of philosophical
gation of ʻthe instantʼ and the subsequent attempt discourse. It does nevertheless allow for the scrutiniz-
to articulate the breaching of temporal continuity. ation of aspects of being left ʻunheardʼ (or perhaps
One consequence of this is that when considering art heard too easily) by the non-musical. In short, Levi-
Levinas is drawn to the sensation of rhythm within nasʼs ʻsensationʼ of rhythm is here privileged as a
an aesthetic experience, claiming that ʻparticipationʼ particular gift or ʻfeelʼ for the phenomenological pulse
within the discontinuous pulse both strips the I of its of being.
Once again, Levinas speaks here of the breaking Within the negative aesthetic of Levinas and Stock-
of continuity where the emergence of the unforeseen hausen the ʻblocksʼ and ʻcubesʼ of the former are
in its existential nakedness initiates a rhythm that equivalent to the ʻholesʼ and ʻcavitiesʼ of the latter;
has nothing to do with the counting of beats or the in both cases rhythm is the pulsating remainder simul-
mastery of time as measure. Instead, he alludes to a taneously inscribed and erased.
Marcus Roberts
In 1978 G.A. Cohen published Karl Marxʼs Theory the outset. So, too, had Marxʼs ʻmultiply confusedʼ
of History: A Defence. That this landmark work set anatomy of the capitalist mode of production.2 As for
out to defend (something like) the orthodox historical ʻMarxʼs theory of historyʼ in its technological deter-
materialism of the Second International was surprising minist incarnation, Cohen has long since confessed
enough; that its author situated himself within the ʻana- to doubts as to its defensibility; few Marxists – even
lyticalʼ tradition – and therefore engaged, and sought amongst his co-workers – now share the slightest
to defeat, Acton, Plamenatz, Popper et al. on their doubts about its indefensibility;3 and, anyway, Cohen
own methodological terrain – was surprising indeed. himself no longer considers it to have any purchase
It is testimony to Cohenʼs analytical acuity that, from upon the crucial problems confronting socialists at
such unpropitious materials, he fashioned not a mere the close of the twentieth century. He argues that the
curio, but arguably the most accomplished defence of pre-history of the historical materialist programme has
ʻtechnological determinismʼ ever produced, and one nothing very interesting to tell us regarding either the
of the most important works of Marxist philosophy constituency, agency and strategy of any prospective
to have emerged from the Anglo-American academy. transition to socialism, or the motivational and insti-
In fact, its publication heralded the emergence of a tutional structures of a feasible socialism. Thus, in the
sui generis Marxism designated by its progenitors introduction to Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality
– prominent amongst whom, alongside Cohen, were (1995), Cohen concedes that
Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski and Erik to the extent that Marxism [i.e. Analytical Marxism
Olin Wright – as ʻAnalyticalʼ or ʻRational Choiceʼ – MR] is still alive, as … one may say that it (sort
Marxism. The architects of this new ʻparadigmʼ of) is in the work of scholars like John Roemer and
insisted that a necessary condition of Marxismʼs salva- Philippe Van Parijs [note the conspicuous absence
tion was its importation into the tradition of analytical of Elster – MR], it presents itself as a set of values
and a set of designs for realising those values … Its
philosophical method, ʻpositivistʼ social science, and
shell is cracked and crumbling, its soft underbelly is
– or, at least, so argued Elster, Roemer and Przeworski exposed.4
– that version of rational choice theory originating in
the Marginalist revolution of the 1870s and providing However, while conceding the demise of Analytical
neo-classical economics with its definitive axioms. As Marxism, Cohen, in an article originally published in
one commentator observed, ʻCohen and his co-thinkers 1990, announces the advent of another new paradigm:
… casually crossed the supposedly impassable border ʻAnalytical Semi-Marxismʼ.5
between Marxism and the academic mainstream in If it is true that the moment anyone started to talk to
philosophy and social theory.ʼ1 Marx about morality he would laugh, then Analytical
After nearly two decades, few Marxist ʻinsightsʼ Semi-Marxism would have had him in stitches. At the
have survived the attempt to ʻreconstructʼ it. Most end of a century providing socialists with few occa-
of the Marxist heritage – Marxism-Leninism, Trot- sions for merriment, Cohen declares it high time for
skyism, Western Marxism and Structuralist Marxism a straight-faced engagement with, and development of,
– had been consigned to the Humean flames from the ʻethicalʼ or ʻutopianʼ socialism decried by Marx-
A staple diet
Cohen does not claim to possess a well-worked-out
model of a feasible socialism. However, in view of
his rejection of large-scale economic planning – ʻVon
Mises and Hayek were rightʼ40 – it is unclear what
alternative he might offer to some type of market
socialism other than something along the lines of
Nordic social democracy. Of course, a further pos-
sibility, to which Cohen confesses his vulnerability,
is despair:
Passages: Jacques Rancière, for more than twenty years you have been following a
somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has
nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philo-
sophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in
atypical fashion.
Rancière: Given the historical and political conjuncture of the 1970s, which I certainly
did not foresee, I wanted to look again at certain of the concepts and conceptual logics
that Marxism used to describe the functions of the social and the political. For me, that
wish took the form of a decision, which might be described as purely empirical, to look
at the contradiction between the social and the political within the working-class tradi-
tion. Basically, I wanted to know how Marxism related to that tradition. I wanted both to
establish what that working-class tradition was, and
to study how Marxism interpreted and distorted Jacques Rancière first came to prominence as one of
it. For many years I took no more interest in phil- the co-authors, with Louis Althusser, of the original
osophy. More specifically, I turned my back on two-volume edition of Lire le Capital (1965), to which
what might be called political theories, and read he contributed an essay on Marxʼs 1844 Manuscripts
nothing but archive material. I posited the existence (trans. ʻThe Concept of “Critique” and the Critique of
of a specifically working-class discourse. I began to “Political Economy”ʼ, in Ali Rattansi, ed., Ideology,
suspect that there was once a socialism born of a Method and Marx, Routledge, 1989). However, he
specifically working-class culture or ethos. Years of soon broke with Althusser (see Rancière, La Leçon
work on working-class archives taught me that, to be dʼAlthusser, 1974), becoming an influential figure
schematic about it, ʻworking-class proletarianʼ is pri- in French Maoism. This break, at once political
marily a name or a set of names rather than a form and theoretical, was focused on what Rancière has
of experience, and that those names do not express described as ʻthe historical and philosophical relations
an awareness of a condition. Their primary function between knowledge and the massesʼ. Developing out
is to construct something, namely a relationship of of a critique of Althusserʼs theory of ideology (see
alterity. Rancière, ʻOn the Theory of Ideology – Althusserʼs
That, then, was the starting point. I then slowly Politicsʼ, RP 7, Spring 1974; reprinted in R. Edgley
went back to asking questions about a certain number and R. Osborne, eds, Radical Philosophy Reader,
of concepts from within the philosophical tradition. Verso, 1985), it led to a series of reflections on the
The essential matrix for what I have been doing since social and historical constitution of knowledges: La
then was supplied by the writings of a carpenter called Nuit des prolétaires, 1981 (trans. Nights of Labour,
Gauny. They take the form of an experiment in what Temple University Press, 1989); Le Philosophe et ses
might be described as ʻwild philosophyʼ. The most pauvres, 1983; and Le Maître ignorant, 1987 (trans.
significant of his writings deal with his relationship The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University
with time and speech. What did this mean? I had been Press, 1991). More recently, since 1989 Rancière has
working on these texts, and when I looked again at broadened his canvas to engage the constitution of
certain texts from within the philosophical tradition, ʻthe politicalʼ within the Western tradition (Aux bords
and especially Platoʼs Republic, I realized that this du politique, 1990; trans. On the Shores of Politics,
self-taught nineteenth-century carpenter had given phil- Verso, 1994) and the poetics of historical knowledge
osophy the same conceptual heart as Plato, namely the (Les Noms de lʼhistoire, 1992; trans. The Names of
fact that the worker is not primarily a social function, History, Minnesota University Press, 1994). His latest
but a certain relationship with the logos, and that he books are Le Mésentente, 1995 and Mallarmé – la
is assigned to certain temporal categories. politique de la sirène, 1996.
Passages: One might say that your subsequent books have almost systematically
emphasized the importance of the Greeks. Are the Greeks, and especially Plato and
Aristotle, of particular relevance to you?
Rancière: Yes. I refer to Plato and Aristotle because they are in fact the most modern
theorists of the political. In terms of the political, they are the basic thinkers, and they are
therefore the most modern thinkers. The circulation of the signifiers of politics is, so to speak,
a precondition for politics. Signifiers that are essentially Greek and Roman circulate through
the medieval Church and the Renaissance, and are then taken up again during the revolutionary
period. Some signifiers of politics, such as the concept of leisure, play an absolutely central
role in the nineteenth century, and they derive directly from ancient philosophy. I wanted to
stress that line of descent. It so happens that the only philosophical texts to address directly
the subject-matter of my nineteenth-century texts were by Plato and Aristotle. In comparison,
the writings of Kant or Hegel are, in this context, no more than a pale imitation, even though
Hegel does in fact rework the idea of the world and of need. Hegel is a modern political
economist. In that sense, he comes close to the world that produced my working-class texts.
At the same time, I would say that what Hegel has to say about it takes us back to a symbolic
structure that was inscribed or written by Plato and Aristotle, and that was perpetuated by
what might be termed a vulgarized Ciceronianism. And in that sense it may prove to be one
of the basic structures of any theory of the political.
*
Plato, The Republic, trans. A.D. Lindsay, Everyman, London, 1992, II 371; VI 495.
Rancière: One of the starting points for the book was an article I was asked to write five
years ago for an issue of Le Genre humain devoted to the question of consensus. It appeared
to me that the idea of a consensus was an attempt to find a direct correspondence between the
notion of ʻthe peopleʼ and that of ʻthe populationʼ, defined as an object that can be completely
broken down into given empirical categories. And it seemed to me that the poverty of the
political, or the collapse of the political that we are now witnessing, could be understood
in terms of this identification of the people with a political category, and of the population
with a sociological category that could be described by using the appropriate statistical tools.
Going back to the great concepts of the people – disparate concepts of labourers, proletarians,
citizens, and the people – I therefore began to explore the idea that any political subject is
the mark of a disparity and not an identity. That is why I began to re-examine the concept
of the demos in classical thought. In a sense, La Mésentente is no more than an extended
commentary on the opening lines of Aristotleʼs Athenian Constitution. Aristotle explains the
situation of the poor by saying that they had no share in the polis. In a sense, one can say
that politics begins when those who have no share begin to have one.
Thinking about consensus in this way led me to realize that the demos was, right from
the start, a very singular object. Demos became a name for ʻthe communityʼ, but for any
well-born Athenian it meant something very specific, namely the poor, those who are nothing.
My starting point, then, was the paradoxical object I analysed as the first object of politics.
Politics begins with the existence of a paradoxical object that is at once a part and a whole.
Which implies the existence of a still more paradoxical object because the part that is counted
as a whole basically consists of those who have no share in anything. This is also important
in terms of contemporary problematics, where what we call ʻexclusionʼ refers to the one
element that cannot be counted in a state system where everyone can supposedly be counted;
where it is supposedly possible to quantify every element in the polis, their needs and their
opinions. There is a remainder that has not been counted and cannot be counted. It seems
to me that politics begins when the uncounted are not only counted, but when counting the
uncounted comes to be seen as the very principle, the very element, of politics. I therefore
tried to develop this logic.
It might obviously be argued that I am drawing a hasty comparison between the Greek
demos and the modern proletariat. But I think it is vital to argue that politics exists only when
there are subjects who are marked as different and that, in the final analysis, the difference
that creates a political subject always comes down to counting the uncounted, with all the
paradoxes that may entail. In other words, the subject is always a problematic subject, either
Passages: Arenʼt people without any fixed abode and the proletariat, in fact, com-
pletely new categories that cannot cling on to a complete history, to a whole memory
that once had a political impact?
Rancière: Yes. The concept of memory is an ambivalent one. There have been periods
when it was thought that memory was a property of social bodies. There was the great period
of peopleʼs memory or working-class memory. There have also been periods when it was
thought that memory was something that could be injected, and that people therefore had
to have a history if they were to be aware of their identity, their past and where they were
coming from. I believe that memory does not function like that. Just as there are singular
forms of subjectivation, there are, I think, singular operators of memorization. To take our
generation, all those who explain ʼ68 in sociological terms are, in my view, quite mistaken.
ʼ68 was not a youth revolt. ʼ68 did not represent the emergence of a new way of life. ʼ68 was
an event inscribed within a certain type of political memory, and that memory was bound up
with decolonization. The ʻGerman Jewʼ of ʼ68 would have been unthinkable were it not for
a certain mode of including the Other. And that mode of inclusion was inscribed within the
Passages: If we accept the idea that the political is grounded in irreducible conflicts
that can flare up in different ways, what are the contemporary indicators of those
permanent conflicts, given all the talk of the disappearance of the right–left dichot-
omy? Where will the future conflicts occur? In what domain, on what terrain?
Rancière: I am trying to look at the notions that make politics possible. How politics becomes
concretely possible is another matter. In the absence of subjects capable of realizing equality
– which is the ultimate and absent foundation of politics – in the form of an active freedom,
the question of equality is laid bare. Fragmentary political scenes are taking shape around
the issue of whether society should be structured around an egalitarian or a non-egalitarian
rule.
In France, until the strikes of Autumn 1995, politics usually centred around the youth issue,
around the school and university question. The educational system is in fact becoming the site
designated by our social system as its most important link, as the site of societyʼs fantasmatic
self-identity. Schools and universities are supposed to be able to supply something the world
of labour can no longer supply: the focus which, thanks to ʻtrainingʼ, allows the distribution
of skills to be brought into line with the distribution of jobs. They therefore supposedly
allow society to be equal to itself, to be a body in which every function has its place. More
so than ever before, they are a metaphor for society itself, the site where its egalitarian or
non-egalitarian meaning can be stated, and where the logic of consensus must break down.
We have therefore reached the point where those who govern us are obliged to declare
inequality. At the same time, the egalitarian signifier can be grasped
(thanks to the issue of secular education ʻfor young peopleʼ). And
the political does exist to some extent when the political signifier
can be grasped as such.
During the strikes of Autumn 1995, the place where the equalitar-
ian signifier was manifested reverted to the ʻworkerʼ pole, thanks
to the issue of the public sector, of pension and other rights and
even the issue of how ʻintelligenceʼ is shared out within the social
body. The egalitarian signifier could be grasped once more. But the
problem is that it was the only thing that was grasped. The egalitar-
ian signifier was not refracted through any freedom or citizenship.
The question is whether or not these mixed situations allow us to
imagine a politics in which a declaration of equality or non-equality
can polarize everything. I have no answer to that question.
A symbolic violence
Passages: Why did you chose the title La Mésentente [ʻThe Disagreementʼ] for your
latest book?
Rancière: The notion of disagreement is clearly meant as a critique of both Lyotardʼs theory
of the differend, and Habermasʼs theory of communicative action. Like Habermas, I think
that debate is central to politics. On the other hand, I do not think that political interlocu-
tion corresponds to the model of communicative rationality. The latter presupposes that the
parties involved have pre-established positions, and that their conflicting statements have a
common referent. I think that the very nature of politics is such that the stage has not been
built, that the object has not been recognized, and that the very partners in the debate have
Passages: Could it be said that your conception involves an implicit political ethics?
According to Arendt, politics means that equality excludes violence as a political act
because violence means the curtailment of action, and the utilization of the Other.
What is your definition of politics?
Rancière: One could say that politics is a peaceful or limited war. One of the founding
ordinances of Athenian democracy that are ascribed to Solon is the curious ordinance that
obliges citizens to take part in civil wars and stipulates that those who do not must be stripped
of their civic rights. On the other hand, ʻrecalling bad thingsʼ was an offence in the Athens
of the classical age, and one remembers Platoʼs astonishment on learning that condemned
criminals were free to walk the streets. Politics is an extreme form of symbolic violence,
an inescapable conflict over principles that allows violence to be controlled. Because it is a
regulated symbolic violence, and because it institutionalizes a wrong and an alterity that can
be discussed, politics is a substitute for war. And in the absence of politics, we do indeed see
the reappearance of figures of an alterity that cannot be symbolized, and the reappearance of
war to the death or generalized criminality.
It is as though politics were a specific and controlled form of violence that blocks other
forms of violence. It is in that sense that there is such a thing as an ethics of politics: it is a
specific way of handling conflict. It is when politics no longer exists that we begin to look for
a mere ethics, and that we try to base politics on ethics. We appeal to the moral individual
who supposedly exists inside the political individual, and who is supposedly the ultimate
foundation, the ultimate guardian of the great principles. But there is no such thing as a moral
individual who is more moral than the political individual. The moral individual always obeys
a certain morality. And there are all sorts of moralities. Believing that we have to kill the
ʻinfidelʼ, or that Jews are not human, is also a matter of morality. It is when politics fails that
we see all these ʻmoralitiesʼ coming into play. There is such a thing as an implicit political
ethics and it is a specific way of handling conflict.
Speakers include:
Jacques-Alain Miller Colette Soler Eric Laurent
Marie-Hélène Brousse Rosa Calvert Pierre-Gilles Guéguen
Jean-Pierre Klotz Geneviève Morel and others
If Marxism is on the blink, how much does it matter? Marxist one cares to mention. The belief that the world
It matters, obviously, to right-wingers who are now is material, independent of and in some sense prior to
either gleefully triumphalist or glumly bereft of a consciousness, is shared by both Plekhanov and Paddy
whipping boy; and if Marxism is erroneous then, one Ashdown, just as the belief that social being broadly
might claim, it matters for the sake of a truthful view determines consciousness unifies both Gramsci and
of things that it takes itself off as soon as possible. But the Guardian.
how far does it matter to the political Left? The Left is The doctrine of base and superstructure is arguably
in business not to install Marxism, which is a theory, peculiar to Marxist theory, but many self-confessed
but to construct socialism, which is both a project Marxists have refined it out of existence, and in any
and a state of affairs; and the relationship between case Freud, no friend of Marxism, held that the funda-
the two has gone curiously unexamined in all the talk mental motive of human society was economic, and
of the demise of the former. Most Marxists speak of that without the imperative to labour we would simply
their creed as a unity of theory and practice, but it is lie around all day in various states of jouissance. It
hard to see what a specifically Marxist practice would is also arguable that business executives subscribe to
consist in, as opposed to a non-Marxist revolutionary the doctrine, in practice if not in theory. Theories of
socialist one, such as the politics of the late Raymond surplus-value, the falling rate of profit and the like may
Williams. be specific to Marxist thought, but, once again, quite
What does being a Marxist add to being a social- a few self-proclaimed Marxists have emphatically
ist? Historically speaking, the two have been closely rejected them. Conversely, Marxists have hardly had
bound together, to the point where, without the various a monopoly on the labour theory of value. If Marxists
Marxist traditions, socialist ideas, and revolutionary believe that something called history is teleological,
ones in particular, would have been far less prevalent progressive, contradictory, dialectical and in some
in twentieth-century culture. But it is less easy to sense rational – a big enough if, to be sure – then so
determine what Marxism adds to socialism theoreti- do Hegelians. Perhaps Marxists hold to a contradiction
cally, and arguably impossible to say what it adds to between the forces and relations of production – in
it practically. Almost all of the doctrines which appear which case Louis Althusser was only dubiously of their
peculiar to Marxism either turn out not to be, or not number. Some Marxists now dismiss the idea of class
to be definitive of it, or both. How then can Marxism identity or scientific knowledge or false consciousness,
be over, when we cannot even agree on what it is and some who do not are not Marxists.
or was? The philosophy of dialectical materialism Maybe what is peculiar about Marxism is that
is specific to Marxism, but scarcely definitive of it, it advances a ʻmaterialistʼ, rather than ʻethicalʼ or
at least for Marx and Engels themselves for almost ʻutopianʼ, theory of socialism. It shows, for example,
all of their careers, or for more or less any Western how the material conditions for socialism are even
Terry Eagleton
Among Raymond Williamsʼs major achievements was in its impact upon local economies, communities and
the development of a critical method for interpreting ways of life.
writing as an active and creative response to the ʻlived At the centre of Williamsʼs intellectual project was
experienceʼ of its producers, within and against com- the task of critiquing ʻreceived modelsʼ, and of recover-
plex determining historical conditions. In anticipating ing and reasserting marginalized and oppositional
the first biography of Williams, who used his own life cultural meanings and values. His efforts to fashion
so compellingly as a resource in this project, readers a democratic socialist alternative to the dominant
might well expect to find the conceptual tools forged traditions of Stalinism and Fabianism – the project
by him now turned upon his own extraordinarily of the New Left from the late 1950s – led him to
varied and prolific writing – as a cultural critic and his- establish an increasingly critical distance from the
torian, as a novelist, and above all as one of the major Labour Party. This hardened from a ʻreserved attitudeʼ
European socialist intellectuals of the last forty years. in the 1930s, through critical support for the Attlee
Readers with such expectations will be disappointed and Wilson governments of 1945–51 and 1964–66, to
and irritated by Fred Inglisʼs confused, contradictory outright hostility after Wilsonʼs re-election in 1966.
and, it must be said, reactionary biography. Analysing Wilsonʼs Party as ʻpost-social-democraticʼ
The political meaning of this biography has not – complicit with the priorities of the international
greatly exercised reviewers, whose overriding concern markets over ʻsocial use and social needʼ, and with
has tended to be with Williams as a novelist and an the capitalist stateʼs attack on the organized working
academic, a ʻfounding-fatherʼ of cultural studies. For class – Williams shifted towards a less equivocal
Williams, however, the significance of these activities revolutionary socialism, clear about the ʻtragic neces-
derived from their contribution to the left-wing politics sityʼ of violence in a revolutionary seizure of power,
of education, communication and ʻcultureʼ which he as well as the difficulties of the ʻlong revolutionʼ to
promoted. This always went hand-in-hand with his prevent ʻthe effective reproduction of existing social
commitment to the more traditional concerns of inter- relationsʼ. From the mid-1960s, his work was grounded
nationalist socialism. Williams was above all an anti- explicitly on the terrain of Marxism, whose con-
imperialist socialist, whose earliest public intervention cepts he reformulated and extended into an analytical
in politics, as a fourteen-year-old, concerned black vocabulary with which to unpick the connections
South African workers (p. 58); whose undergraduate between past and present, self and society, capital and
fiction included a short story on sugar riots in the culture, language and power, in ways that informed
West Indies (p. 60); and whose adult work consistently the practical arguments of a wide range of progressive
analysed the destructive dynamic of global capitalism movements and campaigns.
Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, University of California Press,
Berkeley and London, 1996. 212 pp., $19.95 hb., 0 520 20690 8.
ʻAt least none of us are circumcised,ʼ a Slovenian then it would seem logical that the 1992–95 war
journalist once joked to me uneasily as we crossed in Bosnia was a religious war. The Bosnian Serbs
the front line from Bosnian government- into Bosnian and Bosnian Croat nationalists openly boasted that
Serb-controlled territory. they were fighting to protect Christian Europe from
At the time, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian the westward advance of fundamentalist Islam. Both
Muslims was in full swing, and foreign journalists armies went out of their way to destroy every mosque
were not above suspicion for being, or for sheltering, on the territory they captured. One could justifiably
Muslims. The most common way to identify a personʼs argue that the term ʻethnicʼ in ʻethnic cleansingʼ is a
ethnicity in Bosnia is by their name. Any native can euphemism for ʻreligiousʼ. In collusion, the Christian
tell at once whether most family names are Serbian, regimes in Croatia and Serbia singled out the Bosnian
Muslim or Croatian. But some names are common Muslims for elimination because of their faith.
to two or all three groups, and many Bosnians are However plausible this explanation is, strictly it is
offspring of mixed marriages. And since there are no not the case – nor does Michael Sells in The Bridge
immediately apparent physical differences between Betrayed argue – that religion was the primary cause
Bosniaʼs three major peoples, falsified papers could and impetus for the slaughter in the Balkans. The war
easily conceal a personʼs ʻrealʼ ethnicity. in Bosnia was one of territorial aggression, orches-
In fact, thereʼs only one way to tell a Bosnian trated and actively supported by expansionist regimes
Muslim male from an Orthodox Christian Serb or a in Serbia and Croatia – and fought through their hard-
Catholic Croat male: by his penis. Muslims are circum- line proxies in Bosnia – to divide the country between
cised, Christians (in the Balkans) are not. During the them. Yet central questions remain unanswered. Why
war, it was common practice for Bosnian Serb – or was the conflict so violent? How could radical nation-
Bosnian Croat – troops to order men to drop their alist leaders so effectively rally people around their
trousers for purposes of identification. objectives, inciting them to rape and massacre their
When I politely told my usually well-informed col- neighbours? And why, in a strictly territorial war, was
league that most American men are routinely circum- genocide necessary at all?
cised at birth, he couldnʼt conceal his genuine shock. Sellsʼs finely written, well-argued book makes a
In Western cultures that donʼt circumcise, the practice major contribution to recent literature on Bosnia,
is seen as oriental, a foreign ritual performed by ʻnon- exploring the warʼs religious dimension and above all
European peoplesʼ, like Muslims and Jews. the role of Christian religious mythology in prepar-
The importance of circumcision in the Bosnian ing the ground for genocide. The author, chair of
war is telling, and not just in order to account for the Haverford Collegeʼs Religion Department, shows that
shocking proponderance of sexual crimes, like castra- a particularly lethal religious-based ideology was used
tion, mutilation and rape. Technically, the term ʻethnic to motivate and justify the war and the extermina-
cleansingʼ is a misnomer. Serbs, Croats and Bosnian tion of the Bosnian Muslims and their culture. The
Muslims all belong to the same ethnic group. They Catholic and Eastern Orthodox proponents of this
are Slavs, descendants of Slavic tribes that migrated to ideology, which he terms Christoslavism, conflate
the region in the sixth and seventh centuries. All three Slavic race and Christian religion, concluding that
speak a common Slavic language and are physically the only true Slavs are Christian Slavs. This makes
indistinguishable – except that Muslims are circum- Muslim Slavs (the Bosnian Muslims) traitors to their
cised. The defining difference between the three groups race and enemies of Christianity.
is religion: Serbs and Croats took on Christianity in the Sells traces the impetus and rationalization of geno-
ninth century, while the Muslims of Bosnia converted cide against Slavic Muslims to Serbian Christoslavic
to Islam during Ottoman rule. myth, which by the 1980s had filtered into public
If the only factor that distinguishes between the discourse and the media. The central event in Serbian
Slavic inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina is religion, folklore is the Serbsʼ tragic 1389 defeat at the hands of
Dining with the devil is morally and politically reprehensibleʼ (p. 7). The
price of philosophical postmodernism may be political
impotence, and feminists should therefore choose their
Alison Assiter Enlightened Women: Modernist Femi- friends with care, particularly if they expect feminism
nism in a Postmodern Age, Routledge, London and to be effective in the political world.
New York, 1995, x + 164pp., £35.00 hb., £11.99 pb.,
This first, critical, part of the book is admirable on
0 415 08338 9 hb., 0 415 08339 7 pb.
a number of levels: Assiterʼs style is quite exceptionally
Alison Assiter has set herself two exceedingly tough lucid and accessible. She is able to explain complex,
tasks in this book. First, she aims to explain the central often tortuous, passages in Irigaray with a clarity which
tenets of postmodernism to the beginning student. makes one wish that the original author had phrased
Second, she aims to show why feminists should be things that way. Additionally, she shows exactly why
wary of postmodernism and should consider a return and how theories in the philosophy of language and
to Enlightenment values, specifically to realism in the in epistemology will have consequences for feminism
theory of meaning, universalism in feminist theory, in particular, and for the political world more gener-
and a commitment to value in the cognitive domain. ally. This is no mean feat, and it is heartening to
The first task, taken alone, would be difficult enough: see someone explain so very clearly why philosophy
postmodern writing is notoriously dense, convoluted matters to politics and to morality.
and resistant to clear exposition. However, to couple In the second part of the book Assiter presents
the exegetical aim with a critical and constructive one, her own alternative to postmodern feminism. Whilst
particularly in such a short text, is doubly ambitious. recognizing that knowledge must always be situated,
It is also crucially important at both the philosophical that it matters who the knower is and where he or she
and the political level. is located, she also insists that this must not be inter-
R
aphael Samuel was born in London, to a Jewish Communist family, and died of
cancer in the city of his birth, on 9 December 1996. Education at the progressive
King Alfredʼs School (Hampstead Garden Suburb) and at Balliol College, Oxford,
where he was taught by Christopher Hill, contributed to his intellectual formation, but the
insistent and febrile energy that he brought to the practice and teaching of history –
indeed, to its very reshaping in the postwar years – was forged in a Communist childhood
and teenage membership of the Communist Party Historiansʼ Group. The domestic asceti-
cism of this upbringing, combined with the narrative richness of the Marxist historiography
he learned from the Party he left in 1956, was notably described in a series of pieces on
ʻThe Lost World of British Communismʼ, published in New Left Review in the mid-1980s
– the first English contribution to the now vastly overcrowded terrain of autobiographical
criticism to be written by a man (NLR 154, 156, 165).
Raphael Samuelʼs lasting memorials will be the work he inspired in the generations of
students he taught at Ruskin College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1996, and History Workshop,
in its protean forms of annual conferences, local networks and federations – which spread
across Europe and Scandinavia – and its eponymous journal. ʻA loose coalition of worker-
historians and full-time socialist researchersʼ was what he called it. ʻIt started in 1967,
at Ruskin College … as an attack on the examination system and the humiliations which
it imposed on adult studentsʼ (HWJ 9). History Workshop was a practice of progressive
education as much as it was of history. Raphael Samuel retained a lifelong admiration for
child- (or learner-) centred education, and for the Communist teachers he met in his youth.
He was perfectly willing to listen to elaborate arguments about progressive education as
the final – and conservative – resting place of post-Wordsworthian English romanticism,
but he believed not a word of them. His conviction sent mature students who had left
school at fifteen – unable to write an essay, as John Prescott recalled of his pre-Ruskin
self – straight into the archives, to learn from the fragmented records of the unconsidered
of the earth what a democratic and socialist practice of history might be. Like Raymond
Williams and Edward Thompson, he produced his historical work in interaction with
working-class adult returners to education – a peculiarity of English educational history
and English historiography that awaits its historian.
The standard charge against the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism
and a romantic merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in which
each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold indifference of posterity,
is piled upon another, in a relentless rescue of the past. When he was himself subject
to these charges, it was presumably his fine – and immensely detailed – accounts of the
labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather than minutiae that he
cared about. If, as Gareth Stedman-Jones suggested in his Independent obituary, Raphael
Samuel charted better than anyone else the desperate increase of hard labour in every
branch of industry and manufacture brought about by Victorian industrial capitalism (on
the land as much as in the factory), then it was because the details inscribed the meaning
of that toil, those lives, to those who lived them.
A
year or so ago, the University of Warwick made me a professor, and the inaugural
lecture was set for May 1996. The audience for it I wanted, that I most franti-
cally had to have, was Raphael. But he could not come: what turned out to be a
last holiday with his beloved friend and wife Alison had already been booked. He would
have taken the train from Euston to Coventry, had he been around, but he would not have
seen the point. In the Guardian obituary, Bill Schwarz wrote about Raphaelʼs indifference
Carolyn Steedman
Jason Gaiger
The Open University