Zhao Dingqi: The End of Politics and "Post-Democracy"—Rancière's Philosophical Critique of Contemporary Western Politics
Jacques Rancière is one of the most prominent contemporary Western scholars of the radical left. Born in 1940, Rancière was a key member of the famous Capital research group led by Louis Althusser and contributed to the writing of Reading Capital. After the 1980s, Rancière began to involve himself in the study of political philosophy. Even as the Western academic world shifted rapidly to the right, Rancière remained steadfast in his commitment to radical egalitarian concepts. Facing the sentiment of "political secularization" that permeated the Western world following the end of the Cold War, Rancière—based on a distinction between "politics" and "the police"—pointed out that contemporary Western society exhibits a depoliticizing tendency to replace "politics" with "the police." Under this tendency, Western society has formed a kind of "consensual democracy" or "consensual system" that obliterates the political, entering a "post-democratic" era in which democracy has lost its substantive content and become entirely formalized. This "consensual democracy" has not yielded the world of universal freedom it promised. On the contrary, where the so-called "totalitarian states" collapsed, "ethnicism and ethnic wars broke out." Concepts proposed by Rancière, such as the "end of politics" and "post-democracy," carry important reference value for our understanding of the current universal political crisis facing the West and the rise of emerging political forces such as [right-wing] [1] populism.
I. Disagreement and the Part of No Part
After the failure of the "May Storm" [2] in 1968, many radical intellectuals who had participated in the radical social movements of the 1960s fell into disillusionment. They betrayed their leftist egalitarian ideals, with some even becoming important figures in the officialdom of the French Fifth Republic; however, Rancière’s thought never wavered. Rancière has always maintained a commitment to radical egalitarianism—and it was precisely this persistence that ultimately led to his disappointment with, and eventual break from, Althusser. In 1974, Rancière published Althusser's Lesson, formally breaking with his mentor. Behind the binary division of "science" and "ideology" proposed by Althusser, Rancière discovered a hidden, traditional logic of domination. In Rancière's view, this theory denied the intrinsic value of the working class's spontaneous expression and action, transforming the working class into a passive mass that must follow the guidance of the Party and theorists: "In Althusser's construction, because the working class are victims of the obfuscating effects of ideology, they cannot see through the reality of their situation. They need the leadership of the Party, and they need to trust that the Party's intellectuals will notice their situation and be able to liberate them from oppression through appropriate political action." Rancière argued that this logic converts the order established through the division of labor (i.e., the division between manual and mental labor) into a symbolic order. In this order, only groups engaged in mental labor have the right to express valuable and authoritative views and ideas, while the common people at the bottom are deprived of the right to expression, their spontaneous speech dismissed as meaningless.
Rancière coupled the critique of unequal social domination with the discursive power of different social groups. In his concept of radical equality, the plight of the ruled lies not in their failure to understand or master the "correct" views and ideologies imparted by intellectuals, but in the fact that a specific system of inequality erases their discourse and expression. The inequality of modern society as understood by Rancière is not the class inequality based on specific relations of production spoken of by Marx, but rather the concealment and disappearance of specific groups who have been deprived of discursive power and go unrecognized by society. After the 1970s, Rancière devoted himself entirely to archival research on the lower classes and established a "Worker’s History Research Group" at Paris VIII. Inspired by the British historian E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, he sought to unearth "thought from below" and "history from below" by analyzing and mining labor archives. In Rancière's view, any expert, scholar, or intellectual concerned with the condition of the working class should not issue dictatorial opinions, but should instead believe in the workers' ability to directly express their own desires and needs. Guided by this thought, Rancière dedicated himself to studying "the dreams of the 19th-century French working class," attempting to let workers speak for themselves so they could reconstruct their own expressions and organizations.
In Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, published in 1995, Rancière revisited ancient Greek political literature to explore the relationship between the speaking animal and the political animal. Since antiquity, speech has been regarded as the primary characteristic distinguishing humans from animals, as Aristotle famously said: "Nature, as we say, doth nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she hath endowed with the gift of speech." Animals can only emit sounds, expressing the pleasure and pain common to all beasts; humans, however, possess the capacity for discourse and speech (logos). Speech can express the distinction between the "useful and the harmful" and, through this distinction, convey communal justice and injustice. Yet, not all humans in the biological sense possess the capacity or the qualification for speech. Rancière discovered that in ancient Greek political discourse, a speaker required specific qualifications. Based on whether one possessed the qualification for speech, the people in a social community could be divided into "discursive animals" and "vocal animals." Those speakers lacking qualification—the heterogeneous and anonymous many called "the people"—were considered capable only of expressing the "animal noise of pleasure and pain." For example, the Roman consul Appius Claudius [3] arrogantly stated that the plebeians "possessed only temporary speech; and such speech was a sort of improvised sound, a lowing of cattle, a sign of need, rather than an expression of intellect. They did not possess the eternal speech that is ever the same." That is to say, the speech of the people at the physical level was socially hidden and invisible, treated only as meaningless animal noise. If the people were to break this concealment and forcibly issue their own discourse and speech, it was believed it would cause chaos in the political order.
Consequently, discursive animals constitute the visible within a society, while vocal animals sink into invisibility, thereby forming a distribution of bodies within a "sensible order." Rancière uses this division to replace the category of class antagonism in Marxism; this distinction between the visible and invisible ultimately produces discursive "disagreement" (mésentente). The "disagreement" elaborated by Rancière is not a mistake in cognition or a misunderstanding in the usual sense, but is rooted in a restricted speaking situation—namely, "a determined kind of speech situation in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying." It is not a conflict where one party says white and the other says black, but rather one where "both say white but understand completely different things by it, or do not understand at all what the other says under the name of white." Thus, the production of disagreement reflects two fundamentally heterogeneous rational bases upon which the subject and object of discourse rely. Which party's discourse can be universally accepted and received by society depends primarily on the power relations behind the subject.
For the common people at the bottom of a society, they not only lack the right to speak and express themselves but are also usually in a position of concealment. The commoners who are hidden and invisible in society are called by Rancière the "part of no part" (la part des sans-part)—that is, those "who have no part in anything" within the social community, such as the poor in antiquity, the Third Estate, or modern proletarians. Rancière traces the concept of the "part of no part" back to Aristotle. In Politics, Aristotle divides the people of the community into three classes and examines their "value" as qualifications for community: the wealth belonging to the oligarchs, the virtue belonging to the aristocrats, and the freedom belonging to the "demos" (the people). But compared to the wealth of the oligarchs and the virtue of the aristocrats, the freedom possessed by the people "is not a determinable property but a pure invention" that cannot be verified in reality. At the same time, freedom is not a property exclusive to the common people; the people are merely an "undifferentiated mass without clear qualification—without wealth, without virtue—who yet consider themselves to possess the same freedom as others." In other words, the common people in fact possess no specific characteristics (such as wealth or virtue), but have had the false characteristic of "freedom" imposed upon them. Through this, the commoners' identification with the community is manufactured: "the mass of those without qualities identifies with the community in the name of this wrong." Or rather, it is precisely because of the existence of those with "no part"—who "bear the empty name of freedom" without any other characteristics—that the community exists as a political community.
The proletariat, as understood by Rancière, is precisely the "part of no part" excluded from the mainstream social system in capitalist society. During the 1832 trial of Louis-Auguste Blanqui [4] by the French government, when the prosecutor asked for his profession, Blanqui replied "proletarian." The prosecutor said, "That is not a profession." Blanqui retorted, "It is the profession of the majority of our people, for they are deprived of political rights." Rancière comments that while the prosecutor was correct from the logic of "the police," Blanqui was right from the point of view of politics, because "the proletarian is not the name of a socially definable group. It is a name for the 'outcast,' a name for the driven-out." In modern capitalist society, although the proletariat appears to possess the same legal rights as the bourgeoisie, they substantively possess none of the power or wealth in the bourgeois kingdom; they are the status-less ones in a state of concealment, excluded and driven out within capitalist society.
II. Politics and the Police: Two Logics of Social Operation
In extracting the "original conflict of the community over justice and injustice" from the capacity of speakers, Rancière distinguishes between two different logics of social operation: "the police" (la police) and "politics" (le politique). Although the police and politics are often conflated in public discourse, they are essentially two completely different logics.
(1) The Police: The Control and Distribution of Bodies
Rancière's understanding of "the police" is deeply influenced by Michel Foucault. Foucault defined "police" as "the form of governance technology dominated by the principle of state reason," a technology involving all matters regarding "man" and his "happiness." This science of police originated in 18th-century Germany, where the "narrow territorial divisions" faced by Germany allowed them to enter into "local zones that were extremely easy to observe." The logic of this police science can be summarized in one point: the government "governs too little"—that is, "not enough attention; too many things lost control; too many places lacked regulation and supervision; there was insufficient order and management." Under this police science, health, birth rates, hygiene, and all factors involving human health and life were brought into the state's sphere of governance. Rancière further develops Foucault's concept of the police. What he understands as "the police" is a governance technology and distribution system that arranges social operations according to a certain consensus. This system determines the division and distribution of the various parts that make up the social whole, and its primary function is to "define the parts and the portionless" [the part of no part].
First, the police order determines the position each group occupies in society and also decides whether each social group is qualified to speak. In Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière points out:
“The police is first of all an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of speaking, and which sees that those bodies are assigned by name to particular places and tasks; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.” Under the police order, every member of society is assigned an identity and a position; actions and speech inconsistent with that identity are forbidden. Thus, the police is not the "disciplining" of bodies, but rather the rules governing the appearance of bodies, the forms of occupations, and the nature of the spaces assigned to those occupations. In this way, the police obscurely carries out an orderly distribution of the members of society. This distribution includes two modes—sharing and exclusion—which allow one portion of people to become the "speakers" and the "visible" of society, incorporated into the social community and qualified to participate in public affairs. Another portion, meanwhile, becomes the "invisible" and "unspeakable," excluded from society and deprived of the qualification to participate in public affairs. For example, within the police order, the worker's workplace is defined as a private space not subject to the norms of the so-called public sphere. If workers wish to participate in public sphere affairs, they are restricted by their conditions of employment and the nature of their work.
Second, the police is an invisible law distinct from "policing" [5]. The "police" as defined by Rancière does not merely signify what we commonly understand as "policing"; it is not "the baton charge of law and order maintenance and the interrogation sessions of the secret police." On the contrary, in the police order as he understands it, scenes of maintaining social order through violent means rarely appear. Only in states where governance has failed is an order formed where grassroots police are responsible for all police functions. Mature modern Western societies, conversely, are states where the "policing" function has been greatly weakened. In these countries, the police system is determined not only by the draconian laws of the state apparatus but also by so-called spontaneous social relations. The police no longer possesses an element of violence but becomes "an element in the social deployment of medicine, welfare, and culture," designated to play the "role of counselor, organizer, and agent of public law and order." That is to say, the police order is a form of concealed social rule.
Third, the logic of the police transforms the rules of government rule into the natural laws of society. Rancière points out: "The principle of the police is to present itself as the realization of the essence of the community and to transform the rules of government into the natural laws of society." The system of consensus formed under the logic of the police asserts that under any circumstances, human beings "can only do what it is possible to do." These so-called "possible" things are those that do not transcend the existing order of rule; "possibility" becomes the conceptual exchanger for "reality" and "necessity." Under this logic, the reality of unequal rule becomes an historical necessity that cannot be challenged or transcended. The technocracy [6] popular in contemporary society is regarded by Rancière as the best contemporary exemplar of the logic of the police. This logic turns choice-based political questions into choice-less natural laws, thereby naturalizing and eternalizing social inequality.
(2) Politics: A Practice of Equality and Emancipation
Different from the common understanding of politics, the politics Rancière understands is not the so-called "bureaucratic administrative system and economic management," but rather a heterogeneous activity relative to the police, whose purpose lies in resolving the problems of social inequality maintained and reinforced by the police order. In his view, politics occurs when the "count of the uncounted" [7] begins to truly act as a political subject. Once the "uncounted"—who have nothing but identify with a community in the name of a "wrong" (le nom du tort)—lodge a protest against those who possess status and property, the original order is interrupted and the original community is split; it is at this moment that politics begins. Therefore, the starting point of politics lies in the place where "the count of the parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inclusion of the count of the uncounted (une part des sans-part)."
First, politics is a distribution of the sensible [8] that disrupts the police order. The politics Rancière understands is different from the class struggle expounded by traditional Marxism. He points out that treating the class struggle between the poor and the rich as the basis of politics is not a concept that only emerged after entering modern society; this concept already existed in ancient society. But this struggle is not the problem politics seeks to handle; rather, it is the starting point from which politics is established. The struggle between the rich and the poor does not in itself constitute politics; politics is formed only when the rule of the rich is interrupted by the appearance of the count of the uncounted. Therefore, politics is "any activity that moves a body from the place originally given to it or changes the destination of that place." This activity makes the invisible bodies that originally had no place in the police order become visible bodies, and allows the noise—originally regarded as animal sound—to become intelligible discourse. Rancière gives the example that formal political activities such as elections, strikes, and demonstrations may or may not be political; they are political only when they "reconfigure the relationship defining the workplace and the community."
Second, politics is the breaking of consensus. Unlike the police, which emphasizes consensus and order, politics emphasizes dissensus and conflict. However, this conflict is not a struggle or disagreement between different interests or ideas, but a fundamental dispute concerning the police order itself. It interrupts the social consensus and distribution of bodies set by the police order, attempting to reconstruct a new order of distribution. While criticizing consensus, Rancière also launches a critique of communities constructed on the basis of so-called universal consensus. In his view, the achievement of so-called consensus is completed through the elimination of disagreement; such a consensus will inevitably follow a unified standard, thereby obliterating ambiguity and diversity. Such a community would reduce politics back into the police and reduce equality back into inequality.
Third, politics is a practice of equality and emancipation. Rancière points out: "The sole principle of politics is equality." Of course, equality is not unique to politics, and equality itself is not necessarily political; what politics seeks to realize is "the verification of equality inscribed in the heart of the police order in the form of dispute." This "equality" is not a kind of equality that can be manifested through political operations or legal systems, nor is it a goal that ought to be achieved. Equality can only be understood in the practice of the "presumption of equality," and politics occurs at the point where the "logic of governance" and the "logic of equality" encounter one another—or rather, within the gap that inevitably exists between the two. Politics is actually a process of emancipation, a specific process of subjectivation in which people regarded as unqualified to exercise power break away from their given social roles, positions, and modes of perception, and proceed to manifest their own power.
III. Two Forms of the "End of Politics"
Facing the global wave of de-ideologization following the end of the Cold War, Rancière proposed the concept of the "end of politics" based on his understanding of politics. He points out that the "end of politics" is the ultimate form of the depoliticization of politics. In such an era, "politics" has descended into a routine management task guided by the principle of "realism," and the logic of the police has replaced the logic of politics. He distinguishes this end into two non-synchronous endings: the "end of promise," which declares that the New Era [9] no longer holds promises, and the "end of division," which emphasizes a new consensus.
First, the end of promise: the presentification and secularization of politics. The promise of a better future or utopia has been a typical characteristic of modern politics since the 19th century. Rancière keenly realized that a palpable change occurred in the French political arena in the 1980s: namely, the "end of promise." In the 1981 French general election, the Socialist presidential candidate Mitterrand proposed 110 political promises, but when he was re-elected president in 1988, "no one questioned how many of those promises he had actually kept." Rancière views this change as a sign that the utopian tradition since the 19th century is coming to an end. Rancière says ironically: "The 19th century was the century of an ideal people, the century of the community’s promise and of the island of Utopia," but the future vision conceived by the politics of that century "actually evolved into an abyss into which our century nearly plummeted." Because of this, the presidential candidate at that time chose a new stance, no longer making promises—the promise, as a link between reality and the future, was regarded as "a principle that causes disaster: it proposed in advance an 'end' for the development of the community, while the fragments of its collapse became fatal stones." Under these circumstances, politics became "secularized." Politics is no longer a plan to realize promises of happiness and emancipation, "no longer as a secret voyage toward the island of Utopia," but rather "as the art of steering and riding the waves, as the natural and peaceful development of economic growth and 'production'." That is to say, politics is no longer the pursuit of an alternative, better society, but becomes an art of "steering" centered on "production" and "economic growth"—the logic of the police has replaced the logic of politics. This practice of political secularization is a political practice of "radical presentification," giving rise to a thoroughly homogenized era. Future time, which once served as the carrier of utopia, has been dissolved; the so-called future is nothing more than "the extension of the present moment." From this, a new temporality is formed: namely, "a temporality freed from the double reign of the past and the future."
Second, the end of division: the return of classical "authority" and the proliferation of racism. Concurrent with the homogenization of time (i.e., the "end of history"), the division of space has also been obliterated; that is, "consistent with this era that no longer differentiates through promises, there ought to exist a space in which there is no longer division." The intense class contradictions existing within capitalist society (which Rancière calls the "contradiction between the poor and the rich") are concealed and replaced by externalized racial hatred. To this end, Rancière proposed the concept of "political reduction" and traced this concept back to the classical era. He suggests that political power possesses two origins: one is "that 'potential' (potentia) affirmed by people as our future productive capacity," and the other is the "authority" (auctoritas) of the sages of the classical era. "Authority" originates from the fear of split and upheaval; if a threat of division arises in a society, then "power" will very naturally receive affirmation from "authority." Taking French President Mitterrand as an example, Rancière points out that Mitterrand's election was precisely an exploitation of this fear. In his "Letter to All French People," Mitterrand took the stabilization of society as the task of politics. To avoid internal division within society, the measure adopted by the modern bourgeoisie is to manufacture new racism and xenophobia to end this internal "differentiation"; this is an exclusionary passion of the "One." Rancière points out that the essence of racism is hatred of the other, and it is likewise a means of regulating affairs within the scope of politics. As politics moves toward its end, racism moves increasingly to the center of the political stage: "the reappearance of racism and xenophobia at present foretells a collapse of politics, a regression from the politics of correcting wrongs toward primitive hatred." The art of politics thus forms an even more extreme division; it no longer leads to differences between the rich and the poor, nor does it lead to conflict and opposition, but rather produces a totalizing passion—a passion sustained by a "collective force originating from hatred."
IV. "Post-Democracy" and the Discourse Trap of Populism
In the process of analyzing the negative consequences caused by the expansion of bourgeois formal democracy, Rancière puts forward his own understanding of the concept of democracy. The democracy Rancière understands is not a specific political system or mode of life, but a mode of political subjectivation; this mode interrupts—
"...an order of distribution of bodies within the community." That is to say, democracy is a singular rupture and interruption of the police order. Hence, the relationship between democracy and politics is not external; rather, they are the prerequisites for each other's existence. Democracy is the form through which "politics itself is established," and a yardstick for measuring whether people in a society possess an equal right to speak. Proceeding from this understanding, Rancière challenges contemporary, popular theories of liberal democracy. He points out that the so-called democracy of liberalism presupposes two enemies: one is a clearly identifiable enemy (i.e., despotic government or totalitarianism), while the other is a hidden enemy (i.e., "democratic life"). In the liberal context, "democratic life" is an excessive, surplus, and out-of-control form of democracy. It was precisely this form of democracy that led to the upheavals experienced by Western societies in the 1960s and 70s—characterized, on the one hand, by "continuous antagonistic struggles in all spheres of state affairs" and, on the other, by "the destruction of the principles of good governance, the weakening of the dignity of public authority, and a disdain for professional knowledge and practical skills." To correct this "democratic life," it became necessary to redirect the masses' enthusiasm for public affairs elsewhere—namely, to "weaken excess political energy and stimulate the pursuit of individual happiness and social relationships." However, this leads to another unfavorable result: citizen indifference toward public affairs. It also weakens the authority of the government, which is forced to constantly respond to the ever-climbing personal demands of the populace. Therefore, the "good democracy" identified by liberalism must control a dual "excess": the excess of democratic vitality and the excess of private life.
Consequently, the deprivation and prevention of genuine people's democracy is the inherent essence of liberal "representative" democracy. Although contemporary Western representative democracy grants the people equal voting rights, the people do not enjoy substantive democratic rights. Rancière understands the essence of representation as a form of oligarchy—a political form manipulated by a minority of elites who control public affairs. Through this form, the ruling class manufactures the hypocritical democratic consensus [10] they require, and the political despotism of the ruling elite over the people is obscured: "The founders of the United States, as well as their French followers, accurately saw that (representation) actually meant the elite holding power; representation was forced to acknowledge the power of the people in the people's name." On this basis, Rancière refers to contemporary Western hypocritical representative democracy as a kind of "post-democracy," specifically a "consensual democracy." Under the name of "democracy," "consensual democracy" essentially cancels out "democracy" and "politics." This democracy clears away the controversies sparked by people’s democracy and simplifies into "a fundamental rule between state deployment, social energy, and the combination of interests." Authentic political questions are excluded from this form of democracy: "Democratic life becomes a life about indifferent commodity consumers, minority rights, the cultural industry, and test-tube babies—a life devoid of politics."
This "post-democratic" system formed in Western society after the end of the Cold War has factually deprived the masses of their democratic rights. The Western populace is unable to find political parties within the mainstream political system that represent their own interests, thereby creating space for the rise of populist politics. In recent years, Western countries have all seen a situation where traditional political parties decline and populist political forces rise. Proceeding from a liberal theoretical standpoint, Western scholars generally understand populist movements as the manipulation of mass emotions in an irrational way—a product of the betrayal of the Western representative democratic system—and widely associate populism with authoritarianism and totalitarianism, viewing it as a "malignant tumor" that Western democratic politics needs to excise. In this context, the critique of populism is converted into a defense of the existing capitalist ruling order, and the legitimate democratic and economic demands of the masses are stigmatized. Regarding the ideological trap hidden within the concept of populism, Rancière conducts a profound critique and exposure from the perspective of "post-democracy." In his view, the "post-democratic" consensus system formed after the "drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe" [11] is unsustainable; it must inevitably lead to the brutal incursion of "racism and xenophobia." "The oligarchic alliance composed of wealth and knowledge claims to control all power and rejects the possibility of the people's differentiation and diversity. But the differentiation of these two principles begins to return from all directions. This return is accompanied by the rise of far-right parties and movements of identitarians and religious fundamentalists—who oppose the oligarchic consensus and appeal to old principles of birth and blood, as well as communities rooted in the land, blood, and the religion of their ancestors." In such a historical context, anti-democratic social elites are not only unwilling to reflect on the social roots of the rise of far-right forces and religious extremism but instead use the term "populism" to continue rationalizing their oligarchic rule. Thus, populism becomes a "name convenient for covering the contradiction between the rationality of universal suffrage and the legitimacy of experts," a name that "simultaneously conceals and reveals the strong desire of the oligarchy—to rule by getting rid of the people." Rancière sharply points out that liberal scholars and politicians use the concept of populism to "package together all forms of dissent against the mainstream consensus, whether those forms include democratic claims or religious and ethnic fanaticism."
V. Conclusion
Rancière’s elaboration on issues such as the end of politics and "post-democracy" reveals the hypocrisy of contemporary capitalist rule and shatters the illusion of "consensual politics" jointly manufactured by contemporary Western left- and right-wing parties. The concepts he proposed, such as the "end of politics" and "post-democracy," have had a significant impact on contemporary Western leftist theorists like Mouffe and Žižek, becoming the prototype for the concept of "post-politics." Of course, due to a lack of a historical materialist perspective, Rancière’s views possess significant limitations. Rancière views politics as a struggle revolving around dissensus [12]; this dissensus is not a conflict between different classes over economic interests, but a redistribution of the sensible body. The class inequality elucidated by Marxism is transformed into an inequality of knowledge or discourse power. The revolutionary subject as understood by Rancière is no longer the property-less proletariat deprived of the means of production within unequal relations of production, but rather the "excluded" who are hidden within the community. These views of Rancière depart from historical materialism to various degrees. As some scholars have noted, Rancière’s critique of modern politics is not established on the basis of a critique of political economy; thus, he is actually "no longer a Marxist." However, his critique of the end of politics and his call for the return of politics express the desire of the Western masses to break the existing capitalist ruling order and reactivate politicality. These thoughts offer certain reference value for our understanding of the current Western political landscape and our analysis of emerging political phenomena such as right-wing populism.