Sustaining Rancière: Organising Dissent and Aestheticizing Equality (Part 2/3)

Dissertation from Ideology and Discourse Analysis course, 2015.

Feb 16, 2023

This is part two of a three-part article on the possibility of sustaining Rancièrian politics within organisational structures. The first part is here.

Abstract

A growing number of writings on the political and aesthetic thought of Rancière have emerged in the last decade or so, making the implications of his novel conception of politics a flourishing area of debate in contemporary theoretical discourse. His subversive understanding of politics has led some to interpret his work as antagonistic to all forms of organisation, ordering, or what he categorises as ‘policing’. In this essay I challenge a purely antagonistic understanding of Rancière’s politics, arguing that although his notion of politics does emerge as an interruption of a police order, politics does not imply an uncritical hostility to any and all forms of organisational policing. First, a show that dissent can be incorporated into, and made to flourish within, organisational practices (or forms of policing), illustrating the practical implementation of this through the recent work of Frederic Laloux. Next, I show that organised groups (what Rancière has called ‘aesthetic communities’) can work to produce new ways of seeing, being, and doing, and that these activities can affect the distribution of the sensible and bring into sight new manifestations of equality. I characterise these manifestations as stages of equality, and conclude by portraying the organisations which engage in these aesthetic practices as theatres of equality. Such organisations are both compatible with Rancière’s theoretical framework and may represent a new way of thinking about how to organise politically outside of the bureaucratic and highly stratified limits of party politics.

Political organisation

For Rancière political power cannot be institutionalised. It can, however, according to Todd May’s reading, be formed into “political collectives”1 sometimes referred to as co-operatives.2 Rancière does not elaborate on the functioning of these collectives, or what their organisational principles should be. However, May has suggested two requirements that such a collective would need to have in order to qualify as democratic, arguing that co-operatives/collectives must have a “democratic composition of its membership and a shared institutional trajectory”.3 Although May does not provide a specific justification for the use of these two requirements, they seem to be plausible proposals for the necessary conditions of democratic collectives. I will use these two standards as a framework for the analysis of what constitutes a political collective, or to put it another way, what constitutes a body which is able to speak collectively as equals and to sustain that speech.

Democratic composition of membership

First, a democratic collective would need to be sustained by a political form of relation, meaning a form of relationship which is sustained by a logic of equality while dissenting from, or subverting, the dominant forms of relating subjects to one another. May argues that what he calls “neoliberalism”4 signifies a dominant form of policing of social bodies and that this policing of human relationships is based on relations between the consumer and entrepreneur.5 Underpinning such a political collective would be a form of social relation that subverts this dominant economic form – which for May can best be understood as relationships based on friendship. May’s understanding of friendship is informed by Elizabeth Telfer’s article on friendship,6 which claims that friendships possess three qualities that are, according to May, amenable to an egalitarian, and therefore Rancierian, form of relationship (May adds to this definition a fourth criteria, taken from the work of Derrida). Firstly, Telfer claims that friendships are associated with shared activities;7 secondly, friendships are always associated with passionate and affectionate relationships,8 even if this intensity is not expressed explicitly it’s day-to-day functioning; thirdly, there is a mutual acknowledgement of the first two conditions,9 which again might not be expressed explicitly or regularly, but which is implicitly necessary for the friendship to function. Finally, within friendships the good of the other is sought for the sake of the other, producing a non-economic form of relation, not based on the expectation of an equal return for one’s investment in the friendship. Although, May does point out that a sustained lack of reciprocation will put substantial strain on the friendship; this seems to be implied by the third condition.

Due to its voluntary and mutually beneficial status, May, following Marilyn Friedman, argues that friendships can be longer lasting and more likely to be grounded and sustained in mutual interests and values than many other forms of social relation,10 such as the neighbour or colleague, or the consumer and entrepreneur. He also argues that friendships can resist neoliberal logics of social relations due to their non-economic character, claiming that "this in itself offers a vision of social interaction beyond the confines of the neoliberal order",11 although he is clear that friendships are not necessarily subversive. The claim of the potentially subversive and political nature of some forms of friendships leads May to a view of friendship as being a potentially emancipatory form of relation that can bring about social change. He also argues that a good friendship can demonstrate what a more equal world might look like from within our world; showing emancipatory relationships within the already existing world rather than hypothesising a utopian vision of an emancipatory world to come.

For these reasons, it may be plausible to argue that friendship is one of the more direct and immanent forms of relationship in which to ground an emancipatory political movement; indeed, they may be a key form of relationship to underpin the formation of more egalitarian communities. This is most obviously the case at a more local level, in which the relationships between members of a community must be personal and based on a certain level of mutual trust. Local politics, furthermore, is a key area of consideration for Rancière, who claims that "politics always happens locally".12 However, it is also necessary for emancipatory movements to broaden their reach and become more interrelated and large-scale, since Rancière does not wish to conceive of politics as a small-scale and local phenomenon, rather arguing that the "creation of a new International is assuredly the order of day".13 As a result, I want to claim that friendship relations should not be understood to be the sole force for political subjectification,14 since the objective of an emancipatory political movement is not to achieve limited equality for the members of a particular community, but to collectivise political struggles; to "coordinate them, to unite them and to universalise their motives and actions."15 May goes on to articulate three other forms of social relation, which he proposes as forms of emancipatory social relation, and which I will now briefly consider as forms of relationship that are possibly emancipatory in character and therefore useful for conceptualising the development of a political organisation with a democratic membership:

Trust is closely related to May’s discussion of friendship in his reading of Rancière,16 stating that it implies a "relationship of vulnerability before and with the other"17 which seems necessary for any political organisation that aims to create a space for the articulation of dissensus, since dissenting from the prevailing consensual order necessarily puts one in a position of vulnerability in relation to the prevailing order. Even in situations in which a political movement forms massive popular support, such as in the event of a mass protest, the members of that protest still put themselves in a vulnerable position in relation to the prevailing order. One can therefore understand trust to be implicitly present in political movements and events of all kinds. Rancière himself describes democracy as having an intimate connection to the idea of trust; claiming at the end of his essay on the formation of a community of equals, that "the test of democracy must forever be in democracy’s own image: versatile, sporadic – and founded on trust."18
Sharing, much like May’s conceptualisation of friendship, is a form of relation which resists the dominant ‘neoliberal’ partition of social roles between consumer and entrepreneur. It resists neoliberal forms of policing by opposing the logic of exchange for personal gain with an understanding of giving which does not presuppose the expectation of receiving an equal or profitable return. Undermining the inflexible subject positions of investor and consumer promoted by a neoliberal form of policing carries with it political significance,19 and May argues that "in an economy governed by expectations of personal gain (expectations that play into the hands of those who are best situated to obtain personal gain), sharing is a deviant relationship."20
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, political movements and organisations require solidarity between their members and solidarity in relation to the aim(s) that those members organise around. This is not to say that members of a political movement must share an identical aim in their struggle, nor that they should wish to articulate the same thing, but they must have a sense of solidarity with the other members of the struggle in relation to their shared struggle. They must understand their voice to be compatible with the voices of the other members of that struggle in order for them to identify as a part of it. In this sense, solidarity allows one to act on the "presupposition of the equality of any and every speaking being."21 Solidarity, for May, is understood as "the presupposition of equality internal to the collective subject of political action",22 rendering solidarity inextricably linked to political subjectification and making it integral to the formation of political organisations.

While friendship may be considered to be the most direct and immediate form of relationship favourable to subversive political actions and practices, trust, sharing, and solidarity are equally necessary components of any political organisation. It is necessary both that they are present in a political movement or organisation, but also that such an organisation facilitates the deepening of friendships, trust, sharing, and solidarity among its members, as well as functioning as proof of the existence and effectiveness of those forms of relation.2324

Institutional trajectory (internal) – dissensual organisation

It is important to emphasise at this stage that although the presence of friendship, trust, sharing, and solidarity are necessary for political movements and organisations, they are not sufficient to create a political body which is organised and (contingently) sustainable. Social obligations that go beyond the voluntary and spontaneous modes of relationship examined here are necessary for political organisations to be sustained. More formal obligations and organisational practices may be required for an organisation to sustain its political character. May affirms this need for additional frameworks of organisation, claiming that "not everyone is motivated by trust or inclined to share, and no one is all the time."25

I will now examine the circumstances under which additional forms of group organisation and policing can be considered politically productive. This appears to be a paradoxical way in which to do politics since political action is that which opposes the police order. However, since all social orders are constituted by both a police order and political dissent from that order, if a political movement hopes to become organised and sustained it must aim not to simply eliminate policing, but to make it’s policing capable of incorporating dissent from itself into its ways of functioning. To put it another way, the question is what the trajectory of that policing should be. A police order paradoxically directed towards dissent from itself is a form of policing which must be incorporated into an organisation for it to possess an effective political character.

Tanke explicates Rancière’s understanding of dissensus and its relation to politics as follows, claiming that: "politics opposes consensus by means of dissensus. Dissensus, whether the straightforward political variety or the type employed by art, is the means by which the sensible is deprived of its self-evidence, punctuated, and subjected to dispute."26 An effective political actor does not passively abstain from the police order's distribution of the sensible, but actively dissents from it, staging or articulating a more equitable distribution in opposition to the presiding one. This means that any organisational agreements and practices that are incorporated into a collective are democratic to the extent that they allow dissensus from those agreements and practices to speak. One might say that agreements can be judged as just to the extent that they are able to be judged as unjust (but are nevertheless not judged as unjust) – they must have a vulnerability to being dissented from in order to prove themselves to be (contingently) consented to. An organisation can be considered to be a community of equals insofar as its practices and agreements create a space in which the equality of its members can be verified through dissent from those practices and agreements. An organisation that has systems in place which allow disagreements to be said, heard, and acted upon by its members, in relation to its existent forms of policing, is a democratic, or a political, organisation. More precisely, it is democratic to the extent that it allows for the expression of dissent, and has the mechanisms in place to hear and respond to that dissent. Rancière describes such a democratic organisation as the creation of "a space for disputation where the relationship between like and unlike could come into play and where the words of equality were genuinely subject to verification."27 An organisation which enabled political action to be expressed would be one in which its members were not subjected to predetermined places, positions, and portions, but were, on the contrary, able to "deregulate all representation of places and portions",28 or to declassify29 their places and roles, acting as uncategorised and disidentified30 subjects. These subjects, and the agreements and obligations which they are in tension with, would make up a dissensual community,31 a community which Rancière understands as being "structured by disconnection." [My emphasis]32

The aim towards the production of dissenting voices should not be understood as simply the creation of a space in which individual members can explicitly speak out and effect the agreements in an organisation. The collective is democratic to the extent that it incorporates any and all speech into it as equal, not only the individual human voices of its members. A speech of dissent may be articulated by an individual member of the group, or by an unspecified or anonymous member (I will briefly elaborate on this in a moment); it may also be articulated by a spontaneously formed sub-group within the organisation which has a grievance with its predominant organisation; it may also be articulated by the group as a whole, either against their own current systems of policing or against external policing, imposed onto them from outside (more will be said about the external political trajectory of the organisation in the next section). Finally, speech could be incorporated into the collective by non-members of that collective, for example, if the collective were associated with another collective or if it produced goods which were consumed by non-members of the collective. All these forms of speech ought to be made audible by the organisation through the practices it is constituted by. However, there is no reason that speech should be limited to these forms. In fact, the opposite is true: the classifications of forms of speech just specified should themselves be subject to declassification by the members of a collective.

To make this idea more concrete, I will give two examples of forms of agreements or policing which may be politically productive in the way outlined above. Firstly, as was just mentioned, the formation of anonymous channels of speech would allow voices of dissent to be heard who may otherwise be unwilling to speak to the rest of the collective for fear of dismissal, judgement, condemnation, etc. This may include both the anonymous formation of dissent (the proposition of grievances, petitions, organisational changes) and the anonymous enactment of dissent (anonymous voting on/organisation of dissent and the proposals of alternative (more equitable) agreements to rectify identified inequalities).33 Other forms of anonymity may also be incorporated into the organisation's structure to ensure that voices are heard who would otherwise be disinclined to speak. A second, and more substantial form of organisational system, which allows for the expression and incorporation of dissent, is provided by Laloux in his explication of what he calls ‘teal’ organisations. His research was made on a number of organisations which, in his words, have "cracked the code"34 of organisations that operate without dependence on either of the two ways of organising which Rancière ostensibly positions himself against (although Laloux does not do this with Rancière’s work in mind, in spite of the substantial affinities between them): operating "without the need for either hierarchy or consensus".35 I will briefly consider each of these ways of understanding organising which both Rancière and Laloux position themselves against:36

Firstly, Laloux’s ‘teal’ organisations function without formal hierarchies. Although many of them legally have CEOs (which is a legal requirement in some countries), those in these positions have no decision-making authority which supersedes the will of the other workers in the organisation. For each member of a teal organisation, their roles and positions are not determined by a boss, or a predetermined hierarchical ordering of any sort (other than the processes/practices which will be outlined in a moment); rather "their job emerges from a multitude of roles and responsibilities they pick up based on their interests, talents, and the needs of the organisation."37 Similarly, the more general categorisations of the types of roles one takes on in the organisation are - what Rancière would call - declassified: "almost all of them [the teal organisations] also decided to drop words like employee, worker, manager, and replace them with something else - most often simply colleague"38 [emphasis in original]. This lack of an inflexible and stable hierarchy of roles does not lead to an absence of positions which oversee decisions made by other members of the organisation. However, these roles do not include a decision-making capacity over decisions they oversee, but resemble a role of advising and assisting. For example, Buurtzorg (a home-care nursing organisation in the Netherlands) has "regional coaches"39 who give advice and help members of small groups of 12 nurses to be integrated into the self-organised team, assisting them all in a broad range of areas; providing advice and assistance to the group to ensure they can work together effectively and pursue the paths that they see as most advantageous for the care of their patients. Laloux writes that here “the vertical power transmission of traditional pyramidal organisations is taken off its hinges: the teams of nurses aren’t simply empowered by their hierarchy; they are truly powerful because there is no hierarchy that has decision-making power over them." [Emphasis in original]40
Secondly, these organisations function without depending on the consensus414243 of the members of those organisations; for a decision to be adopted "it is enough that nobody has a principled objection", according to Laloux.44 Democracy beyond the confines of consensus is a necessity in the incorporation of Ranciereian politics into organisations, because dissent always involves the troubling of the consented-to ways of doing things. *While the elaboration of an understanding of democratic organising beyond or without consensus was perhaps the most under-developed aspect of this essay, its something I will speak more of in future articles here and have elaborated in much greater detail in my PhD thesis in the form of spaces of dissent, the building blocks of which should begin to come into focus in the final portion of this essay.*

The rejection of both hierarchical and consensual rule raises the obvious question of how decisions are made in the teal organisations Laloux identifies. How is it possible to create a form of organisational order without relying on the approval of decisions from bosses or the consensual approval of ideas from the rest of the members of the organisation?

Teal organisations make decisions through a series of processes and practices that create a space in which decisions can be made and proposals can be refined and adjusted so that they are most beneficial to the continued functioning of the organisation. Perhaps the foremost example of these processes and practices is the “advice process”, which is employed in various forms by all of the organisations under investigation by Laloux. This means that before members make important decisions they “must seek advice from all affected parties and people with expertise on the matter." [Emphasis in original]45 Those whose advice is sought do not have any authority to deny or reject the proposal put forward, but are free to give advice or criticism of the proposition and seek the advice of others.46 This process allows for members to be informed of, and limited to, the capacity and means of the organisation, while also creating a space in the organisation in which any member can undertake projects of their choosing that they perceive to be in the organisation's best interest. Laloux’s research also illuminates a number of other practices and agreements that can be made to facilitate the creation of spaces for free decision-making and the articulation of voices in an organisation.

The mechanisms and practices employed by teal organisations create a space in which members of those organisations are continuously free and able to dissent from the ‘normal’ running of the organisation without endangering its continued functionality. If one of Buurtzorg’s nurses thinks of a way to increase the efficiency and/or effectiveness of their care for their patients then they are (so long as their colleagues agree that such a technique will not have a problematic effect on the organisation as a whole) free to act upon that idea. Similarly, if a new technique or practice is used by one team of nurses, other teams are able to incorporate that mechanism into their practice (or choose not to). Furthermore, the lack of unilateral authority to deny members the freedom to pursue an idea means that members of the organisation are able to take reasonable risks to experiment with more efficient ways of operating. The extent to which these organisations leave room for members to determine their own roles and practices, and to dissent from the roles and practices which they see as ineffective in some way, is the extent to which these organisations can be said to be internally organised democratically (which is to say, politically).

These examples should elucidate more clearly the kinds of practices and procedures that can be incorporated into organisations which aim to be political in Rancière’s sense of the word. The maximisation of room for dissensus in organisations constitutes the internal trajectory of the collectivisation and organisation of politics; however, a non-hierarchically organised collective cannot be considered political if its external trajectory (the service/product it seeks to provide, the effect it has and aims to have, etc.) is not similarly democratic. Room for dissensus is a necessary, but not a sufficient, requirement for political organisations. This may lead us to the limit of May’s work on Rancierian political organisation, since he fails to sufficiently account for the purposes that his democratically organised collectives are directed towards. He claims that political organisations must have a "shared institutional trajectory",47 but he does not specify what would make such a trajectory democratic/political. Without this specification, there is a danger that democratically organised collectives will be understood as political irrespective of the goals and intent of the organisations they are part of. For example, one of the organisations May points to as democratically organised is AK Publishing.48 While he argues that its internal organisation is democratic, he does not make any argument that its goal as an organisation (to publish and distribute books related to anarchism) is itself a democratic goal. This does not seem immediately problematic in the case of an anarchist publisher, but it raises the question of whether a similarly organised publisher would be considered democratic if it published, for example, White-supremacist literature. It seems clear that for an organisation to be political and democratic, it must be both internally and externally organised democratically: the second of these two requirements will be considered in the remaining part of this essay. Here, I will argue that as well as being a dissensual organisation, political organisations must also aim to become an aesthetic organisation.49

The final part can be found here.

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