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

Dissertation from Ideology and Discourse Analysis course, 2015.

Feb 23, 2023

This is the final part of a three-part article on the possibility of sustaining Rancièrian politics within organisational structures. The previous part can be read here and the introduction to this series can be seen 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.

Institutional trajectory (external) – aesthetic organisation

The institutional trajectory of a political organisation, defined by its aims and intents as a political organisation, cannot be limited to the production of some goods or services and selling them for profit. While it is possible that such an organisation would produce political effects (for example, the production of subversive and revolutionary literature which may reconfigure the readers’ view of things) such production of goods and services are often politically ambivelent (the sales of fruit and vegetables might be done by a neoliberal corporation or a radical cooperative) or it could reinforce a dominant police order (for example, by producing ‘beauty’ products, which affirm the position of the consumer as consumer and play into a pre-established system of norms and expectations of particular demographics). This brings us to the limit of Laloux’s commensurability with Rancière’s framework. While some of the practices and processes he identifies produce a space in which dissensus can be spoken, heard and responded to, the organisations which apply these democratic ways of organising are not themselves political organisations. Morning Star’s aim as an organisation is not to verify the equality of every speaking being with every other (in spite of its arguably democratic internal structure), its aim is to sell tomatoes and profit from those sales.1

I hope to have shown in the first part of this essay that groups of individuals can organise themselves in a way which leaves a space for dissent to speak, and that in this way people can organise politically. In this section, I will elaborate on how such a group of collaborators (or what Rancière would call a community) can act politically together (and share a political trajectory). I will argue that this shared political trajectory requires the development of shared aesthetic and political practices. This argument requires first, the elaboration of Rancière’s notion of aesthetic community, and second, an exploration of the forms of aesthetic practice which such a community could utilise in order to redistribute the sensible.

Rancière elaborates on the notion of an aesthetic community in Chapter 3 of The Emancipated Spectator. He argues that such a community would not be simply an amalgamation of aesthetes, or artists producing works, but would rather be a community of sense or a sensus communis.2 Such a sensus communis would involve three “senses” of community. Firstly, it would be a certain combination of sense data, including "forms, words, spaces, rhythms"3 and so on – this refers to the material, sensual and textual reality of the works produced by that community: the text on the page, the space in which a protest emerges. The second level of community is associated with the previous section of this essay: it would be a dissensual community, or, in Rancière’s own words, it presents a "dissensual figure".4 More specifically, the combination of sense data would be such that it articulates a certain conflict between two sensory worlds,5 for example, the antagonism expressed in the works of Marx, or the demands made by the Occupy protestors while they fill the streets. The third level of community is a consequence of the previous two levels: sense data brings about intertwining contradictory relations (dissensus), which in turn bring about a new form of community – a manifested community between "human beings"6 which embodies a community in opposition to the dominant one. This may be the community of human beings who create and endorse a political manifesto, or the community of people identified under the signifier the occupy protestors, for example. If one understands the second level of community as being the effect of dissensus, the third level should be understood as "the reality of that effect",7 it is the "anticipated reality of that [emancipated] people".8 Aesthetic practices should therefore have a threefold effect; firstly, combining materials and other sense data; secondly, arranging that sense data in such a way that it has a dissensual effect; and thirdly, manifesting the equitable community of human beings who produce that dissensual sense data. The specificity of these three levels of community should become more clearly distinguishable in the next section in which forms of aesthetic practice are elaborated on and their differences made explicit.

To my mind, there are at least three forms of aesthetics which can be produced or embodied by an organisation to produce dissensual effects; such aesthetic practices would have to function in a threefold way to create, what Rancière calls, a community of equals.

First, and most obviously, an aesthetic community may produce aesthetic forms which are what Beyes calls aesthetics in the narrow sense (or "the politics of aesthetics" as opposed to "the aesthetics of politics").9 This encompasses forms of production and expression which are ordinarily referred to as aesthetic practices: poetry, paintings, murals, cinema, music, and so on. Such modes of production may have explicit political inflexions or may produce new distributions of the sensible with no obvious political message; Rancière’s understanding of the political effects of artistic practices are not confined to the presence of a conscious or explicit political message; aesthetic practices have a political effect not as a statement of a political position, but as a function of the unveiling of a new way of seeing the distribution of sensible data in ways of doing, making, producing, and being.
Whether these aesthetic productions were produced by an organisation as a whole, or by a particular member of that organisation, it would contribute to the constitution of an aesthetic ‘framing’ of such a community; its aesthetic character: "Books, theatre, orchestra, choirs, dance, paintings or murals are modes for framing a community".10 Such a production would also act as a proof of the reality of the aesthetic community of which it is a product; that is to say, an artistic production would fulfil the third level of aesthetic community by manifesting the equality of the members of the community of which it is a product.
In cases where many or all of the members of an organisation participate in the production of an aesthetic project, trust, sharing, and solidarity will be both a prerequisite for, and product of, the completion (and process of production) of a particular aesthetic project; in this way aesthetic productions, projects and objects completed by an aesthetic organisation can be seen as proofs of the solidarity, trust, sharing, and friendship of the members of that group. Such a proof would not only be an expression of the collective exercise of an organisation. An individually undertaken aesthetic project could demonstrate the equality of its members in a twofold way (insofar as that project was endorsed as a manifestation of that organisation). Firstly, the producer of the work expresses their voice as equivalent to that of the organisation by unveiling the work as a product of the collective rather than as an individual expression. Secondly, the organisation, insofar as it accepts the equivalence of the work with the voice of the community, verifies the equivalence of the organisation with the voices of its particular member(s).
Second, the production of new practices in the organisation which act out the equality of its members (and may include non-members) in forms of collective practices, rituals, celebratory practices, group activities, public events, the development of its own traditions, ways of establishing relations with other collectives, etc. These practices would act as verifications of the equality of the members of the organisation as well as producing a context in which the members are declassified from the particular roles they may play in the functioning of that organisation (particularly in collective activities such as ritualistic or celebratory practices). Such a practice may be as simple as the organisation of a group celebration or party, or it may be a more refined form of practice with a more specific desired effect. For example, Laloux has elaborated a number of such practices which have been implemented into his teal organisations: Heiligenfeld, a German organisation which runs four mental health and rehabilitation hospitals, regularly meet up for ‘group reflections’ in which a topic is chosen (such as dealing with failure, interpersonal communication, bureaucracy, company values, etc.) and small groups discuss the issues before sharing their thoughts, to the extent that they want to, with the rest of the groups (around 350 members attend the weekly meetings). Such a practice can create an environment in which a "community and a common language"11 is developed by the members of an organisation and feelings of trust and solidarity are reinforced.
These forms of collective practice can create spaces in which solidarity can be verified and can also encourage (such as in the example just mentioned) practices of sharing. Such practices can thereby produce more intense friendships among those one is familiar with, and greater trust among those one does not know intimately, such as other communities or organisations with whom one's group is collaborating. As well as producing deeper relations (of friendship, trust, solidarity, and sharing) among members of an organisation, participatory practices can also involve the participation of the broader demos in practices of equality. This may take the form of promotional types of events, exposing people to a political organisation, or participatory art and practices, as elaborated by Claire Bishop in her research on participatory artistic practices which, utilising Rancière’s aesthetic perspective, elaborates on the ways in which some artists have created participatory and political spaces.12
These manifestations of participatory aesthetic practices would also fulfil Rancière’s second level of community by making visible a sensory world in conflict with the predominant, unequal one (while simultaneously bringing that tension into being). This opposition does not take the form of an explicit hostility to predominant forms of community and organisation, but rather demonstrates (or stages) the fact that a more equal distribution of roles and positions is possible through the aesthetic practices a community enacts.
Finally, aesthetics may be practised through a broader conceptualisation of aesthetics, in the form of an “aesthetics of politics”, as opposed to the “politics of aesthetics” discussed above. The aesthetic modes of production would take Rancière’s definition of aesthetics in its broadest sense (as "a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise"13 or the determination of the modes of articulation between "forms of action, production, perception and thought").14 This broad way of understanding aesthetics brings forth a variety of potential practices which would not be ordinarily called ‘artistic’ practices, but would be political and aesthetic practices concerned with the unveiling of new ways of doing, seeing, thinking, making, and so on.
The potential breadth of such practices is such that it is unrealistic to provide an adequate overview of the types of practice that may be included here. However, a few examples of such modes of aesthetic practice may serve to illustrate the types of activities which may be included: the creation of blogs, forums and meetings to share political strategies and to organise the implementation of such strategies; the distribution of information related to constructing spaces in which community can manifest (relating to building techniques, laws regarding legal squatting, advice on conservation and self-production of resources and energy, etc.); the development of ways to connect disconnected but ideologically resonant groups and organisations; the development of platforms for the publication and distribution of information, perspectives and experiences (for example the development of independent news platforms and media outlets or the founding of independent book publishers).
As with the other two forms of aesthetic practice discussed here, these aesthetic political practices serve a double function, both manifesting modes of dissensus from the dominant modes of policing through aesthetic practices (level 2), and the proof of a more equal form of community as a result of the existence of the organisations from which those practices arise (level 3).
Trust, sharing, solidarity, and friendship are evidently substantial threads running through these kinds of practices. The creation of blogs, forums, public meetings, the dissemination of information relating to self-organisation, etc. could create contexts in which sharing can be done and the products of that sharing enjoyed. Meetings for the discussion of strategy and unification of compatible groups would encourage solidarity and trust between groups and would provide platforms on which ways to increase trust and solidarity could be shared. The pursuit of various projects such as these (and the expansion of ways in which the distribution of the sensible can be redefined) may deepen friendships among members of a community, and the expansion of the ties that an organisation has to other organisations would create a space in which new friendships may be formed and developed.

The forms of practice described above may leave the reader wondering whether any and all practices that fall into one or more of these categories, or organisations whose works fall into these categories, can be considered a political community in Rancière’s sense. It seems that an additional factor is necessary to consider an aesthetic organisation as having a political trajectory: it must aim to produce verifications of equality through the expression of a wrong.15 This is implied by Rancière’s second level of community described above, as it necessitates a "polemic point of struggle"16 between a police order and political subjects. The means by which an organisation can express a "conflict between two sensory worlds"17 as well as the "anticipated reality of that people"18 is more clear in some cases than in others. In the second and third forms of aesthetic practice, it is easy to imagine various polemic scenes which verify the emergence of equality in a community that falls out of the jurisdiction of the predominant police order (for example, the organisation of forums, events, online communities and markets which aim to share materials and information through a logic of sharing, solidarity, trust, and equality). In the first form of aesthetics ("the politics of aesthetics") communities and spaces of antagonism are unlikely to manifest as the explicit result of the publishing of books, music, plays, and so on. However, in these cases, the redistribution of the sensible, and the implied verification of equality, can produce modes of subjectification by disidentifying from the dominant ways of judging and producing forms of art. This could be done by redefining who can make films and documentaries (for example, Dogma95); by reinventing how theatre can be performed (for example, You Me Bum Bum Train, Dismaland, and other interactive and participatory forms of theatre); by redrawing the boundaries between where and how political art can be practised (for example, the development and popularisation of street art); and so on.

The notion of subjectification brings to light a second response to the problem presented above, concerning organisations that ‘fall into these categories’. While it is true that an organisation must express a point of struggle against a police order, which Rancière refers to as the expression of a ‘wrong’, in order to qualify as political, it is also true that the categorisations expressed above are themselves forms of policing (designations of places, roles, qualifiers) and must themselves be blurred through forms of political practice which extend beyond the categories just expressed. It may be the case that the most egalitarian aesthetic practices (that is, the ones which form the conditions of subjectification) would be precisely ones which "extracts [themselves] from the dominant categories of identification and classification"19 just elaborated above. While I hope that the above categorisations are helpful for thinking about where to direct the trajectory of political organisations, neither these categories nor any others should be used as grounds to limit the ways in which equality can be verified; the vital thing is that aesthetic practices bring into visibility new ways of being, seeing, and doing in the world.

The art of the beautiful and the art of living

Referring to Rancière’s writing on the work of Schiller illuminates another important way of understanding the formation of aesthetic practices which aim to stage equality and fulfil Rancière’s three forms of aesthetic community. Rancière argues that for Schiller, the intersection between politics and aesthetics is expressed through the mediation between two forms of complementary experience: life and beauty. In Rancière’s own words, he claims that

“Schiller says that aesthetic experience will bear the edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the art of living. The entire question of the ‘politics of aesthetics’—in other words, of the aesthetic regime of art—turns on this short conjunction. The aesthetic experience is effective inasmuch as it is the experience of that and."20 [Italics in original]

The importance of beauty is quite obviously integral to the effectiveness of the first mode of aesthetic practice expressed above (how influential and effective can aesthetic work be if it does not encompass some relation to the beautiful?), this remains the case when such a relation to the beautiful is subversive and traumatic, such as in the works of Bosch. Additionally, beauty is quite clearly at work in aesthetic practices such as collective rituals and forms of collective practices like the ‘group reflections’ practised by Heiligenfeld (Laloux claims that members learn to "see each other in the light of their deep humanity, in the beauty of their strengths and vulnerabilities").21 However, in the third form of aesthetics discussed here (the aesthetics of politics), the importance of beauty becomes particularly informative. It is not enough simply to produce a new platform from which new perspectives can be expressed and new understandings disseminated; such platforms must be constructed beautifully; such alternatives must be expressions not simply of utility or pragmatism, but produced with an emphasis on the beautiful and sensually effective. It is not enough to connect similarly minded groups through an efficient and effective interface for integrating organisations (although this would no doubt be valuable and necessary), such forms of integration would at best be spectacular, beautiful and inspiring events. For example, the organisation of festival-like gatherings creates a space in which groups can become familiar with one another, rather than the soulless signing of a piece of paper to signify the coming together of two groups. This emphasis on the beautiful and spectacular leads me to the importance of the idea of staging equality; the production of a unificatory spectacle which is not only functionally democratic (by being a space in which dissensus can speak) but is aesthetically desirable, spectacular, engaging, and inspiring.

Staging – creating a theatre of equality

Rancière describes political action as a "veriﬁcation or an enactment that opens speciﬁc stages of equality, stages that are built by crossing boundaries and interconnecting forms and levels of discourse and spheres of experience."22 We can therefore understand the possibility of sustaining Rancierian politics and aesthetics in a political organisation as being dependent upon the creation and sustenance of a stage upon which equality can be demonstrated, verified and confirmed. The language of theatre, drama, and performance is present in much of Rancière’s work; claiming that politics requires a form of "performing or playing"23 of the gap between equality and inequality, which requires "ﬁrst setting it up as theatre"24 in which to act out this tension. What I have up until this point described as a political organisation can be understood as such a theatre within which equality may be staged and performed through forms of aesthetic practice elaborated on in the previous section.

One thing that seems worth taking note of here is the fact that theatres are not fluid and momentary phenomena; they are organised, built, constructed, and sustained (though not necessarily permanently). This seems to be overlooked by Hallward. He eloquently describes Rancière’s dramatic orientation, arguing that politics "is a matter of building a stage and sustaining a spectacle or ‘show’. Politics is the contingent dramatization of a disruptive equality, the unauthorized and impromptu improvisation of a democratic voice."25 However, he also accuses Rancière’s theatrocratic26 notion of politics as being "unabashedly sporadic and intermittent",27 seeming to overlook the possibility of an improvised, unauthorised and contingent political performance which is still able to incorporate organisation, planning and stability into its functioning. I hope to have shown, in the earlier part of this essay, that dissensus can be incorporated into an organisation under particular circumstances; I also hope to have shown that collectives can act politically by engaging in aesthetic practices. If these two claims have been adequately argued for, then Hallward’s theatrical characterisation of Rancière’s work can be understood without dismissing the possibility of constructing and sustaining (albeit contingently) a theatre of politics, or a "theatrocratic"28 form of organisation.

Hallward is correct to argue that stages come and go, and that shows cannot be sustained indefinitely. However, the theatres in which those stages are built and shows are performed - to the extent that they provide a space in which the performers can perform, without restraint and classification, the equality they aim to prove - can be sustained, developed and strengthened. The conditions of such a theatre coming in to being are, we have argued, that it is (1) organised through the democratic logic of dissensus and (2) its participants feel engaged with one another through relations of friendship, trust, sharing, and solidarity. In other words, one can turn Plato’s notion of theatre as a "choreographed performance of communal unity and discipline" altogether on its head.29

Scope and opposition

Finally, I want to briefly address the question of how, where, and in what capacity the organisations discussed in his essay could be implemented. While I do not want to limit the implied spaces in which these forms of organisation might be practised, it is clear that in some existing bureaucratic organisations, such as the institutions of the state, it would be near impossible to replace existing systems of organisation with new dissensual ones (due to the inpenetrability of oligarchy and bureaucracy, and the unwillingness of those who have the capacity to make such changes). It is also the case that many large corporations and businesses are similarly impenetrable to the implementation of new organisational techniques and practices from below. For these practical reasons, the organisations elaborated on above would be most easily implemented into new forms of organisation, which could be established with egalitarian principles in mind. What follows are three categories of such new organisations. However, as with the other categories suggested in this paper, they should be actively resisted, tested, extended and dissented from:

Quasi-business – producing material ‘goods’ for political ends. This would include many of the examples used earlier in the paper concerning aesthetic objects such as books and music; the organisation of events; the creation of spaces both online and in physical locations; and so on. Although economic factors would not be absent from the reasoning of such organisations ('breaking even’ is a prerequisite for remaining viable over the long term) the production of profits would necessarily not be the goal of such an organisation (as is the case for many existing organisations and several of the case studies described by Laloux).
Quasi-social organisations – producing what could be categorised as ‘social goods’ for the benefit of those whose voices are unheard, as well as providing means by which peoples can make their voices heard.
Community/communes – finally, and perhaps most directly, forms of dissensus could be used as a means of organising new places to live and ways of living together. In these cases, the prioritisation of fusing both beauty and living becomes most explicit – while in the other cases, the goods produced and the services provided must be beautiful or must show something of beauty, in the case of organising living spaces a prioritisation should be made to infuse beauty into the very art of living and into the space in which living is done.

Concluding remarks

Through the development of this essay, I have elaborated upon two forms of shared activity which, when conjoined, make Rancière’s conception of political action (the act of verifying equality) potentially sustainable. The first is dissensual political organisation, which can be understood as the process of constructing organisations that provide a space for its members to dissent from the organisations’ practices, norms, and agreements. Such organisations can be conceived of as theatres in which stages of equality can be built (spaces in which speakers can act as equals), and spectacular performances of equality can be implemented (demonstrations and verifications of equality can be made visible). These performances, actions, stages and practices are the second form of political action discussed in this essay, making forms of equality visible and thereby redistributing the sensible by verifying equality in a plurality of ways.

My characterisation of what can be called organisational politics implies a seemingly paradoxical endorsement of policing, since organisation implies a distribution of roles, positions, and ways of doing and being. So-called ‘pure’ democracy is the absence of any form of governing, including agreed-upon organising principles, foreclosing the possibility of pure politics being organised. This necessary inclusion of some forms of policing makes the development of what I have called political organisations an impure form of politics, but this impurity does not invalidate the capacity of organisations to be political: vitally, for Rancière, there is no pure politics.30 Rather than seeking to form organisations which do not include policing, a dissensual organisation directs it's policing towards the creation of a space in which dissensus can be articulated and equality can be verified. As Chambers argues, political opposition to policing does not manifest itself merely in the undoing of police orders, but in transforming them.31 The same can be said of aesthetic practices,32 which never embody a pure equality but a contradictory manifestation of equality in one form or another; whether that be in a medium conventionally associated with the arts; a participatory practice/performance; or through a broader understanding of aesthetics, creating new ways of seeing, being and doing, and new spaces in which different distributions of the sensible can be exposed. Aesthetic practices such as these, aside from the politics of that which they produce, are capable of verifying equality by staging the spectacle of a community of equals in a theatre of equality. Such a theatre remains contingent and impure, but has here been shown to nonetheless be capable of being organised, structured and sustained over time.

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