Book Review: Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Vol. 1 The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People, Vol. 2 by Jacques Rancière

Abstract

Jacques Ranciere Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Vol. 1, Verso, London, 2011; pp. 239, 9781844676972, 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Jacques Ranciere The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People, Vol. 2, Verso, London, 2012; 177 pp: 9781844678600, 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Within these two volumes by Jacques Ranciere are compiled a dozen or so essays from 1975-85, most published originally in the journal Les Revoltes Logiques. This was a journal headed up by Ranciere at the Centre de Recherche des Ideologies de la Revolte. The essays marked his movement away from an earlier influence under Althusser, with whom he collaborated in Reading Capital (1965), and a movement toward the post-68 critiques of structuralist Marxism. These essays thus begin a 'critical stance toward Marxist dogmatism' in these terms (Volume 1:8), and a process of profound reappraisal of Marxist fundamentals, particularly regarding class. In particular, the articles are an attempt to understand why the movements of '68 were such a failure, and second, to understand and counter the consequent coagulation of disillusionment and cynical resentment on the part of the frustrated 'intellectuals' towards a proletariat that had infuriatingly failed to stick to the dialectical script of historical materialism. Fundamentally, Ranciere begins here an argument he lays out more explicitly in the Emancipated Spectator (2011b: 32), in which he counters the charge (now axiomatic) that the signs of '68 have been appropriated by capital. The take-home message from this now dominant attitude being that we should all accept the futility of class struggle in the face of capitalism's mighty adaptability and assimilability (Volume 2: 42). Instead, for Ranciere our frustrated cynicism stems from a persistent and compulsive return to a highly problematic positionality as intellectuals, thinkers, artists, etc. This positionality is that of the intellectual--whether radical or cynical--who says to some objectivated and auto-generated other, 'Here is the reality that you cannot and wish not to see'. In the 19th and 20th centuries, intellectuals in Marxist and socially critical movements have constituted the proletarian class as just such a auto-generated 'other'. However, in his line of thinking, this does not mean that critical theory has failed or become irrelevant, or that it is epistemologically passe. Ranciere reasons that today's cynical apologetics regarding the futility of class struggle through critique is mobilised out of exactly the same assumptions and modes as the critical theory that such cynics deem superannuated (201 lb: 29). Though the 'message' today is different--cynical, rather than critical --it is the failure to break out of the same 'positionality' that is the common characteristic and common problem. This presentation shows us how the enduring validity of the emancipatory struggle is wrongly discredited, and that emancipatory critique itself still has life in it, but only if we can desist from the compulsion to resume the discursive positionality defined above. The title of the volumes plays on a pun between the ostensible contents, which revolve around historical instances of theatrical production, spectacle, and dramatisation, on the one hand, and Ranciere's theoretical argument regarding 'the distribution of the sensible' in the political aesthetics of oligarchic capitalism, on the other. Evidently, Ranciere wishes these essays to contribute to a 'staging of the people'. He is attempting to counter the positionality of the intellectuals through the kind of historical scholarly practice attempted in these essays. Therefore, together the two volumes do not construct a systematic argument. As a collection of thematically and critically related articles, the effect is rather to meander contemplatively through a variety of empirically vital and textual settings: from the California Gold Rush through 19th Century French theatre to the trade unions of Vichy. …