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From “The Idea(s) of Politics”, undergraduate thesis by Patrick Harrison, Brown University

CHAPTER 2

UNIVERSALITY: THE POLITICS OF SAMENESS

Totality does not equal universality. If late capitalism has produced a global commonality

of social and power relations, it has produced nothing universal: no equality other than equality

in exploitation; no freedom other than freedom to consume and to be consumed; no truth other

than the empty decree of the end of history. If capital has created a mass situation or community,

then there is no Sameness to this community, no universal belonging, but only the privileged

belonging of the virtuous bourgeoisie, and the non-belonging of the wretched of the earth. We

should carefully distinguish, then, between universality and totality to show that questions of

universality are equally at play in local struggles as in global ones.

Implicit in our preceding discussions of totality were two distinct assumptions about the

relation of politics, universality, and totality. First, in Fredric Jameson’s Marxism, there is the

assumption that radical politics must address itself to some narrative of totality in order to be

truly universal. This attitude is implicit in Jameson’s argument “local struggles and issues are

not merely indispensable, they are unavoidable; but as I have tried to say elsewhere, they are

effective only so long as they also remain figures or allegories for some larger systemic

transformation”.i For Jameson, totality and universality are two sides of the same coin: because

we exist in a socio-economic totality, local political action only has universal import when it is

an allegory of the main narrative of this totality—class struggle. Furthermore, this conceptual

schema implies that local struggles that do not function as allegories for the single narrative of

class struggle are not properly political struggles, but are rather instances of “false” or

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“paranoid” consciousness that must be read as indexing the truth of class struggle precisely in

their failure to properly express it. Ultimately for Jameson, in order for a political struggle to

have universal import, it muse function as an expression of a contradiction in a pre-given totality.

Second, in the later Foucault’s concept of totality as that which is produced by

massifying power relations, such as biopolitical power, that operate by producing humans as

mass species-subjects or “populations” (rather than just as individual subjects), it becomes

possible to think of universality and a universal politics as struggles that divide this artificially

produced (rather than pre-given) totality in half. Foucault calls such a situation “race war”, a

term that has nothing to do with bio-medical and cultural discourses of “race” but applies to any

situation in which a social totality is divided in half against itself: class struggle, colonial

occupation, etc. In race war, “a binary structure runs through society”, splitting society into a

superrace and a subrace, and inaugurating a permanent war of society against itself for racial

purification.ii It is in such a war that, for Foucault, a truly universal truth and right—truth and

right that speak to the whole of the totality—can arise:

The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the

perspective of the sought-for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject

himself. […] The more I decenter myself, the better I can see the truth” […] Truth is an additional force,

and it can be deployed only on the basis of a relationship of force. The fact that the truth is essentially part

of a relationship of force, of dissymmetry, decentering, combat, and war, is inscribed in this type of

discourse.iii

We should reject the model of the race war as the only possibility for reconceptualizing

universality, truth, and right. Race war does not produce truly universal universals. The right of

the race war is the right of the superrace to dominate or destroy the subrace, and its truths are

statements predicated on the superiority of one race over another. Racial truths are not really

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addressed to the opposite race, but only to one’s own race; they are not truths of equality and

belonging, but of destruction of the racial Other. In short, racial truths are truths that seek to

complete and close off the totality by the genocidal elimination of internal impurity or

foreignness.

What is common to both different conceptual pairings of universality and totality is the

predication of universality on a relation of antagonism: class antagonism in Jameson, and the

antagonism of race war in late Foucault. In all but instances, the universal is a disputed

universal, rather than simply that which is most common; truth is a disputed truth, a weapon in

struggle. In other words, universality is that which is brought forth and embodied by the

antagonism of engaged subjects. Let us recall our assertion in the previous chapter that politics is

the confrontation of engaged subjects, and nothing else; that the space in which political

confrontation takes place is always (pre)constructed for every engaged subject; and that there

exists no non-subjective, non-political position from which one could opt-out of, transcend, or

claim to objectively represent the space in which this confrontation of engaged subjects takes

place. With this definition in mind, then let’s connect the dots and hazard the following

hypothesis: that there is politics only where the stakes are universal, that there is only politics

proper where there is struggle of universal import. The critical question is this: can we think

universality without totality? Or, must the “universal” be defined as that which addresses a

totality?

Certainly for both Jameson and Foucaul, any concept of universality is predicated on a

prior concept of totality. For Jameson, there is universality because there is a pre-given universal.

i Jameson, Fredric “Marxism and Postmodernism”. New Left Review vol. I/176, July-August 1989: p. 33-45. p. 44.ii Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and

Francois Ewald. New York: Picador, 2003. p. 51.iii Foucault. Society Must Be Defended. trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and Francois

Ewald. New York: Picador, 2003, p. 53.

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For the late Foucault, universality is made possible through a produced totality. We should do

them better, then, and begin our discourse on universality the thought of universality to be

independent of and not identical to totality. We need a thought of universality against totality.

Only through such a thought of universality can we think of both singular, local struggles and

struggles against totalizing forms of power—such as global capitalism or State biopolitics— as

equally universal in their import and, thus, as equally political struggles. And we must

furthermore stipulate that, insofar as the universal is brought forth in a produced-totality, the

universal does not close off and complete this totality by purging the Other, but rather adds to the

totality, expands it, and brings forth Sameness from that which was excluded. Only under these

suppositions will we create a thought of the truly universal, of a universality that consists in the

equality of all, or rather, of a non-totalizable non-all in freedom and belonging.

In the preceding chapter, our discourse set the stage of contemporary politics by

investigating whether there existed a political totality. Having cautiously affirmed through an

extensive historico-theoretical discussion that international biopolitical capitalism increasingly

brings about a global social, economic, and biopolitical commons that can be thought of as a

political totality, we must now proceed forward through a more formally philosophical

discussion of principles of politics, universality, equality, and truth. Further analysis of present

history will only lead us to contemplate possibilities for action that remain within the facticity of

what-there-is. In a political moment as urgent as this, after the historical failure of the worlds

most ambitious radical political projects of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, we must wager

that our current situation requires a rigorous process of thought concerning basic philosophical

and ontological questions—thought about thought—to conceive of the possibility of new

possibilities. That is, by thinking about how we think about politics, universality, truth, etc., we

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can hopefully open up new possibilities for radical forms of political action by understanding

what is meant by these terms in a fundamentally different way. By this I do not at all propose a

return to the notion of the autonomy of thought; thought remains eminently conditioned by

history, and historical practice is constitutive of thought. Rather, what I am proposing is that

through thinking about how we think about politics, we may be able to produce concepts of

equality, truth, and freedom that are fundamentally heterogeneous to those found in hegemonic

capitalist, liberal-democratic ideology, and that are not mere reiterations of the concepts handed

down to us from the orthodox Marxist tradition, either.

We proceed forward, therefore, in two parts. First, in Chapter 2, we will proceed through

a close reading of Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics-as-disagreement and Etienne Balibar’s

concept of equaliberty to articulate new concepts of universality, freedom, and equality and

contrast them with contemporary approaches to politics in the current intellectual Left, especially

those influenced by Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau. We will define the engaged subject of

politics as the part-of-no-part whose appearance inscribes the principle of equaliberty and creates

a community divided in itself. Finally, we will briefly discuss the movement of shackdwellers

called the Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa as an instance of radical, egalitarian

democracy. In Chapter 3, our discussion will proceed to an even more formal exploration of the

ontology of Alain Badiou to rearticulate Rancière’s concept of the appearance of the part-of-no-

part as a meta-ontological Event. Badiou will enable us to clarify the meaning of some of

Rancière’s terms and even improve on Rancière’s theory of politics by allowing us to think of

how to extend the liberatory effects of the Event beyond the moment of initial rupture through

what Badiou calls a truth-procedure. More substantively, however, Badiou will allow us to

conceive of politics as an ontological activity that fundamentally restructures collective being

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and Symbolically mediated reality by “touching” the Real and bringing forth a radical equality-

in-belonging or generic humanity.

RADICAL EQUALITY: RANCIÈRE & BALIBAR

Rancière summarizes his theory of politics in Disagreement thus: “politics exists

wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those

who have no part”.iv To understand what Rancière means by the “part of those who have no

part”, it is worth rehearsing his reading of Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle divides the polis into

three “parts” each with a different entitlement to the “good” of the community—meaning not

only property, but also a “proper” social place in the community as a speaking subject: the oligoi,

whose entitlement to political power and wealth is self-legitimated by their inherited wealth; the

aristoi, whose entitlement to representation and wealth is founded on their virtue or excellence of

character; and the demos or “people”, whose proper lot in the community is only their freedom.

Whereas the oligoi’s wealth is self-legitimating, and the virtue of the aristoi legitimates their

superior share of property and power, the demos has no proper lot of anything but their freedom,

which, Rancière points out, is not even proper to them, but which they rather share with the other

two non-slave parts of society. Whereas the oligoi and aristoi are defined by positive attributes

—wealth and virtue, respectively—the freedom of the demos is a purely empty attribute: it is

nothing but the freedom not to be enslaved thanks to the sheer contingency of their having been

born to “free” citizens in Athens after the abolition of debt slavery. It is in precisely this sense

that the demos constitutes a “part-of-no-part”, a part of society which not only has “no part in

anything”—no guaranteed political role or property—but is also not really a proper part at all,

has no positive identity in the social order. This non-role of the part-of-no-part originated by the

iv Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. p. 123.

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ancient Athenian demos can be remapped throughout history up to the present to include women,

the colonized “the wretched of the earth”, the postcolonial poor of the global South, immigrants

in the contemporary developed world, and, most importantly for Rancière, the proletariat, not in

the sense of the word as the 19th century industrial working class, but as

a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the

dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and

which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in

general.v

Politics proper, from ancient Greece through industrial England to the globalized contemporary,

consists in the tension between the official hierarchy of society and the structural vacuum of the

part-of-no-part whose very existence threatens the naturalness and coherence of the existing

order. At stake in politics proper, as Marx immediately allows us to see, is universality itself.

Rancière argues that the political act proper is the polemical identification of the

particular of the part-of-no-part with the universal of the community on the basis of their equality

in freedom with all other parts of the society. Rancière describes this movement by which the

“nothing” of the part-of-no-part polemically identifies itself with the “everything” of the

community itself:

Not only does freedom as what is “proper” to the demos not allow itself to be determined by any positive

property; it is not proper to the demos at all. The people are nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of

those who have no positive qualification—no wealth, no virtue—but who are nonetheless acknowledged to

enjoy the same freedom as those who do. The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like

the rest. Now it is this simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them in all things that gives

them a specific qualification. The demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all

citizens. In doing so, this party is not that one identifies its improper property with the exclusive principle

v Marx, Karl. Early Writings. trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. New York: Penguin, 1992. p. 256.

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of community and identifies its name—the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position—with the

name of the community itself.vi

By recognizing that the demos is equal to the oligoi and aristoi in freedom, if only “in principle”,

Aristotle lets the cat out of the bag, allowing the demos to directly identify itself with the

freedom shared by the community as a whole. The part-of-no-part thus constitutes a “singular

universal”: a singular historical entity that embodies a universal principle of equality in freedom

and inscribes this principle into community through the disruption of the existing order.vii This

freedom in equality is nothing less than the radical equality of all in “the sheer contingency of

any social order”,viii and its disruptive inscription reveals that “there is no natural principle of

domination by one person over another”.ix Rancière’s subversive reading of Aristotle recalls

Marx’s own ambivalent appreciation for capitalism: capitalism’s declaration of the equality of

men, women, and children in the freedom to sell their labour (i.e. to be exploited), cruel as it may

be, nonetheless breaks feudal bonds and opens up the space in thought for the development of

much more radical conceptions of equality and freedom to be realized in communism.x But

whereas Marx’s concepts of equality and freedom are arguably bound up in a substantive notion

of human nature that is fettered and alienated by capitalism and could be actualized under

communism, Rancière’s notion of equality in freedom rejects any substantive, positive definition

of the human and is non-founded only on the empty potential for the social order to be different

than it is. Equality in freedom is nothing less than the lack of any natural reason for domination

—that the order of things should not be different than they are.

vi Rancière, Disagreement, p. 8.vii Ibid. p. 23.viii Ibid. p. 15.ix Ibid. p. 79.x Marx. Capital Vol. I. trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990. About capital’s creation of “free

workers,” see p. 874. About equality, Marx writes “… since capital is by its nature a leveler, since it insists upon equality in the conditions of exploitation of labour in every sphere of production as its own innate right, the limitation by law of children’s labour in one branch of industry results in its limitation in others.” p. 520.

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Etienne Balibar has helpfully theorized this radical equality in freedom as the proposition

of the direct identity of freedom and equality as a “self-evident truth” or, rather, a “truth [that]

cannot be put in doubt”.xi Balibar calls this equality-in-freedom “equaliberty.” At stake in

Balibar’s discourse is the creation of a principle with all the prescriptive force for political action

of a universal truth without any of the mystificatory, Enlightenment baggage usually associated

with the term “truth”. Thus, it is important for Balibar not simply to posit that equaliberty is

universally true, but to articulate how it is universally true—that is, to ask in what precise sense

is it a “true” proposition, and what is the form of the universality of this truth. Balibar insists

that freedom and equality are not ideal essences, but consist in material historical practices and

discourses: not “Freedom” and “Equality” in themselves, but the practical, historical “freedom

to” and “equality in”. Therefore, the proposition of equaliberty must be proved through the

rigorous historical demonstration that “the (de facto) historical conditions of freedom are exactly

the same as the (de facto) historical conditions of equality”.xii Such a demonstration can only be

the negative demonstration that there is no historical evidence to contradict the identity of

freedom in equality, since where and whenever freedom has been impinged so also has been

equality, and vice versa. In this sense, equaliberty is a properly “experimental” proposition, the

“truth” of which is thinkable only retroactively as the historical “truth-effects” of concrete,

historical events that enunciate it. Furthermore, Balibar argues, if the proposition of equaliberty

can only be negatively proven, then the substantive “content” of the proposition of equaliberty is

fundamentally indeterminate. That is to say, the proposition of equaliberty contains no

substantive prescription for the realization of maximal equality-in-freedom in practice, but is

supplied with substance only by concrete historical enunciations with finite demands, the

xi Etienne Balibar. Masses, Classes, Ideas. trans. James Swenson. New York: Routledge, 1994. p.47.xii Ibid. p. 48.

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performative effectivity of which is derived precisely from the indeterminacy of the “content” of

equaliberty:

All the force of the statement [of equaliberty] comes form its indeterminacy, but this is also the source of

the practical weakness of the act of enunciation, or rather, of the fact that the consequences of the statement

are themselves indeterminate: they are entirely dependent on ‘power relations’ and the evolution of a

conjuncture in which it will always be necessary in practice to construct individual and collective referents

for equaliberty.”xiii

The indeterminacy of equaliberty—the “emptiness” of freedom in Rancière—should be

distinguished from pure negativity. Historical inscriptions of equaliberty do not function only to

disrupt the social order, but also to create a new order. The historical enunciations that inscribe

equaliberty into the community may be either negative—“Why should women not vote? Why

should conditions at the workplace not be of public political concern?”xiv—or positive—“All

men are created equal”. Strictly speaking, nothing either negative or positive is prescribed by

the proposition of equaliberty. The indeterminacy of equaliberty means that it is a purely formal

principle, empty in itself of any concrete prescriptions for political action, but one that is

nonetheless indispensable for political action to refer.

We can illustrate the consequences of this highly philosophical “formal turn” for political

thought with the example of rights. The proposition of equaliberty sweeps aside traditional

distinctions between “real” rights—defined as the “rights of man”, “universal, inalienable,

subsisting independently of any social institution”,—and “(merely) formal” rights—defined as

the “rights of citizen”, positive and effective legal institutions that are ultimately restrictive and

inadequate to the former.xv The discourses of both the political Right and the vulgar Left adopt

xiii Ibid. p. 49.xiv Žižek, Slavoj. The Universal Exception. ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. New York: Continuum, 2007. p.

190.xv Balibar, Masses, p. 44.

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this model: the vulgar Left will say that real rights can only be adequately expressed through the

revolutionary transformation of society; the Right insists that any social orders is adequate to

defend our real rights, and then defends any oppression in the existing as a kind of necessary

evil, or as an inevitable “reality” that cannot be eliminated but only reduced to acceptable levels.

The weakness of both positions is that they rely on a substantive conception of “human nature”

which “real” rights express and “formal” rights defend.xvi

Against this, Balibar argues that there is no human nature prior to any (contingent,

constructed) social order, displacing the binaries of “real” and “(merely) formal” rights, and

“man” and “citizen”, entirely.xvii In the place of this discourse, he posits the principle of

equaliberty, which we might think of as a double-edged blade: one edge is the purely formal

proposition of the identity of freedom and equality, empty of any substantive program for its

historical realization; the other edge is enunciation of this principle in practical, historical

political struggles that performatively gives this empty principle substantive content through

demands for institutional political rights; and the two edges meeting at the point of the singular

universal that subjectively embodies this demand for equaliberty. This martial metaphor is quite

appropriate, for equaliberty is above all a polemical principle, a weapon of struggle, the “sword

of justice”. Equaliberty “is not so much the definition of a political right”, nor even so much a

“right to have rights”,xviii “as it is the affirmation of a universal right to politics”.xix That is, the

principle of equaliberty is a “right” to identify one’s particularity with the universal of the

community and polemically demand institutional protection of one’s principled equality-in-

freedom, a “right” that has no substantive guarantee, but is non-founded only on the contingency

xvi Ibid. p. 40.xvii Ibid. p. 44.xviii Balibar. “Universalism”, lecture at University of California Irvine, 2 Februay 2007. Text online at

http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=171, 9 April 2008.xix Balibar, Masses, p. 49.

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of any social order.

In contrast to the traditional discourses on rights, we should assert that we have not “real”

rights first and “formal” rights second, but the formal “right” of equaliberty and real-life rights

which inscribe this empty principle with positive historical content simultaneously. Or, better

yet, we should say that equaliberty is not so much a “real” right as it is a “Real right” or a “right

of the Real” to shatter any given social-Symbolic order by re-inscribing the “sheer contingency”

on which the given order is non-founded. To be sure, this hypothesis is tricky, since neither

Rancière nor Balibar uses the term “Real” in the texts we are discussing. And yet, is not the

indeterminate and purely formal relationship of equaliberty to its historical, polemical

enunciations precisely the same as that of the Real to language? And, when Rancière posits that

the “equality of anyone with anyone” is founded on the “sheer contingency of the social order”,

what can be the absent-cause of this “sheer contingency” but the Real itself? It is in precisely this

sense that, as Badiou puts it, “equality is not at all realized, but real”: equality is not the goal of a

political struggle, but a condition that is axiomatically affirmed as the inaugural gesture of

struggle.xx Equaliberty can be thought of as the right of the Real to rupture the existing Symbolic

order. Or, more exactly, equaliberty is the right of the part-of-no-part to embody the minimal gap

between the Real and the Symbolic, and thus inscribe its name as a “torsion” or “warp” in the

existing order.xxi

We will elaborate on this thesis much more fully in Chapter 3. For now, though, we should

conclude this preliminary transcoding of Balibar and Rancière into Lacanian terms by observing

that, just as the Real is never adequately “captured” by the Symbolic, so institutional rights can

never exhaust the principle of equaliberty: “there will be a permanent tension between the

xx Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker. New York: Verso, 2006. p. 112.xxi Rancière, Disagreement, p. R14.

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conditions that historically determine the construction of institutions that are in conformity with

the proposition of equaliberty, and the hyperbolic universality of the statement”.xxii Furthermore,

there is no reason that only institutional/State “rights” should be the only concrete forms of

equaliberty. Equaliberty cannot be exhausted by any one institutional form, but can inscribed

into any kind of political, social, and economic practice, whether as the creation new rights in

existing institutions, or the revolutionary formation of new institutions and new methods of

political self-organization. The work of politics is never done, even as it strives towards the

unchanging horizon of the maximal equaliberty. While Rancière’s theory of politics essentially

defines politics as a rupture of the existing order, Balibar’s principle of equaliberty enables us to

think a thread of temporal continuity running through the histories of these ruptures. If politics

proceeds in fits and starts, then these concrete historical ruptures are also so many performative

inscriptions of a single universal truth—the identity of equality and freedom—that is at least as

old as the Greeks and the durability of which has no end in sight.

***

Now that we have glossed Rancière’s general theory of politics proper as the rupture of

the existing order through the polemical identification of the part-of-no-part with the whole of

the community, we should take a step back and determine how the social order is structured in

the first place, and from there proceed to discuss in detail the precise form of universality

operating in the notion of this “singular universal”. The naturalness and security of the existing

order is maintained by what Rancière calls the police: “the procedures whereby the aggregation

and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of power and the distribution of places

and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution”.xxiii In more concrete, practical

terms, the police is

xxii Balibar, Masses, p. 50.

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an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees

that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; 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.xxiv

Rancière’s concept of policing is essentially the same as Foucault’s concept of the governmental

management of power relations; Foucault himself used the term “police” to describe the

instruments of governmentality.xxv

We might think of policing as having two semi-distinct moments: counting—the

procedure that determines that each “part” of society exists and has positive, singular attributes—

and assigning—the procedure by which each part is assigned that which is “proper” to it.

Doubtless, the two moments of policing are only partially distinct and are very often practically

exercised simultaneously in what we might call general ac/counting; counting subjects is always

instrumentalized towards a process of assigning them a proper place, and the assigning of bodies

to social places retroactively effects the counting of the subjects. Nonetheless, it is worth

provisionally separating the two moments, first, to give more precise, historical specificity to the

meaning of each moment and to track the difference between Rancière and Foucault’s approach

to politics. The first half of the cited sentence describes the function of the police in actively

creating for each party in society a “proper” role and place and assigning them to it. Especially

important to assigning are power relations of domination and exploitation, as well as forms of

subjection that produce subjects in ordered physical and conceptual spaces, such as the

disciplining of the body in medicine, social behavior, sexuality, and architectural/urban space;

and discourses of identity; etc. The second half of the cited sentence describes the function of

xxiii Rancière, Disagreement, p. 28.xxiv Ibid. p. 29.xxv Foucault. “Governmentality” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil

Gupta. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. p.131-143. cit. p. 143.

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the count of parts. Rancière’s use of the word “count” plays on the two meanings of the term,

signifying both the arithmetic counting of elements in society as so many parts of a harmonious

geometric whole, and the deciding of “who counts” in society. In more Foucaultian terms,

counting consists in the production and circulation of knowledge about humans that produces

them as subjects and inserts them into matrices of normalcy that determine what account is made

of their speech: whether they are experts or laymen, sane or mad, etc. The police is the very

fabric of social existence, the structures of knowledge/power that order social being-together.

The moment of departure between Ranciere and Foucault lies in Ranciere’s insistence the

maneuverings of power relations should be thought of as politics.xxvi While Rancière does not

assign any pejorative connotation to the term “police” and concedes that “one kind of police may

be infinitely preferable to another”, he insists that Foucaultian counter-power represents only

counter-policing, a re-inscription of the police logic of accounting, rather than a break from it.xxvii

For Rancière, the thesis that “everything is political” must be rejected, for “if everything is

political, then nothing is”. xxviii Rather, we should assert that anything can become political if it

gives rise to a radically egalitarian logic of being-together heterogeneous to the managerial logic

of the police. The logic of politics proper must be defined not by the continuous struggle of

management and micro-resistance, but by definite rupture; not by the macroscopic agonism of

intersecting power relations, but by a binary antagonism that divides a single community into

two through the polemical appearance of the part-of-no-part.

The police opens up a space for politics to emerge through the “wrong” count of the parts

of society: “there is politics—and not just domination [that is, policing]—because there is a

wrong count of the parts of the whole”.xxix Clearly inherited from Marx’s “general wrong”,

xxvi Rancière, Disagreement, p. 27.xxvii Ibid. p. 31.xxviii Ibid. p. 32.

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Rancière’s concept of the wrong designates the fundamental injustice by which the police

miscounts the elements of society and denies the existence of the part-of-no-part. Rancière uses

three highly formal tropes to develop his concept of the wrong: one linguistic, one optical, one

topological. The task of politics is to “process” the wrong by contesting the existence of the

wrong against those who deny its existence, by making the wrong visible, and by inscribing the

wrong in the community as its difference from itself.

The primary trope Rancière uses to elaborate his theory of politics is the linguistic trope

of disagreement. According to Rancière, “Disagreement occurs wherever contention over what

speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation”.xxx Disagreement is

disagreement, and not just miscommunication, because each party both understands and does not

understand what the other party means by the same signifiers because of their homonymic

ambiguity. Disagreement is always a meta-disagreement, a dispute about whether there is or is

not a disagreement taking place at all by disputing three conditions of its own speech situation:

The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution “are” or “are not”, whether

they are speaking or just making a noise. It is knowing whether there is a case for seeing the object they

designate as the visible object of the conflict. It is knowing whether the common language in which they

are exposing a wrong is indeed a common language.xxxi

In a political disagreement, the part-of-no-part testifies to their existence, in spite of the wrong of

their not being counted, in a language common to all. Against this, the police declares that the

part-of-no-part is not a real party; that there is no wrong; and that there is no common stage of

disagreement, even going so far as to claim that there cannot be any communication because the

language of command can be understood by the dominated, but not spoken by them.

xxix Ibid. p. 10.xxx Ibid. p. xi.xxxi Ibid. p. 50.

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Disagreement presumes the fundamental performativity of speech: “parties do not exist prior to

the declaration of wrong… [b]efore the wrong that its name exposes, the proletariat has no

existence as a real part of society”.xxxii The speaking subjects, the object of disagreement, and the

communal speech situation are all constituted all at once in the moment of the enunciation of a

disagreement. Utterances in situations of disagreement therefore have no objective referents

“out there,” but directly concern the intersubjective constitution of each speaking party and the

possibility of mutual recognition. Now we understand that when we have said that politics

begins with a miscount of a part-of-no-part. This miscount is not a mere “error”, an accounting

mistake which simply “overlooked” some part (of no part) that was always “out there”, and

which can be settled in an amicable fashion by developing a better system of accounting. The

wrong is in no way objective; its existence cannot be neutrally verified within a framework of

transparent communicative rationality. Rather, it must be perceived/ performatively articulated

(it is the same thing) only from the engaged subject position of the part-of-no-part that affirms

and embodies the existence of the wrong. Disagreement thus performatively constitutes as a

community divided in itself, what Rancière calls “dissensus”: “the presence of two worlds in a

single one”.xxxiii

Rancière’s linguistic model of politics as disagreement should be contrasted the with the

model of politics drawn from deconstruction(ism) as the recognition of others qua absolute

Other. From this latter point of view, politics is about the struggle between two relations to

Otherness: one a murderous, totalitarian relation which seeks to destroy the absolutely Other; and

one, a relation of hospitality and openness to the Other. Laclau is right to point out that it is the

vulgar disciples of Derrida who derive from deconstruction a completely unconditional ethical

xxxii Ibid. p. 39.xxxiii Rancière. “Ten Theses on Politics”. Theory and Event vol. 5:3, 2001.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html, 9 April 2008.

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injunction of openness to the Other, and that Derrida himself knows that things are more

complicated—that even as one desires an encounter with the Other, such an encounter is

impossible because one’s relation to the absolutely Other can only be a radical non-relation. xxxiv

This leads Derrida to formulate a politics of fidelity to the unfulfillable “emancipatory promise”

of the arrival of the absolutely Other in what Derrida terms a “messianism without a messiah”.xxxv

If this messianic promise is impossible to fulfill, it must nonetheless be experienced as a

“promise to be kept, that is, not to remain ‘spiritual’ or abstract,’ but to produce events, new

effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth” through lived “fidelity” to this

promise.xxxvi For Derrida, the condition of possibility of politics—of negotiating relations with

finite others—is also the condition of its impossibility—of encountering, in the otherness of

others, a glimmer of the infinite Other to which we can never relate as such. Derrida calls the

temporality of such a politics a “future present,” that is, a present that is always opened up to a

“future to come”, awaiting the arrival of an impossible Event that cannot be awaited as such.xxxvii

In contrast, for Rancière, politics is about the performative retroactive declaration of Sameness:

“We are Same in equaliberty, and we always have been!”. For Rancière, politics consists of two

competing concepts of the Same: the oppressive, hierarchical Sameness of the police order, on

the one hand, and the egalitarian Sameness of equality in freedom, on the other. Indeed, the

labeling of others as Other, as Foreign and not-Same, is a protocol of the police, against which

the part-of-no-part demands the reciprocal recognition of Sameness between all and all.

Rancière should be further contrasted with the still-more vulgar politics of multicultural

pluralism so popular among the American liberal-left. The truly progressive position is not the

xxxiv Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipation(s). New York: Verso, 2007. p. 77. xxxv Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2006. p. 82.xxxvi Ibid. p. 112-3.xxxvii Ibid. p. 81

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multiculturalist respect for differences, but the universalist argument that those who are wronged

on the basis of difference are in fact fundamentally the Same, that they are equal-in-liberty.

Which is not to say that there is no place for the respect for differences, but, rather, that

respecting differences is a task for the police rather than politics. The linguistic tropes often

associated with the left-liberal politics of recognition are that of the “right to narrate” one’s own

history of oppression, or the competition of heterogeneous language games (feminine non-

metaphysics versus phallogocentrism, etc.). The latter account of speech, however, is only a

softer form of the police mis-accounting of the speech of the oppressed as unintelligible noise.

As for the former, Rancière insists that politics exists only where there is a universal address: the

“right to narrate” is only political when it is the right to narrate in a common language, heard and

understood by all. For Rancière, politics does not consist in counter-narratives “gnaw[ing] away

the great institutionalized narrative apparatuses” through “skirmishes that take place on the

sidelines”, but in peripheral narratives claiming center stage and universal import.xxxviii Against

the pluralistic agonism of the politics of recognition, Rancière posits the internal antagonism of

the One divided in itself. Against the competition multiplicity of sub-narratives in fragmented

space, Ranciere posits a community marked by a binary division between those who see no

division and those who do, and this internal division is the very condition that makes possible the

inscription of equaliberty.

The critical point to be derived from this for radical political practice (at least in the

American academy) is not to shy away from antagonism in the name of co-existence, but

precisely to embrace it in the name of the universal. The Left must accept that the universal is

always divided in itself, existing only where it is in dispute, that antagonism is the condition of

xxxviii Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Lyotard Reader. ed. Andre Benjamin. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1989. p.132

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universality, and not an obstacle to it. As the later Foucault said, “we have to rediscover war”

and to “reactivate it”, to accept a genuine binary antagonism as the possibility of true

universality.xxxix Instead of thinking politics as the essentially liberal process of recognition and

created spaces of agonistic coexistence within a framework of consensus, we must embrace the

fact that one can only make universal claims from an engaged, partisan subject position in an

antagonistic situation of disagreement.xl Instead of the endless task of deconstructing binaries,

we must think the possibility if a genuine antagonism, and have the courage to take sides.

The second trope or figure that Ranciere uses to discuss politics is the optical figure by

which the pure appearance of the part-of-no-part retroactively makes visible the wrong count of

society’s parts. Policing requires every part of society to be visible, knowable, and accounted for

within a hierarchical regime of propriety. The “wrong” by which this governance of appearance

disguises the part-of-no-part is necessarily invisible from the point of view of the existing order,

or rather, is the very invisibility of power itself. Thus, the appearance of the part-of-no-part

makes visible the invisible wrong, “revealing a mode of existence of sense experience that has

eluded the allocation of parties and lots”.xli We can think of the appearance of the part-of-no-part

as a pure appearance because it is an appearance that has no referent from the point of view of

the existing order, but which nonetheless possesses an effectivity of its own. That is to say, a

pure appearance is simultaneously the materialization of that which it is “only an appearance”. It xxxix Foucault, Society, p. 268.xl Žižek writes about this point in Rancière, reading him through Badiou:

To be proletarian involves assuming a certain subjective stance (of class struggle destined to achieve redemption through revolution) that, in principle, can occur to any individual; to put it in religious terms, irrespective of his (good) works, any individual can be touched by grace and interpellated as a proletarian subject. The limit that separates the two opposed sides is the class struggle is thus not objective, not the limit separating two positive social groups, but ultimately radically subjective; it involves the position individuals assume towards the Event of universal Truth. Again, the crucial point here is that subjectivity and universalism are not only not exclusive but are, rather, two sides of the same coin. It is precisely because class struggle interpellates individuals to adopt the subjective stance of a proletarian that its appeal is universal, aiming at everyone with no exceptions”. (Žižek, Universal p.199.)

In Chapter 3 we will discuss precisely what Žižek means by “Event”.xli Rancière, Disagreement, p. 58.

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“does not conceal reality but in fact splinters it, introduces contentious objects into it, objects

whose mode of presentation is not homogeneous with the ordinary mode of existence of the

objects thereby identified.”xlii Hence, pure appearance creates a disagreement over the existence

of a “surplus subject” which cannot be ac/counted for by the police.xliii

The pure appearance of the part-of-no-part can thus be recoded as the performative self-

(re)presentation of a new speaking subject through what Rancière calls subjectification: “the

production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously

identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the

reconfiguration of the field of experience”.xliv Subjectification is neither the process of a pre-

existing subject “‘becoming aware’ of itself or finding its voice”,xlv nor is it the emergence of a

new subject “ex nihilo”—to be sure, the bodies that make up the part-of-no-part do exist.xlvi

Subjectification is rather a matter of the pure appearance of a new speaking subject at the

discursive level through the “transforming [of] identities defined in the natural order of the

allocation of functions and places into instances of experience of a dispute”.xlvii

Rancière calls this process of transformation the “disidentification” of subjects with the

subject position created for people by the police. Disidentification is the inaugural moment of

politics: as Badiou elegantly put it, if “all resistance is a rupture with what is, [then] every

rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself”.xlviii The critical

significance of the concept of politics as disidentification is that anyone and everyone can

disidentify themselves with their place in the police order and inscribe themselves under the

xlii Ibid.104xliii Ibid. p. 87.xliv Rancière, Disagreement, p. 35.xlv Ibid. p. 40.xlvi Ibid. p. 36.xlvii Ibid. p. 36.xlviii Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 7.

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subject name of the part-of-no-part, be it “people”, “proletariat”, or “woman”, as the case may

be. Subjectification-through-disidentification is “the opening up of a subject space where

anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a

connection is made between having a part and having no part”.xlix This means that neither can

any one objective social group monopolize the (non)place of the part-of-no-part, nor can any one

group become a “final” part-of-no-part that would exhaust the infinite demand of equaliberty for

all time; anyone can speak in solidarity with “women” when that is the name of the part-of-no-

part in a particular political sequence, and the subject name “women” never exhausts the strictly

relational (non)space of the part-of-no-part.l The appearance of the part-of-no-part is ultimately

a formal matter: the term designates the formal enunciator of the principle of equaliberty, whose

particular subject name will be decided by the contingencies of history.

The third and final trope of the wrong is its topological figuration as the difference of the

community with itself. We have already discussed that the political community is one defined

by disagreement, and therefore divided in itself. We have also seen that the appearance of the

part-of-no-part is also a pure appearance that embodies this wrong: the part-of-no-part is the

subject “whose very existence is the mode of manifestation of the wrong”.li The topology of the

wrong, involves a dialectic between the void in knowledge that the wrong is, and the supplement

of the part-of-no-part that embodies this void.lii It is worth very briefly summarizing Rancière’s

description of the four, historical simulacrums of politics in order to better understand the exact

way in which this dialectical tension between void and supplement plays out in politics proper,

and further clarify how the universal can be divided in itself. The first simulacrum is

xlix Rancière, Disagreement, p. 36.l Ibid., p. 50.li Ibid., p. 39.lii Rancière. “Ten Theses on Politics”. Theory and Event Issue 5.3. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3Rancière.html, 9 April 2008.

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archipolitics, associated with Plato, which claims that the community is a closed unified whole in

which everything is accounted for. Archipolitics is the model of the perfect police state, where

wrong does not exist and the community is fully identical to itself.liii Symmetrical to archipolitics

is metapolitics, which declares that political conflict is always false, and that the truth of politics

“is located beneath or behind [politics proper], in what it conceals and exists only to conceal”,

namely, objective socio-economic conflict.liv For metapolitics, the wrong is the gap between the

illusory sphere of political conflict and the objective conflicts of socio-economic groups;

disagreement is reduced to tension between “false consciousness” and science. This theory,

however, cancels out politics itself, since what it declares to be “real” politics—the conflict of

objectively knowable socio-economic groups and forces—involves only the policing of the

distribution of goods and things, and not real political contestation. Metapolitics’ two

incarnations, according to Rancière, are capitalist democracy, which reduces politics to

managing the economy and ameliorating of social conflicts, and Marxism, which reduces politics

to the objective contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production.

In short, metapolitics depoliticizes politics, reducing the irreducibly subjective antagonism of

politics proper to a matter of objective knowledge in which, as in archipolitics, every party is

accounted for.

The objectifying of social conflict in metapolitics leads to ultrapolitics, which declares

that there is no common ground whatsoever between two opposed subject positions in an

objective socio-economic conflict, and that one party must destroy the other.lv Michel Foucault’s

theory of race war belongs properly to this model of false-politics, as does the Manicheanism of

liii Rancière, Disagreement, p. 65-70.liv Ibid. p. 82.lv Rancière, Disagreement, p. 85. Though Rancière only mentions ultrapolitics in passing, Žižek is quite correct to

point out that ultrapolitics can be considered a fourth archetype of false-politics, filling a structural relation with the other three archetypes in a classical Greimasian: Žižek, Universal, p. 187.

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many anti-colonial struggles, described by Fanon, that precedes a second, more humanist,

universal, and Rancierian moment in which all who struggle for liberation are considered part of

the nation. For ultrapolitics, the wrong designates an absolute, objective, Manichean division of

the community, and each party confronts one another as an absolute Other that must be

annihilated. For politics proper, however, the wrong is an internal division of the community,

and each party confronts the other in an argument about whether or not they are the Same in

equaliberty. We could distinguish the dualism of ultrapolitics from politics proper numerically

by saying that ultrapolitics consists in the antagonism of the absolute Two, but politics proper in

the antagonism within a One that is always in itself Two. Whereas ultrapolitics speaks of the

enemy, of “us and them,” politics speaks of a single “sphere of appearance of a subject, the

people, whose particular attribute is to be different from itself, internally divided”.lvi

Fourth, and finally, there is parapolitics—associated with Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau,

and Habermas—which presents the self-difference of the community as a pluralistic agonism of

individual persons or social groups in a “war of all against all”. lvii Parapolitics proposes to create

order through establishment of clear procedures of legitimating rule through processes of

representation, such as the delegation of authority to the Leviathan or through contract-based

parliamentary democracy. The essential move of parapolitics is to suture shut the open wound of

the wrong through the constant interchange of power between representatives of the people in a

process legitimated democratic consensus. The most sophisticated Leftist version of parapolitics

today is Laclau’s theory of hegemony. It will be useful to contrast at length Rancière’s theory of

politics to Laclau’s, not only to further clarify Rancière’s concept of universality, but also to

develop a new idea of democracy as radical egalitarian rupture in contrast to the democratic

lvi Rancière, p. 87.lvii Rancière, p. 70-81.

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socialism promoted by Laclau and which dominates left-liberal political movements today.

Finally, we will look briefly at the political self-organization of shackdwellers in Durban as a

possible example of such radical democracy.

***

Both Rancière’s theory of politics and Laclau’s theory of hegemony can be read as

rethinkings of class struggle as developed in Marx’s Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right, but the two reinterpretations of Marx are essentially different on two points:

the form of the “general wrong”, and the form of universality embodied by the proletariat.

Universality

Laclau models society in duly post-structuralist fashion as a system of differentially

defined elements. Laclau, like Jameson, assumes that universality is predicated on the existence

of a totality. In properly deconstructive fashion, however, Laclau assumes that society is not a

pre-given totality, but an infinite expanse of differences. A totality can only be formed out of

this expanse of difference if all elements can be equivalently differentiated from some absolute,

antagonistic Other. Laclau’s absolute Other is not the ontological limit-exteriority or infinite

alterity of Derrida, but an other “inside” the field of differences that is produced as absolutely

outside through ideological and political processes of exclusion. This absolute other may be

ideologically figured as an absolute outside (Nature or the Foreigner), or it may be an element

within society that is depicted as the tyrannical, common enemy of all other parts of society (e.g.

the bourgeoisie as the “notorious crime of the whole of society”).lviii Politics would then consists

in the agonistic struggle of elements “within” society to represent, with their own signifiers, this

shared difference between all the elements of society and society’s other. In this way, a

particular part of society can occupy the position of the singular universal. This is, however, an

lviii Marx, Early Writings, p. 254

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impossible task, since this shared difference, qua difference, is nothing but a pure negativity.

The position of the universal is necessarily an empty one, then, the particular content of which is

determined through the struggle between the various elements in society to hegemonize the role

of representing “the impossible fullness of society”.lix

We can make three essential distinctions between how Laclau’s and Rancière’s

conceptions of universality. First, as we said, Laclau predicates universality on the existence of

an ontologically prior totality. The fact that both universality and totality are both (im)possible

for Laclau does not change the basic onto-temporal relation between the two concepts. For

Rancière, however, the universal only comes into play in the resistance of totalization: only

when the part-of-no-part rises up and refuses its place in the totalizing system of police

knowledge does it become a singular universal. The universal, for Rancière, is precisely what

creates a fracture in any police totality, and divides totality into twain between those who see

only the totality of objective knowledge with nothing unaccounted for, and those who see a void

that must be made Same in equaliberty with all. The “one world divided into two” that politics

creates is not so much a “renewed” totality, as it is a totality that is always incomplete, a non-all,

always marked by an internal void, or supplemented with an illegal, internal surplus subject.

Second, Lalcau and Ranciere have slightly different conceptions of the form of political

antagonism. Laclau is very insightful to argue, against the left-liberal politics of recognition, that

universality comes into play only when the banal difference of everything with everything is

turned into a binary antagonism. However, for Laclau, the struggle to embody this universality

is characterized by pluralistic, agonism. For Rancière, however, the embodiment of the universal

by the part-of-no-part is immediately antagonistic. Against the universality of compromise—

each element finds its interests more or less represented in those of the hegemon—Rancière

lix Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 55.

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posits a universality that is always a disputed universality, one that cannot be compromised but

must be wholly either affirmed or denied. Either the part-of-no-part belongs to the community or

it does not; either there is a community of equals, “a world of reciprocal recognitions” of mutual

Sameness in equaliberty, or there is not.lx

This leads directly to a third, crucial difference between Laclau and Rancière: whereas

Laclau’s universality is not truly universal—it always excludes a manufactured Other, the

“notorious crime of socity”—Rancière’s is a truly universal universality precisely because it is

predicted on internal difference rather than exclusion. Precisely because the part-of-no-part is an

internal void, its declaration of belonging, of equality in freedom, is addressed to every one. The

part-of-no-part represents the whole of the community because it embodies the zero-degree of

membership in the community. It expresses the one attribute that is universal in the community

—pure belonging, shorn of any other positive feature or qualification. Rancière’s model of

universality is the inverse of Laclau’s: it is the universality initiated when the internal void or

Other declares itself to be Same, that there is no outside-the-community. Therefore, as Rancière

says, “The ‘world’ can get bigger”—we can include ever more people into the fold of the

community—but “the universal of politics does not get any bigger”. lxi

The Wrong

On the question of the form of the “general wrong,” the key difference between Laclau

and Rancière is that whereas according to Laclau posits the “general wrong” as an injustice

(imaginary or real) committed symmetrically against all parts of society by their common enemy,

Rancière posits that the wrong is committed asymmetrically against the part-of-no-part. For

Laclau, the general wrong cuts across all parts of society. For Rancière, the part-of-no-part is the

lx Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. p. 218.lxi Rancière, Disagreement, p.139.

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locus of the wrong. This difference has to do with the question of counting. Earlier we said that

Rancière’s theory of politics was the inverse of Laclau’s, but this is not exactly precise. The

part-of-no-part is not really an Other because in order to be an Other, one must be counted as

excluded, but the part-of-no-part is precisely not counted at all. The part-of-no-part is more

properly a void in the count, and the thought of such a void is precisely what escapes Laclau’s

model of society. Thus, Laclau’s model of society is really only a police model, in which all the

elements of society are always-already present and accounted for. Rancière shows that what is at

stake in politics is the presentation of a void in the model of society as a differential system, and

of making this void belong to society as an internal supplement. What else is this void that the

order of signifiers misses but the Real itself? In the following chapter, we will devote extended

discussion to the idea that the part-of-no-part inscribes the Real into the social-Symbolic order of

a political community.

For now, however, it is pressing that we conclude with some observations on how

Rancière’s theory of politics should make us re-conceptualize democracy and political practice.

Laclau’s theory of hegemony leads him to define democratic politics as the agonistic

succession of finite and particular identities which attempt to assume universal tasks surpassing them; but

that, as a result [of this impossibility of fully representing the universal] are never able to entirely conceal

the distance between task and identity, and can always be substituted by alternative groups”.lxii

For Laclau,

a radically democratic society is one in which a plurality of public spaces, constituted around specific

issues and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instills in its members a civic sense which is a

central ingredient of their identity as individuals. Despite the plurality of these spaces, or rather, as a

consequence of it, a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific

identity.lxiii

lxii Laclau, p. 15-16.

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It is quite clear that this model of society as an order of spaces is not a model of politics but of

police, and that Laclau’s concept of democracy is not one of democratic politics but of

parapolitical policing. The “democratic culture” or “civic sense” ostensibly created in this space

is nothing more than the deconstructist’s utopia, in which “all sides fully accept the radically

contingent character of their endeavors.” lxiv Such an order may indeed be an acceptable police

order, but it is not democratic politics proper.

Against this, Rancière argues that there can be no “democratic society” as such, but rather

that democracy is what upends the order of every society:

Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics itself, the system of forms

of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions corresponding to their

‘nature’ and places corresponding to their functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency.lxv

Democracy, for Rancière, is not a term for any order of society, but the very name of the

procedure by which the part-of-no-part declares its equality in freedom with all. A properly

political, democratic struggle consists not in the agonistic competition of pre-deconstructed

groups within a multi-institutional framework, but in a binary, antagonistic struggle of the One

against itself that explodes all frameworks. The binary inscribed by politics cannot be

deconstructed, but only “eclipsed”, through the victory of one side or another.lxvi So called

“liberal democracy” has no intrinsic relation to democracy at all, but constitutes a form of

policing Rancicere calls “postdemocracy”:

… a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby

reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests.

Postdemocracy is not a democracy that has found the truth of institutional forms in the interplay of social

lxiii Ibid., 121.lxiv Žižek “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”,

http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm, 9 April 2008.lxv Rancière, Disagreement, p.101.lxvi Rancière, Disagreement, p. 139.

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energies. It is an identifying mode, among institutional mechanisms and the allocation of the society’s

appropriate parts and shares, for making the subject and democracy’s own specific action disappear. It is

the practice and theory of what is appropriate with nothing left over for forms of the state and the state of

social relations.lxvii

In a word, postdemocracy is not politics at all, but metapolitical policing; it is not the

preservation of politics, but its ossification. We should maintain, however, that State institutions

are always anti-political. It has sometimes been the case that States have been a central

battleground of political struggles. Throughout the 20th century, voting rights were critical points

of contention for genuine political struggles, most dramatically in the struggle against apartheid

in South Africa. However, the infinite demands of equaliberty cannot be satisfied by any single

right, and politics can never become frozen in any form of State. Furthermore, if democratic

State institutions once proved key for political struggle, they cannot be confused with politics

itself, and today they very often prove to be the enemy of genuine politics, as liberal

postdemocracy establishes an ideological monopoly on the signifiers “democracy” and

“politics”, turning every discussion of democracy into a banal question of elections, of State

affairs, and of the governmental management of power relations.

The continuation of genuine politics in South Africa since the end of apartheid in the

movements of shackdwellers offers a possible example of what radical, egalitarian democracy

might look like. Michael Neocosmos has diagnosed the failure of the anti-apartheid struggle to

bring about a substantive economic and political change for the most excluded and impoverished

in South African as a consequence of a confusion between democracy as “people’s power” and

democracy as State:

The binding of the mass movement around the idea of the coming to power of the exiled leaders of the

lxvii Ibid. 102

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ANC was its undoing. The sites of embryonic people’s power never fully matured and were rather still

born, as the democratic politics of the mass movement more or less rapidly collapsed into authoritarianism

as a result of internal contradictions and external pressures.lxviii

The “people’s power” to which Neocosmos refers is the autonomous, self-organization of

people’s courts, schools, and “street committees” during the period of 1984-86 when the ANC

famously called upon South Africans to make the country ungovernable. Neocosmos sees to the

ongoing self-organization of residents of shantytown—particularly, to the alliance of settlements

near Durban called the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM)—as the continuation of people’s power

today. Those still excluded from economic security and legal rights even after the end of

apartheid surely constitutes, for South Africa, its part-of-no-part. Since 2001, the municipal

government of Durban has pursued a program of slum clearance by withdrawing basic services

and utilities such as electricity and toilets in settlement areas, and evicting shackdwellers to sell

land to private development projects.lxix In 2005, the AbM coalesced around a 750 person

demonstration that barricaded Kennedy Road, a major highway near a large shack settlement of

the same name, to protest efforts at their eviction. Since this originary event, the movement has

expanded into an alliance of settlements from across the Kwa-Zulu Natal province and also in

Capetown.lxx

With few employment possibilities, no healthcare, no financial safety net, no basic

utilities, and even no policing (except when the police arrive to forcibly evict the poor and

bulldoze settlements), the urban poor of the global South exist in a vacuum in which the State

lxviii Neocosmos, Michael. “Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today”. http://abahlali.org/node/1429, 9 April 2008. p. 45.

lxix Pithouse, Richard. “‘Our Struggle is Though, on the Ground, Running’ The University Of Abahlali baseMjondolo”. www.abahlali.org/files/RREPORT_VOL106_PITHOUSE.pdf, 9 April 2008. p. 15-19lxx Ibid. p. 23

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has withdrawn control (only, of course, to brutally reassert it through evictions, etc.). The AbM

have managed to carve out a space of communal solidarity in the absence of any support by the

State, organizing schools, community gardens and kitchens, and community councils that operate

through collective decision making. lxxi Though the AbM has some elected leadership, they are

held to strict procedures of accountability through reports to collective decision making bodies

and mostly function as organizational officials with little independent decision-making

authority.lxxii The AbM has organized mass election boycotts and demonstrations that have

successfully prevented evictions, but have gained few positive concessions from the city

government in the way of basic utilities. Perhaps most crucially, the AbM is an entirely non-

professional and non-party movement that has refused both financial aid from international

NGOs and refused to present candidates for local municipal office in order to preserve the

autonomy of their self-organization.lxxiii In their actions, the AbM has renounced the pursuit of

State or representational power and focused on a politics of “the transformation of the lived

experience of power”.lxxiv

It is worth inquiring if today the urban poor constitutes a part-of-no-part of global

capitalism—deprived of a place in the national legal, supranational legal, and economic orders.

Today over half of the Earth’s population—3.2 billion—live in urban areas, and urban areas are

expected to account for virtually all of global population growth “which is expected to peak at

about 10 billion in 2050”.lxxv The very existence of the urban poor is due to both the massive

expansion of cities as centers of commerce and manufacture as “undeveloped” nations are

integrated into the global market, and to the decimation of agricultural economies in the

lxxi Ibid. p. 47.lxxii Neocosmos, p. 51-55.lxxiii Ibid. 28.lxxiv Neocosomos, p. 1.lxxv Davis, Mike. “Planet of Slums” New Left Review vol. 25, March-April 2004, p. 5-34. cit. p. 5.

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undeveloped world caused by subsidized over production in the developed nations. The urban

poor furthermore contribute to the global economy indirectly by acting as the base of unskilled,

informal labour in urban areas. Žižek has mused on the political potential of shantytown

residents:

One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealize slum-dwellers into a new

revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the

proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the

classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the

state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of

being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life.

The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called ‘symbolic

class’ (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists etc) which is also uprooted and perceives

itself as universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks

in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘symbolic class’

inherently split, so that one can make a wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the

‘progressive’ part of the symbolic class? The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum

collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’ […]lxxvi

If Žižek’s comparison of the modern globetrotting immaterial labourer to the slum dweller seems

a bit vain, it is worth nothing that many of the shack-dwelling leaders of the AbM are

intellectuals who have published rich theoretical papers on their websites, and that intellectuals

from around the South African academy have allied themselves with the AbM’s cause (including

the two South African scholars, Richard Pithouse at University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Michael

Neocosmos at University of Praetoria, cited in this chapter). It is also encouraging for the

possibility of international solidarity that the AbM has held demonstrations against the deposing

lxxvi Žižek, Slavoj. “Knee Deep”. London Review of Books. 2 September 2004. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/zize01_.html, 9 April 2008.

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of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, successfully courted the sympathetic attention of international news

media, produced a documentary film about their struggle,lxxvii and a website rich with

documentation of their activities as well as journalistic and theoretical papers produced by their

intellectual leadership.lxxviii These tentative international identifications and exploitations of new

media have both enabled the world at large to take notice of the struggle of the AbM, and created

for its members a degree of ideological solidarity with disenfranchised poor in other parts of the

world. Given the limited means and the immediacy of the concerns of AbM, it remains to be

seen what a shared sense of struggle with the people of Haiti, or with the youth in the Parisian

banilieus could mean for the poor of South Africa. However, communication with similar

struggles in other countries, and with those who are willing to engage with the AbM on their own

terms, has already had a profoundly encouraging ideological effect for the struggle. What

practical effect such cognitive mapping has, beyond bolstering the confidence of organized

struggles that manage to make contact with one another, remains to be seen.

The struggles of the AbM are predicated on the immediate conditions of both their local

situation and their existence in the margins of the global economic order. The AbM has no

means of production to seize except their very bodies, and no weapons of struggle except their

capacity for disciplined, mass, coordinated action. Their politics is radical egalitarianism at

work. And yet, the direct democracy advanced by the AbM is by no means an alternative to the

State, which continues to lie at the horizon of all their activity: their primary project is still to

prevent eviction and gain basic services to their settlements from the city government. If the

AbM provides us with at least one example of radical egalitarian political ruptre, then the crucial

question is what kind of police order should result if the demands of the AbM were met. Is the

lxxvii Kennedy Road and the Councillor. dir. Aoibheann O'Sullivan, 2005. http://www.archive.org/details/AoibheannOSullivan_0, 9April 2008.

lxxviii “Abahlali baseMjondolo”. http://abahlali.org, 9 April 2008.

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extremely localist, direct democracy of the street committees of 1984-86 and the self-

organization of the shantytowns usable model for a more egalitarian order, a kind of soviet for

the age of immaterial production? Probably not; they are transitional, ruptural forms of

organization that by necessity leave untouched the much larger questions of what is to be done

once a new order is established. What remains to be thought is how the liberatory effects of the

politics proper can be extended beyond the initial rupture. If politics and genuine democracy is

precisely not a permanent order of being-together, but the instance where police orders are

disrupted, then how can we ensure that politics will bring about a more just and egalitarian order

once its sequence of confrontation has been eclipsed and victory achieved? It is here—what

comes after the rupture of politics—that Rancière’s thought on politics comes to a stop.