The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2

By Jacques Ranciere

Following the previous volume of essays by Jacques Rancière from the 1970s, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, this second collection focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the “discovery” of totalitarianism by the “new philosophers,” the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso Books
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781844679218

Jacques Ranciere

Jacques Ranci�re is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include The Politics of Aesthetics, On the Shores of Politics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Nights of Labor, Staging the People, and The Emancipated Spectator.

Book preview

THE INTELLECTUAL

AND HIS PEOPLE

STAGING THE PEOPLE, VOLUME 2

Jacques Rancière

Translated by David Fernbach

This work was published with the help of the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du Livre

This edition first published by Verso 2012

© Verso 2012

Compiled from articles originally appearing in Les Révoltes logiques

© Les Révoltes logiques 1975 to 1985

Translation © David Fernbach 2012

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-921-8

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Printed in the US by Maple Vail

Contents

1. The People’s Theatre: A Long Drawn-Out Affair

2. The Cultural Historic Compromise

3. The Philosophers’ Tale: Intellectuals and the Trajectory of Gauchisme

4. Joan of Arc in the Gulag

5. The Inconceivable Revolution

6. Factory Nostalgia (Notes on an Article and Various Books)

7. The Ethics of Sociology

Index

1

The People’s Theatre: A Long Drawn-Out Affair

July 1848. Citizen Eugène Delaporte, a former student at the Conservatoire and musician in the town of Sens, submitted to the members of the National Assembly a project approved by the minister of the interior. He drew their attention to an essential weapon for ‘spreading Holy Fraternity’ and ‘dissipating the shades of fanaticism and ignorance with the help of science’: the development of choral music. As evidence, he cited the story of workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who were canalizing the Marne and had been poorly received by the locals. Brawls had already broken out, when some Paris workers emerged from their ranks and performed in the open air ‘some of those choruses that stir the masses, calm hatreds and lift up populations by reminding them of the common heavenly origin of us all’. Fraternity then reigned on the Marne, and would soon reign throughout the Republic, by means of a unified organization of musical education and choral societies that this Citizen Delaporte was prepared to devote himself to directing.¹

November 1853. The same Delaporte, who had spent the last five years organizing local bands in the departments of Yonne, Aube, Marne and Seine-et-Marne, wrote to His Excellency the minister of the interior to remind him of a great truth: music is ‘the most certain means to achieve the moralizing of the people’. This was not because it raised them to heavenly fraternity, but more modestly because it drew them away from the bars. And over the years, high officials of state and His Majesty himself would be able to witness this: evil haunts and evil doctrines had lost ground, while religion, the family and social order had gained as choral singing expanded – was this not a practical demonstration of the impossibility of achieving anything fine or great without the authority of a leader? A benefit for which the Empire would soon show appreciation, by appointing M. Delaporte to the post of inspector-general of musical societies.

What we can see here, over and above the opportunism of a particular individual, is the singular temporality that enables major socializing initiatives to be always timely. Social harmony through the artistic education of the people reflects the logic of social inventions. These stubbornly follow a dynamic of their own, whether summoned on the royal road of reform or that of governmental revolution, most often conveyed by the countless networks which are generated by the daily demand for new ideas to handle new school populations, distract new populations of workers, give new life to abandoned rural regions, instruct conscripts or moralize prisoners, not to mention creating new markets, ensuring the expansion of the press or giving substance to political alternatives. Everywhere that a connection is needed, the social inventors are at hand, resurging under every regime and acting as a pivot for new political investments – less out of opportunism than from the spontaneous Aristotelianism that helps every particular regime to survive by establishing the most suitable form of sociability for all involved. What government would not welcome the project of improving popular manners by means of art? Everyone can understand heavenly fraternity or earthly docility as they like, and the socializing ideas will follow their course, ready to draw the contours of an objective socialism that is often far removed from the hopes and conflicts of politics. That does not simply mean that all cats are grey in the dark, but rather that roles and significations are distributed at an early stage according to an autonomous logic, forming a finished ensemble of alternative solutions to which the most dominant theoretical and political novelties cannot help bending.

The long drawn-out story of the ‘people’s theatre’ offers a good illustration of this. The idea found a place early on at the centre of positions on Art and the People, positions that were both mutually contradictory and equally available for conservatives and revolutionaries. After half a century of oscillation between the accelerated revolutions of art and the permanent inertia of theatre administrations, by around 1900 this idea had become a complete set of possibilities that the novelty of Marxism had to accept as it was. The Brechtian critiques made much later demonstrated this, denouncing the Théâtre National Populaire under Jean Vilar for its project of having a socially undifferentiated people celebrate their ‘communion’ in one and the same ‘ceremony’, and contrasting this with a theatre that would keep the real people at a critical distance, away from petty-bourgeois consumers.² This diagnosis was both correct and ineffective. In fact, Jean Vilar, just like Copeau, Gémier, Pottecher and a number of others, saw their audience as Michelet’s ‘people’. But there was no other audience for our popular theatre. Its project kept to the minimal proposition of not being a class theatre. The ‘good’ people, the ‘undiluted’ people, were left outside the field where desires for a people’s theatre might dwell. They belonged to a different tradition, one that precisely sought to remove the people from the social mingling and communitarian passions of the theatre. The undiluted people were the support for a certain idea of popular art, ‘art without representation’: that of folk tales, nursery rhymes, pottery and embroidery that were an extension of handicraft life and rural leisure activities. In the places and non-places allocated by the contradictory investments of art for the people, a popular theatre with neither communion nor identification belonged rather to critical thought than to the actual stage.

Taste and temperament: Athens and Épinal

Let us start at the beginning. In other words, with the simple proposal to moralize the people through the spread of art. The constraints of the petitioning style in difficult times may embroider this with soothing images of decreed public festivals or homes regenerated by the sound of the harmonium and reproductions of Raphael. It is just that these images were never enough to mobilize any artist’s desire. Even musicians who were fervent upholders of the established order always refused to accept a bandsman’s wrong notes for the false satisfaction of having pulled him away from the bar. And politicians who were a little enlightened knew that the question was more radical. To moralize meant creating manners. But manners are not created by lessons, rather by identification and imitation, in other words by learning a certain jouissance. And they only take hold of the social body insofar as they are held in common. To moralize the people thus meant providing them with some enjoyment in common with the aristocratic classes. Where moral submission to duty and the political claim for rights were equally powerless to merge or to exclude one another, moralization by way of art had a strong ideal to offer, that of a pleasure that simultaneously elevated the more powerful, subjected those below to discipline, and united both in a single community.

Understood in this way, popular morality has an unchallenged homeland: Athens, and a privileged place: the theatre. The people as legislator, both aesthetic and military, melded into the cult of the collective stage and the enjoyment of the masterpieces of Aeschylus or Sophocles, made available to all – such is the emblematic image of all modern aesthetic education. In every case, the question is ‘to adapt to the conditions of modern popular life the spirit that gave birth to and inspired the theatrical festivals of Greece’.³

We still have to know what precisely this spirit was, and in what place and forms it could render the manners of a society once again harmonious.

One path taken was resolutely urban and educational. The secret of Athenian greatness was that its state entrusted the education of the people to artists; and that is what the modern state had also to do. This was at least the task that the marquis Léon de Laborde set out in Quelques idées sur la direction des arts et le maintien du goût public – an exemplary approach on the part of an equally exemplary character. A social inventor, and himself the son of a social inventor (promoter among other things of mutual instruction and amorous gymnastics), commissioner of the Republic to the Exposition Universelle of 1851, and reporting on this task to the Empire, Laborde sought to show that everything went together. France was faced with the threat of industrial decline, if it let the artistic taste that supported both public civility and national energy fall into confusion:

The French have to live in the good company of great things . . . Just as a well brought-up person only attracts to his salons and his intimate acquaintance his equals in education and good form, so must the state act for the nation. It will surround it with masterworks of art, so that the people are impregnated with these without noticing it, by habit and by imitation of all the elegant tendencies that pass in procession.⁴

To transform the taste of the people, taking it by surprise, was the precept that many a progressive educator would borrow from this dignitary of the Second Empire, along with the vision of the world that organized it: the opposition between high and low that wasalso that of centre and periphery, and a vision that blended the republican mission with the court as model of elegance. A single principle, therefore, for this crusade of good taste: ‘Combat that which rises from below, spread and make general what descends from above.’⁵ The ‘below’ here meant such things as the whining of barrel-organs or the decorations of pâtissiers; above all, it meant the countryside where ‘people grow stupid and coarse’ and the images d’Épinal which depicted lives of the saints and the Stations of the Cross – a museum and library of the countryside, with their uncouth language, crude drawings and glaring colours that ridiculed the great deeds of national history. The ‘above’ meant the state, the city and the court, which would flood France with the productions of good taste: plays entrusted to the best writers, actors, directors and designers who would define the centre of conversation and the canons of fashion with twenty exemplary productions in Paris which would then be exported to the provinces; reproductions of Raphael, Leonardo, Murillo or Gros distributed right down to the most wretched hamlets; calendars drawn by Daumier and Gavarni, engravings by Vernet or Decamps, printed in millions of copies and sold for ten centimes by selected local dealers with a view to stifling the dross of images d’Épinal with their competition; and all objects of daily life, through to playing cards, redesigned according to norms of aesthetics. As Laborde wrote, ‘we stand at the dawn of popular publicity’.⁶ And this publicity had to make the whole people dwell in familiarity with the beautiful, or at least, in constant comparison of the beautiful with the ugly. For this progressive conservative the ugly, ‘an extreme and an asperity’, would be always superior to the mediocre that ‘softened the most lively and determined feelings’.⁷

Publicity was thus to transform a crowd of styleless rurals into a public of taste, living by the generalized regime of distinguished public opinion. Out of this radical educational project, the more empirical retained one point in particular: the development of the decorative arts as substitute for the decline in handicraft values, and as stimulus to industrial quality. The rest of the programme scarcely convinced politicians any more than it did aesthetes. The former were hardly inclined to make such major efforts to arouse in the people ‘the most lively and determined feelings’, while, for the latter, it was the serials of the Petit Journal and the performances of the café-concert that the ‘dawn of popular publicity’ particularly illuminated. And the very penetration of works of a more ‘elevated’ taste into the countryside could only make clear to both parties the destruction of the traditional modes of expression of well-behaved country folk. The elevation of public taste was therefore opposed by a certain idea of the popular temperament. It was a tamed bohemian, Champfleury, who set the tone for this in the same era. In the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, he set out to gather popular songs, imagery and pottery. And in his Histoire de l’imagerie populaire, he targeted connoisseurs who found the gaudy colours of images d’Épinal ‘barbaric’. For him, their horror of coarseness amounted to a defence of the ‘artifices’ of academic routine. The image d’Épinal, on the other hand, displayed the virtue common to both nature and genius, i.e. naivety. ‘Among the savage and the man of genius we may note a boldness, an ignorance and a break with all rules, which make them stand out.’⁸ With the ‘quality’ of Parisian celebrities, this aesthetic was lost:

Today the maker of images d’Épinal has seen the drawings of Gavarni. I leave the reader to conceive what a singular ‘elegance’ his pencils depict . . . M. Gustav Doré’s ‘Wandering Jew’ has penetrated these regions . . . M. Doré takes particular care with the décor; he has Ahasuerus sacrificed to the background of old Brabant houses, storms and cloudbursts, pine forests and crocodiles. These are simply exciting Bengal lights that the set designer turns on during the performance of his drama . . .⁹

The major vice of Doré’s Parisian taste was to bring the peasant reader into the world of representation. This opened the way for enjoyments that were not those of high art, but rather feuilletons and the choruses of the café-concert: the Greece of Offenbach rather than Aeschylus. With the disappearance of naive imagery, a certain popular sentiment, a certain normal regime of popular life, was corrupted:

Popular imagery was engraved for the people and spoke to the people. The punishment of crime, the remembrance of heroic deeds, were traced here in striking colours. This teaching was clear, visible and speedy. The moral lesson was combined with a good temperament. It would be desirable that the people never saw any worse pictures than these.¹⁰

The moral issue arose at two levels: the Prodigal Son or Wandering Jew of these images, like Old Man Poverty in the almanacs, gave the people healthy lessons in resignation. But above all, this imagery established between its producer and its consumer a relationship of circularity and mutual recognition that effected a self-regulation of the popular temperament.

An alternative model was thus defined in which the same principle of naivety brought into communication at a distance popular art and great poetry. This was in some sense a certain ‘spirit of place’ that assured the social foundation of lettered civilization and the principle of its artistic renewal. Between the frank expressiveness of popular art and the ‘strong poetry of the ancients’,¹¹ between these two manifestations of the spirit of nature, the distance travelled by the sap in the social body had to be respected. The principle of corruption lay in compositions that fell between the two.¹²

From Salamis to Domrémy: the theatre of the nation

Two paradigms thus separated out. On the one hand, the education of the public by artistic impregnation; on the other, the poetics of the spirit of place – the light shining down from top to bottom, and the sap rising from bottom to top. The people’s theatre was summoned to define its identity between these two paradigms, prepared to cross their effects and divert their trajectories in order to assure its own circuit, that of a great art that was the education of the people by way of their own legend. It was Michelet who laid down the principle of this in his lectures of 1847–8, in which he taught the students of the Collège de France their duty to ‘feed the people from the people’.¹³ But this relationship of people to people, in which the student takes the place of the travelling salesman, no longer had anything in common with the tepid regime of regulating village passions. The people’s theatre that would carry out this programme would be one in which the people would perform their own grandeur for themselves. And this they could only do if they were a true people, abolishing a class division whose principle did not lie in the distribution of property but precisely in the separation of languages.

Such was the theme of these lectures, which a clairvoyant government suspended after three sessions: the evil that our society suffered lay in the divorce between the educated classes and the people. This divorce went back five centuries, when the clergy opposed their Latin, and the nobles their French, to the diction of the people. Caught between the old and the new, the people no longer had a tongue of their own. Or, what amounted to the same thing, they had a hundred tongues. But not one, at all events, in which to speak to the men of culture. It was this absence of common language that deserved the name of barbarism. It was opposed to the very principle of civic life: the constant movement from ‘instinctive wisdom’ to ‘reflective wisdom’, ‘the mutual initiation