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maintain and justify some social order, with a specific configuration of power and specific
distribution of goods.
26
Conversely “politics,” as Ranciere understands it, is not only separate from but, by
definition, in opposition to the police: politics is “an extremely determined activity antagonistic
to policing” (Ranciere 1999, 29). Politics is defined as an opposition to or “the
rupture of the
‘normal’ distribution of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it”
(Ranciere 2001, 3). Put starkly, politics does not refer to the power to rule, but rather
interruptions of and interventions upon that power. “Politics exists when the natural order of
domination is interrupted by the institution of the part of those who have no part” (Ranciere
1999, 11). The actors in politics are, therefore, the “part of those who have no part” – that is,
those persons that exist within the
boundaries of the community, but who are not recognized as
being capable of participating in ruling that community. The “part of those who have no part”
includes anyone who is an essential part of an institution without being seen as having a voice
within that institution: slaves in the ancient Athens, ‘illegal’ immigrants in America, workers in a
capitalist firm, queer youth in conservative churches, young black
men in the Parisian suburbs,
ordinary people within international climate change policy. In short, politics occurs when the
excluded, marginalized and dominated interrupt the police order through self-authorized
collective action. In Ranciere’s (
ibid.
16-17) words:
Politics occurs because, or when, the natural order of the shepherd king, the
warlords, or property owners is interrupted by a freedom that crops up and makes
26
It is worth noting that Ranciere does not necessarily see the police order as a bad to be overthrown (that is, as
something that can or should be entirely replaced by politics) or as a topic that is unworthy of theoretical
engagement. “There is a worse and a better police…The police can procure all sorts of goods, and one kind of
police may be infinitely preferable to another. This does not change the nature of the police…Whether the police is
sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics” (Ranciere 1999, 31).
While politics and policing
are opposites, Ranciere suggests that “politics” actually requires the “police”: “Politics occurs when there is a place
and a way for two heterogeneous processes to meet. The first is the police process…The second is the process of
equality” (
ibid
. 30). And, further, “if politics implements a logic entirely heterogeneous to that of the police, it is
always bound up with the latter. The reason is simple: politics has not objects or issues of its own” (
ibid
. 31).
132
real the ultimate equality on which any social order rest…Politics only occurs
when these mechanisms [“the exercise of majesty, the curacy of divinity, the
command of armies, and the management of interests”] are stopped in their tracks
by the effect of a presupposition [of equality] that is totally foreign to them yet
without which none of them could function…
The activation of society’s “ultimate
equality,” is thus similar to the activation of
disruptive/interdependent power: both are always present in society, but are only occasionally
activated, and it is only when they are activated that democratic politics occurs.
It now remains to be shown how these disruptive actions are not entirely reducible to
communicative acts and, as such, why they should push theorists and activists alike to reorient
our view of democracy toward power, rather than just communication. On this point, Ranciere is
less clear than Piven.
On the one hand, he argues that politics involves “whatever breaks with
the tangible configuration” of the social order, a break that “is manifest in a series of actions that
reconfigure space. Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or
changes a place’s destination” (
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