"Hieroglyphs of the Future:

Jacques Rancière and the Aesthetics of Equality"

Brian Holmes

"We're not surplus, we're a plus." The slogan appeared at the demonstrations
of the French jobless movement in the mid-nineties, in journals, on banners,
on tracts printed by the political art group Ne pas plier. It knitted the
critical force and the subjective claims of the movement into a single phrase.
To be "surplus" (laid off, redundant) was to be reduced to silence in a
society that effectively subtracted the jobless from the public accounts, that
made them into a kind of residue -– invisible, inconceivable except as a
statistic under a negative sign. Excluded, in short: cut out of a system based
on the status of the salaried employee. Until they finally came together to
turn the tables, reverse the signs, and claim a new name on a stage they had
created, by occupying unemployment offices in a nation-wide protest during the
winter of 1997-98. The people with nothing erupted onto the public
scene. "We're a plus," they said, intruding through the TV cameras into the
country's living rooms. Which also meant, "We'll drink champagne on Christmas
eve."

One way to grasp the aesthetic language of the French social movements in the
nineties -– and of the transnational movements now emerging -– is to read
Jacques Rancière's work on equality.In La Mésentente (The Disagreement,
1995), he confronted the philosophy of government with the scandal of the
political.(1) Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers,
manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the
police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of
value, apportions out the shares in society. The political is an opposite
process, and it's rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the
calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been
given ("we're not surplus"), to claim both a share in society and another
name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality
("we're a plus"). Because the equality of one speaking being with any other –-
the fundamental presupposition of democracy –- does not exist in the abstract.
It only becomes universal each time it's proven, in a new language and on a
newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have
the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it's a claim
whose naked truth does not suffice, it has to be put to the test, publicly
verified. Which is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration:
a logical proof, against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a
crowd, against the fixed frames of an institution.

Rancière's description was in synch with its time. It anticipated the general
strike of French state workers in December 1995, massively supported by the
public, and it accompanied the later revolts of the homeless, the jobless, the
paperless -– the "mouvement des sans" -– who rose up to demand a new division
and sharing of the social whole, beyond the accounting systems of the
industrial state. But it also offered a key that could reopen the airlocks
between the aesthetic and the political.

In an essay written just after La Mésentente, Rancière explained that the
political always involves a disidentification with some aspect of the existing
community -– for example, with the police state that expels the jobless or the
paperless. At the same time, it requires an impossible identification
with "the cause of the other."(2) This impossible identification suggests a
new, subjective figure of political commitment. Its paradigm in France is the
identification of an entire generation on the left with the Algerian
demonstrators thrown brutally into the Seine by the police in 1961. To
identify with the murdered Algerians was not to speak for them -– an absurd
idea, while their fellows were completing a revolution in Algeria -– but to
live on in their place, in opposition to a national institution that excluded
certain citizens (those of the former colonies) and included others (those of
the metropole). That impossible identification would return in the
transnational, transhistorical assertion of the students in May '68, "We are
all German Jews." And then again in the specific legal and political context
of the late nineties, with the public act, often performed in theaters, of
parrainage or "god-parenting," which meant taking a quasi-familial, quasi-
legal responsibility for an undocumented individual.

This theatrical fiction, like the poetics of the '68 slogan, points to the
specifically artistic aspect of political engagement, sketched out in a few
pages of La Mésentente. Rancière begins by opposing Habermas's view that the
surprise of aesthetic experience, the opening to the world effected by
metaphor, must be distinguished from the norms of communicative action. He
claims instead that the uncertain reality of art, the shift or transport of
meaning that defines metaphor, is an inherent part of every political dispute,
where the argument itself bears first of all on the legitimacy or even the
reality of one of the fundamental elements that configure the disagreement
(its place, its object, its subjects). The place-changing action of metaphor –-
one thing or person for another –- is what allows the creation or extension of
a community of speaking subjects; and this potential extension of a community
is needed for any argument about equality. This is why the modern forms of
political group-formation, or subjectivization, are historically linked to the
emergence of an autonomous aesthetic dimension split from any practical
manipulation of usable objects: an unpredictable, infinitely extensible realm
defining "a world of virtual community -– a demand for community –- superimposed
upon the world of orders and parts that lends everything its use."(3)

Metaphors are the hieroglyphs of an unknown language, the demand for an
unheard-of community. When the group Ne pas plier, in collaboration with the
jobless association l'APEIS (l'Association pour l'emploi, l'information et la
solidarité), raised Marc Pataut's anonymous portraits above the crowd in 1994 –-
singular faces above a sea of demonstrating humanity -– the question was not
whether these meter-high photographs, carried on a wooden picket, really
represented identifiable jobless people. The question was whether a social
issue could be extended beyond individual cases, to call for a general
reconfiguration of society; whether each anonymous face was potentially the
face of the unemployed peuple reclaiming its right to speak; and whether the
gesticulating debates on Republic Square could compare to the ones in the
National Assembly. A visual uncertainty, a metaphoric possibility of "one-for-
another," intertwined with a political argument bearing on proper or improper
names, on the proper or improper division and sharing of resources, of roles,
of sensuous reality. In lieu of an answer, the question itself gestured toward
a possible future that could only be opened up, among the existing divisions
of the world, by an argumentative logic knit together with an artistic
metaphor.

A Change of Regime

Rancière's thinking of the political was formulated in the early 1990s, during
the long French slide into recession and racism, when the status of salaried
labor was falling into tatters along with welfare-state guarantees, when
immigrants were being outlawed in the name of union jobs and the unemployed
were being proclaimed the impossible political subject. Yet the threat of the
flexible, transnational, networked regime -– the so-called "economic horror" –-
sparked original forms of protest and debate. A breach was reopened, marked in
political economy by the work of André Gorz, Misère du présent, richesses du
possible (Poverty of the Present, Wealth of the Possible), which turned the
questions of flexible work and unemployment back on an entire system, to
explore the reasons for maintaining a politics of scarcity in a society of
automated production.

That breach seems to have closed today. La Mésentente had already shown how
certain forms of political consensus act to freeze social identities,
eliminating the disruptive claims of equality. There is the welfare-state
conception of society as an interplay of "partners" (unions, businesses,
public services); the neoliberal idea that society does not exist, only
desiring, enterprising individuals; the multicultural vision of separate,
Balkanized communities, each bound by their own beliefs. All exclude the
political conflict formerly brought by the subject called "proletariat" –- the
most recent name of the antique demos or the revolutionary peuple. After
integrating much of the National Front's racism, the French socialist party
has now found an original mix of the first two forms of consensus: they
intensify the neoliberal program of flexible transnational labor relations, in
hopes of returning to the salaried employment on which the postwar social
contract of the nation-state was based! As though the challenges raised by
the "mouvement des sans" never even existed.

But what is happening now, far beyond France, is that similar movements are
expanding, proliferating, in an attempt to meet their adversaries on another
stage: the stage set by the transnational corporations. This proliferation
involves an identification with the cause of an impossibly distant other,
Mayan peasant, Brazilian autoworker, Nigerian tribesman, Indian farmer… What
are the metaphors that can speak on a world stage? To explore the role of art
in these movements, I think we had better start with something much closer to
home: the language machine that knits the transnational system together, and
the kind of labor that is done with it.

The Internet has widely (and rightly) been seen on the left as providing the
infrastructure for what is called "digital capitalism."(4) But what the
leftist commentators forget -– one wonders why? -– is that the simplest net
application of them all, email, has offered an extraordinary chance to what
Rancière calls "the literary animal." As large parts of the former working
classes gained education, refused industrial discipline, and split away from
their former position in the social hierarchy, they became "immaterial
laborers" facing the new predicament of flexibilized conditions(5) –- but they
also found themselves in possession of a new writing tool. And as they taught
themselves to use it and invented more applications every day, what did they
claim, against all prevailing logic? That here, everyone is equal. The virtual
realities of the 1990s saw the return of a utopia whose emergence Rancière has
chronicled in his accounts of the self-education of the artisan classes in the
early nineteenth century: "Thus one can dream of a society of emancipated
individuals that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate
the divide between those who know and those who do not know, between those who
possess or who do not possess the property of intelligence. It would recognize
only active minds: humans who act, who speak of their actions and thereby
transform all their works into ways of signaling the humanity within
themselves and everyone."(6)

That dream was bound to run up against what Rancière has called "the society
of disdain." In the late twentieth century it took the usual form of the
expropriation of a popular language, and its replacement by manipulated
simulacra. Yet even as the dominance of the Internet by the commercial and
financial spheres became clear, even as the figure of the shareholder emerged
as the only one with a right to participate politically in the new economy,
political activism took a new twist, and disruptions began appearing in the
fabric of corporate and governmental speech.

Since 1993, the anonymously run ®TMark group has been launching parodies into
the ideological mix: consultancy and funding for consumer-product sabotage,
following the actions of the infamous Barbie Liberation Organization; direct
email campaigns promoting subversion, like the Call-in Sick Day to celebrate
the non-holiday (in Anglo-Saxon lands) of May 1st; pseudo-official sites like
gwbush.com, voteauction.com, or gatt.org.(7) Masquerading beneath a corporate-
bureaucratic veneer –- lackluster logos, deadpan graphics, pompous speech -– the
®TMark websites start off believable, waver in midflight, then tailspin into
scandalous denunciation by an excess of liberal truth. Another movement, Kein
Mensch ist Illegal, more recently took up the same kind of strategy with its
Deportation-Class campaign: websites, a poster contest, information kits,
super-activist mileage programs… all opportunities for Lufthansa's
stockholders to find out just how much it could cost them to go on deporting
illegal immigrants for the police. Then, in a parody of the "Oneworld" airline
alliance, the Deportation-Alliance emerged, with collaboration from ®TMark and
many others. Meanwhile, a group of slow-thinking Austrian lawyers stumbled on
the gatt.org site and wanted Mike Moore of the WTO to come pep up their
meeting in Salzburg. "Mike Moore" declined, but sent two substitutes -– later
revealed to be the "Yes Men" -– who stood before the unwitting lawyers to
explain a vast but rather shocking program for the extension of free trade…
The whole incident was documented on video ("tactical embarrassment," as the
activist Jordi Claramonte likes to say).

Through mimicry and imagination, groups like ®TMark create a short-circuit
between the anonymous, abstract equality of immaterial labor and the
subjective exceptionalism of art. "The mimic gives the 'private' principle of
work a public stage. He constitutes a common stage with what ought to
determine the confinement of each to his place," writes Rancière in Le partage
du sensible. But this "common stage" is a scene, not of stifling unity, but of
dissensus: the mimic transmits "blocks of speech circulating without a
legitimate father," literary and political statements that "grab hold of
bodies and divert them from their destination," that "contribute to the
formation of collective speakers who throw into question the distribution of
roles, of territories, of languages –- in short, political subjects who upset
an established sharing and division of the sensible."(8)

®TMark or Deportation-Class are ways for immaterial laborers to claim a voice,
a non-economic share, against the stock-market rules of a shareholder's
society. They are also vectors of a new kind of transnational collaboration or
reciprocity. They offer a way to rejoin the direct action movements, Art and
Revolution, Attac, and hundreds of other organizations –- the newest way into a
much older configuration of the aesthetic and the political, which is also
called democracy.

Because the duplicity of art/work hardly began with Internet. It reaches back
to what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of the arts, which emerged, not
coincidentally, at the end of the Ancien Regime. Aesthetics is the name of an
indistinction, where fact is inseparable from fiction, where the lowest can
become the highest and vice-versa. The aesthetic regime of the arts ruins the
historically prior regime of representation, with its hierarchies, decorum,
and strict separation of genres, but also its Aristotelian distinction between
chaotic, accidental history, and well-constructed, plausible fiction. Working
initially through mimetic or testimonial techniques –- realist literature or
painting, photography or cinema -– the new regime determines the paradoxical
beauty of the anonymous subject, of whoever or whatever: "The ordinary becomes
beautiful as a trace of the true… when it is torn away from the obvious and
made into a mythological or phantasmagorical hieroglyph." (9)

Before and
beyond any "modernist" or "postmodernist" program, the aesthetic regime "makes
art into an autonomous form of life, thus simultaneously positing both the
autonomy of art and its identification with a moment in a process of life's
self-formation."(10) The understanding of activist art begins right here, with
the notion of life's self-formation.

Fictionable Futures

The originality of Rancière's work on the aesthetic regime is to clearly show
how art can be historically effective, directly political. Art achieves this
by means of fictions: arrangements of signs that inhere to reality, yet at the
same time make it legible to the person moving through it -– as though history
were an unfinished film, a documentary fiction, of which we are both cameramen
and actors.

That would be one way to describe an event like the "Carnival against
Capital," staged by the ten thousand actors of Reclaim the Streets in the City
of London on June 18th, 1999. Wearing masks of four different colors, the
crowd wove converging paths through the City, displaying signs, creating
images, knitting its mobile music and language into urban reality –- weaving
another world in order to tangle with the one managed by finance capital (and
to tangle directly with the police). June 18th taught us to read a new story
at the center of finance capitalism. But no privileged viewpoint could wrap up
the film, gather the whole of this "artwork" into a totality and reduce its
contradictions -– because the idea had already crisscrossed not just Britain
but the earth, spreading and dividing like the wildfire of equality. By
tracts, images, Internet, and word of mouth, by collaboration and spontaneous
reinvention, the "disorganization" of Reclaim the Streets and the Peoples'
Global Action network had mapped out a new kind of world, in which collectives
in over 70 different countries could protest against the same abstract
processes of neoliberal capitalism, under vastly different local conditions
but on the same day. Did the "film" of Seattle, Prague and so on begin right
here, with this "artistic" event? But where was "here"? And what did
the "event" really consist of?

If anarchic, artistic demonstrations like June 18th are political, it is
because they involve a disagreement, a direct confrontation with the existing
divisions or shares of sensuous reality. They make visible the "invisible
government" of the international financial institutions (i.e. the new world
police). But if they are aesthetic, it is because they bring a blur of
indistinction to the proper subjects, objects, and places of the debate. They
create another stage for politics: like the protesters in London opening a
fire hydrant to symbolically return a long-buried river to the surface of the
street, to reclaim that stream from the layered abstractions of capital. Or
like the social forces in Porto Alegre displacing the wintry Davos economic
forum to the summer weather of the South, turning the agenda and the very
seasons of capitalist globalization upside down.

It is certain that such confrontations must become more precise, more
reasoned, more explicit, if the new claim to equality is to have any effect on
the existing divisions of the world. The aesthetic "plus" of the
demonstrations must find a way to return to each local environment, to the
specific frameworks that govern the homeless, the paperless, the unemployed.
This is the risky gambit that the far left is now making, on a world scale.
But to be explicit is not to speak the opponent's language (neoclassical
economics) –- which would always be to play an unequal hand in a losing game.
Instead, it is to engage in an unstable mimicry that seeks to prove its claim
to equality on a public stage, while inventing new signs, new pathways through
the world, new political subjectivities.

Notes

1. La Mésentente, (Paris: Galilée, 1995). (Throughout this text I will quote
and summarize ideas by Jacques Rancière; but the contemporary examples of
political and aesthetic practice, and the conclusions drawn from them, are my
responsibility alone -– BH.)

2. "La cause de l'autre," in: Aux bords du politique (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 1998).

3. La Mésentente, p. 88.

4. Cf. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

5. On the refusal of industrial discipline and the emergence of immaterial
labor, see the arguments and references in Michael Hardt and Toni Negri,
Empire, (Harvard University Press, 2000), chapters 3.3 and 3.4.

6. Le maître ignorant (Paris: Fayard, 1987), pp. 120-121.

7. The first two sites were forced to change names and can now be found at
rtmark.com, along with the other ®TMark projects.

8. Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique, (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2000), pp. 68, 63-64.

9. Ibid., p. 52.

10. Ibid., p. 37.