Jacques Rancière in parliament: practising democracy in plenary debates

SUMMARY

Current democratic theories tend to disregard parliamentarism in defining democracy, focusing instead on extra-parliamentary activities. However, parliamentary studies in recent decades have inter alia rediscovered parliamentarism as a culture of debate, emphasizing the importance of rhetoric in parliamentary politics and scrutinizing the emergence of a specific parliamentary culture within democracy. When analysing plenary debates, this institutional context is important; however, parliamentary procedures do not guarantee the democratic character of plenary debates. Starting from the conceptual difference between parliamentary and democratic practice, this article poses the question of whether plenary debate in parliament holds the potential to serve as a mechanism for the practice of democracy according to definitions of democracy in theories of radical democracy. This article suggests a radical democratic perspective on plenary debates, applying Jacques Rancière's conception of democracy as an analytical tool.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• parliamentarism
• Jacques Rancière
• plenary debates

Acknowledgement

This article is based on research conducted in the project ‘Antisemitism as a Political Strategy and the Development of Democracy’, funded by the FWF, the Austrian Science Fund. I thank Kari Palonen for his detailed reading of this article and Brigitte Bargetz, Georg Spitaler and my colleagues in the project, Eva Kreisky, Karin Bischof and Nicolas Bechter, for fruitful discussions.

ORCID

Marion Löffler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8876-2584

Notes

1 J.M. Rosales, ‘On the Irrelevant Place of Parliamentarism in Democratic Theory: Antecedents’, in K. Palonen and J.M. Rosales (eds), The Politics of Dissensus: Parliament in Debate (Santander, 2014), pp. 23–50, p. 23. Neither empirical nor normative theories of democracy devote significant attention to the parliamentary plenum, even if they examine representative democracies.

2 T. Murphy, ‘Deliberative Democracy and the Public Sphere: Answers or Anachronisms?’ In B. Fontana, C.J. Nederman and G. Remer (eds), Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (University Park, 2004), pp. 213–37, p. 214.

3 A. Bächtiger, ‘Debate and Deliberation in Parliament’, in S. Martin, T. Saalfeld and K.W. Strøm (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies (Oxford, 2014), pp. 145–66.

4 K. Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2003); K. Palonen, ‘Parliamentarism: A Politics of Temporal and Rhetorical Distances’, Ästhetik des Politischen, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 15, (2004), pp. 111–25; K. Palonen, From Oratory to Debate: Parliamentarisation of Deliberative Rhetoric in Westminster (Baden-Baden, 2016); K. Palonen, A Political Style of Thinking: Essays on Max Weber (Colchester, 2017).

5 ‘The term “unparliamentary” refers to violations of the tacit practices and conventions.’ See Palonen, Oratory, p. 21.

6 This may lead to different models of parliament. See Palonen, ‘A Comparison between Three Types of Parliamentary Politics: Representation, Legislation and Deliberation’, in this special issue.

7 Colin Crouch, for instance, complains about the changing language in parliament, emphasizing ‘we have become accustomed to hear politicians, not speaking like normal people, but presenting glib and finely honed statements, which have a character of their own. We call these “sound bites”  … . [T]his form of communication resembles neither the ordinary speech of the person on the street, nor the language of true political discussion.’ C. Crouch, Post-democracy (Cambridge, 2004), p. 89.

8 According to Aristotle, there are three rhetorical genres. Forensic or judicial rhetoric is concerned with past events, epideictic or demonstrative rhetoric is concerned with the present, and finally deliberative rhetoric is concerned with future events. Deliberation, therefore, is the genre typically applied in politics. See, for example, J. Richards, Rhetoric (London, 2008), p. 182; C. Ottmers, Rhetorik (Stuttgart, 2007), p. 24.

9 See, for example, A. Bächtiger and D. Hangartner, ‘When Deliberative Theory Meets Empirical Political Science: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Political Deliberation’, Political Studies 58, (2010), pp. 609–29.

10 Bächtiger, ‘Debate’, p. 145.

11 Palonen, Oratory, pp. 152–3.

12 K. Palonen, ‘Parliamentarism Challenged’, in S. Soininen and T. Vaarakallio (eds), Challenges to Parliamentary Politics: Rhetoric, Representation and Reform (Baden-Baden, 2015), pp. 17–35, p. 25.

13 Marco Steenbergen and his team, for instance, applied a concept of deliberation following Jürgen Habermas in order to measure the deliberative performance of legislature and concluded that most plenary debates were undemocratic. M.R. Steenbergen, A. Bächtiger, M. Spörndli and J. Steiner, ‘Measuring Political Deliberation: A Discourse Quality Index’, Comparative European Politics 1, (2003), pp. 21–48.

14 Palonen, Oratory, pp. 233–41. Invention and disposition relate to Palonen's concepts of parliamentary politics of time and politics of procedure. See Palonen, ‘Parliamentarism’; K. Palonen, The Politics of Limited Times: The Rhetoric of Temporal Judgment in Parliamentary Democracies (Baden-Baden, 2008).

15 A deliberative approach according to Habermas excludes all rhetorical strategies that do not support rational argumentation and consensus. Similarly, a parliamentary culture includes rules that might prohibit some rhetorical moves.

16 J. Rancière and D. Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 30, (2000), pp. 113–26, p. 113; N. Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-thinking Emancipation (London, 2007), p. 85.

17 J. Rancière, Die Wörter der Geschichte: Versuch einer Poetik des Wissens. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuausgabe von Jacques Rancière (Berlin, 2015), pp. 7–14. He refers to the French Revolution and the revolutionaries’ vocabulary, which facilitated historical transformation.

18 Palonen, Skinner, pp. 134–45.

19 Foucault discussed early modern state administration along the work of the German so-called Polizey-Wissenschaft. Rancière, in contrast, applies the term ‘police’ instead of a standard notion of politics in order to contrast and highlight his concept of politics as democracy.

20 J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1999), p. viii.

21 In a comprehensive sense, logos denotes word, speech, narrative, reason, intellectual capacity, foundation, meaning and so on. See A. Hetzel, Die Wirksamkeit der Rede. Zur Aktualität klassischer Rhetorik für die moderne Sprachphilosophie (Bielefeld, 2011), p. 74.

22 Hetzel, Wirksamkeit, p. 88. The Greek letters Hetzel applies were transferred into Latin spelling.

23 Hetzel, Wirksamkeit, p. 38. Hetzel relates this idea explicitly to radical democracy according to Chantal Mouffe.

24 Rancière, Disagreement, p. xii.

25 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 21.

26 Hetzel, Wirksamkeit, p. 28.

27 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 24.

28 J. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London, 2006), p. 38.

29 Rancière, Hatred, p. 41.

30 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 64.

31 Aristotle discusses the specific virtues of each group in the polis, the aristoi (nobles), the oligoi (rich) and the demos (people). Each contributes their specific quality to the common good: the aristoi their nobility, the oligoi their richness and the demos their freedom. However, the freedom is no proper quality of the demos, because the others are free as well. In Rancière's interpretation, this reveals a miscount of the parts of the polis. The part of the demos is thus not freedom, but equality, as the demos is equal to all others in terms of freedom.

32 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 72.

33 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 82.

34 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 86.

35 J. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and Translated by Steven Corcoran (London, 2015), p. 50.

36 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 87.

37 In Ten Theses on Politics, Rancière writes: ‘The people  …  is the supplementary part in relation to every count of the parts of the population, making it possible to identify “the count of the uncounted” with the whole of the community.’ Rancière, Dissensus, p. 41.

38 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 89.

39 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 88.

40 Richards, Rhetoric, p. 32.

41 Hetzel, Wirksamkeit, p. 89, fn. 38. His approach requires a ‘rhetorical logos’ – i.e. the notion of logos cannot be reduced to rationality or language as a given set of words and grammar. The rhetorical logos includes all dimensions of the word and constitutes the linguistic environment of subjectivation.

42 Hetzel points to Gorgias and Isokrates, both of whom show that the logos does not come from outside – i.e. the rhetorical subject does not use language as a tool, but constitutes himself or herself within the logos he/she inhabits. Hetzel, Wirksamkeit, p. 123.

43 The political subject (demos) appears with the declaration of a wrong (miscount, injustice) in the order of the police. Political subjectivation, therefore, is the subjectivation of wrong which does not precede its declaration. L. Arsenjuk, ‘On Jacques Rancière’, Eurozine (2007), http://www.eurozine.com/on-jacques-ranciere/.

44 J. Cohen and A. Fung, ‘Radical Democracy’, Swiss Political Science Review 10 (4), (2004), pp. 23–34, p. 23. Cohen and Fung include ‘deliberative democracy’ according to Jürgen Habermas in their schema of radical democracy. In contrast, radical democratic theorists such as Chantal Mouffe frequently criticize Habermas and his ideal of consensus.

45 Rancière, Hatred, p. 45.

46 Rancière, Hatred, p. 47.

47 Carol Pateman illustrates the change in legitimizing political power as patriarchy. She refers to the dispute over paternal rule as a blueprint for the political power of monarchs between Sir Robert Filmer, who argued in favour of patriarchy, and John Locke, who claimed that the father and the mother exercise ‘natural’ rule in the family. Consequently, paternal rule was actually parental rule, which could not serve as a model for political rule. Pateman shows that this move delegitimizes patriarchal rule and at the same time institutes masculine rule. C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1989), p. 21. Therefore, contractualists exchanged the kind of arkhê, but they did not eliminate the police logic.

48 They illustrate equality in a state of nature. Rancière, Hatred, p. 47.

49 Rancière, Hatred, p. 48.

50 Equality is not a mere hypothetical assumption, but the equality of capabilities to occupy the positions of governors and of the governed. See Rancière, Hatred, p. 49. In his book Le Maitre ignorant Rancière defines equality as the equal participation in the logos. See J. Rancière, Der unwissende Lehrmeister: fünf Lektionen über die intellektuelle Emanzipation (Vienna, 2007).

51 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 2.

52 Hewlett, Emancipation, p. 97.

53 This critique also applies to Habermas’ theory of communicative action and on deliberative democracy. See Hewlett, Emancipation, p. 97.

54 Rancière, Hatred, p. 51. Although Rancière criticizes ‘representative democracy’, he does not advocate direct democracy as an alternative.

55 Rancière, Hatred, p. 42. Rancière tries to prove that political rule is normally the rule of those who are rich in a society. In this vein, he makes clear that Aristotle splits up the group of those in command into two distinct groups – the nobles and the rich – although actually these are the same people. Finally, the basis of politics is the struggle between the poor and the rich, though not as a social reality, but as the ‘institution of the part that has no part’ (i.e. the poor). See Rancière, Disagreement, p. 11.

56 Rancière, Hatred, p. 53.

57 It is obvious that Rancière refers to the French constitution, when discussing presentative democracy.

58 M. Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation: Ranciere on Democracy and Representative Government’, Thesis Eleven 122, (2014), pp. 3–17. For the debate on representation see N. Urbinati and M.E. Warren, ‘The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science 11, (2008), pp. 387–412. Michael Saward elaborated on the concept of ‘representative claims’: M. Saward, ‘The Representative Claim’, Contemporary Political Theory 5, (2006), pp. 297–318.

59 Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation’, p. 4.

60 I. Lorey, ‘The 2011 Occupy Movements: Rancière and the Crisis of Democracy’, Theory Culture & Society 31 (7/8), (2014), pp. 43–65.

61 Lorey, ‘Occupy Movements’, p. 48.

62 Interestingly, Lorey deploys the concept of the multitude to criticize the (liberal) idea that the people constitute an entity. However, Rancière rejects the term ‘multitude’ and criticizes this concept for substantializing its egalitarian presupposition. See Rancière, Dissensus, pp. 92–8.

63 Lorey, ‘Occupy Movements’, p. 50.

64 Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 99–100.

65 To speak the name of a political subject does not mean to speak on behalf of it. Consequently, a slogan like ‘we are the people’ differs from the claim ‘in the name of the people’.

66 Rancière, Dissensus, p. 93.

67 Actually, he rejects the notion because it presumes a division, which should be contested.

68 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 31.

69 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 29. Appearance equates with being recognized, being a name in the symbolic order of citizens, or – in a discourse theoretical view – participating in the hegemonic discourse.

70 Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation’, p. 6.

71 Lievens, ‘Contesting Representation’, p. 8.

72 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 97.

73 Rancière, Hatred, p. 3; pp. 71–2.

74 O. Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge, 2010), p. 83.

75 Rancière, Disagreement, p. 38.

76 Davis, Rancière, p. 83.

77 J. Rancière, Die Methode der Gleichheit: Gespräch mit Laurent Jeanpierre und Dork Zabunyan. Aus dem Französischen von Richard Steurer-Boulard (Vienna, 2012), p. 109.

78 J. Rancière, Die Nacht der Proletarier. Archive des Arbeitertraums. Aus dem Französischen von Brita Pohl (Vienna, 2005), p. 172.

79 Rancière, Methode der Gleichheit, p. 172.

80 Davis, Rancière, p. 86. In his illustration of the police, Rancière reverses Althusser's example of ideological interpellation by a police officer.

81 Rancière, Disagreement, p. X.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research conducted in the project ‘Antisemitism as a Political Strategy and the Development of Democracy’, funded by the FWF, the Austrian Science Fund [grant number P26365-G22].

Notes on contributors

Marion Löffler

Marion Löffler, Dr. Mag., is researcher and lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Her research focus is on contemporary political theories, democracy and parliamentarism, political gender studies and the contribution of fictional literature to political theorizing. Recent publications include: ‘Restitution: Wiedergutmachung übersetzt in die Sprachen der Alliierten. Antisemitische Konnotationen einer Begriffsdebatte’, in Katharina Prager and Wolfgang Straub (eds), Bilderbuch-Heimkehr? Remigration im Kontext (Wuppertal, 2017), pp. 203–16; ‘Transformationen männlicher Herrschaft. Symbolische Gewalt, Geschlecht und Staatlichkeit bei Pierre Bourdieu’, in Michael Hirsch and Rüdiger Voigt (eds), Symbolische Gewalt. Politik, Macht und Staat bei Pierre Bourdieu (Baden-Baden, 2017), pp. 145–66.