Rancière and the poetics of the social sciences

Abstract

This article reviews the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work for methodological debates in the social sciences, and education specifically. It explores the implications of constructing research as an aesthetic, rather than primarily a methodological, endeavour. What is at stake in this distinction is the means by which research intervenes in social order and how it assumes political significance, with Rancière arguing against a notion of science as the other of ideology. Rancière’s argument for a democratic research practice organized around a ‘method of equality’ is situated in relation to openly ideological feminist ethnography. The implications of Rancière’s work for investigating affect in academic discourse and subjectification in education are reviewed in the conclusion.

Keywords:

• Jacques Rancière
• research methods
• aesthetics
• feminist methodology
• subjectivity
• democratic education
• affect

Notes

1. I am very grateful to researchers who have helped me, through discussions, draft papers and e‐mail exchanges, experiment with Rancière’s ideas, including Gert Biesta, Yves Citton, Peter Hallward, Valerie Hey, Claudia Lapping, Martin Oliver, Nick Peim, Paul Stirner and Michael Young.

2. What is at stake here is the performativity of scientific accounts, and how they may enact mastery over ‘dominated’ subjects even whilst criticizing domination. The concept of performativity develops the argument that power and authority work in part through discourse, by bringing a situation into being. If an account divides people into the ‘dominated’ and the ‘dominating’, it could be said to enact performatively a social categorization by which the ‘dominated’ can do nothing else except be dominated. This account could consequently be said to re‐inscribe hierarchy, and to assume a position of mastery over ‘the dominated’. The idea that research accounts are performative thus points to the power of accounts to materialize – to bring into being – what they represent, and thus to re‐inscribe hierarchy and domination, or to question their basis by pointing to the lack of foundation for domination.

3. In this respect, Rancière’s work can be aligned with work focusing on the ‘decentred’ subject, following in the wake of the work of Foucault on the construction of the subject and the influence of the ‘linguistic turn’ in Lacan and Derrida – see Hall (1992) for an overview of this move towards a decentred vision of the subject. One of the characteristics of Lacanian‐influenced work is the emphasis on a supplement generated from the discursive constitution of the subject: an unsignified/unnameable remnant which cannot be included within an identity category, but which secures the boundaries of that category. This is where Rancière’s work is resonant of Lacanian work, because both point to a dislocation between a body and its symbolization within a discursive regime, a dislocation brought about by a supplement which remains unaccounted for (which remains unsymbolized). This is why Rancière’s work is also resonant of feminist theory which emphasizes that the conflation of ‘gender’ with male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomies posits gay and lesbian bodies as ‘supplementary’ – in excess of, and not accounted for within feminist politics (Butler 2004). Butler has also pointed to the dislocation between a body, a system of symbolization, and a performative claim to subjectivity.

4. One way of interpreting this difference is in relation to Rancière’s own research history. He started off writing alongside Althusser on the development of a Marxist ‘science’, contributing a chapter to Lire le Capital (Reading Capital) in 1965. After rejecting the Althusserian distinction between science and ideology, he co‐wrote La Parole Ouvrière (which translates as ‘Workers’ speech’) in 1976, in an endeavour to find the ‘authentic’ voice of a pre‐Marxist workers’ movement. His subsequent writings can be construed as a rejection of his own earlier work, and the traditions to which they belonged.

5. See Pelletier (2009) for a fuller account of Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu. Rancière develops his critique most fully in the penultimate chapter of The philosopher and his poor (2007a).

6. Rancière argues that a research account effects ‘a division of the sensible’, by which he means the system of distribution according to which ‘the common’ – a term which in English covers a range of concepts including the common good, the public realm, the community, the universal – is divided into particular parts (the private, the domain of exclusive expert knowledge): ‘I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self‐evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determine the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution’ (2004, 12). Valorizing the attitude of workers who challenge a certain idea of ‘popular culture’ is an endeavour to ‘re‐distribute the sensible’, by demonstrating that workers do not have ‘their own’ culture. The claim that workers have their own particular culture is a move, Rancière argues, of excluding them from the realm of the common – i.e. exclusion by homage. Rancière’s argument here is not that there is a substantive thing called ‘common culture’, but that the partitioning off of ‘popular culture’ to which are assigned particular bodies implies either that there is another realm of culture which is precisely not associated with particular bodies (universal culture – we might refer to this as the Leavisite argument), or that is there is no realm of common/equal culture (Bourdieu’s argument). Rancière’s theoretical enterprise is an endeavour to avoid these two alternatives. Butler’s representation of drag practices could be viewed in a similar way. In her work, drag makes apparent that there is no authentic, ontologically indexed way of being gendered; and that there is no distinct ‘queer culture’, defined in terms of a ‘particular’ (unique to queer bodies) set of practices. This is because she figures drag as imitative, as performative.

7. Hey draws on Butler’s concept of ‘passionate attachment’, as developed in the latter’s examination of theories of subjection (Butler 1997b).

8. In particular, Rancière distinguishes his notion of mésentente from Lyotard’s concept of differend.

9. Zizek (1989) develops a similar argument in Chapter 1 of The sublime object of ideology, in which he explores the argument, put forward by Lacan, that Marx developed the idea of the symptom in Freud’s work: what Marx showed is that aberrations in the capitalist system (depressions, market crashes, and so on) were not just epiphenomena to be rectified, but the key to understanding the functioning of the whole system. In other words, what were previously ‘insignificant’ processes were transformed into knowledge of capitalism. Freud then used the same procedure with respect to dreams and slips of the tongue – also previously seen as epiphenomena – to generate knowledge of human psychology.

10. For a recent, wide‐ranging examination of the implications of performativity for social science research methodology, see Law (2004).