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Introduction: Hearing Voices

Democracy, by definition, is very noisy.

Adam Phillips 1

'What is democracy, if not the equal ability to be democrat, anti

democrat or indiferent to both democracy and anti-democracy?' This

question is posed by Jacques Ranciere in a recent discussion of the

relation between literature and politics. 2 The very 'indiference' that

Ranciere invokes here, an indiference that he sees as characteristic

of writing itself, leads him to propose (ontra Sartre) a definition

of literature: 'literature conceived neither as the art of writing in

general nor as a speciic state of the language, but as a historical

mode of visibility of writing, a specific link between a system of

meaning of words and a system of visibility of things' (PL, 12). 3 This

is such because of a particular characterization of democracy itsel:

'Democracy is more than a social state. It is a specific partition of the

sensible, a specific regime of speaking whose efect is to upset any

steady relationship between manners of speaking, manners of doing

and manners ofbeing' (PL, 14). Literature's democracy is thus opposed

to a hierarchy that installs itself in the system of representation. Such

systems of perception are central to Ranciere's recent work, and

allow us to identiy a line not only through the 'literary' texts (on

Mallarme, on the lesh of words, or on the silent letter) but also

into the more obviously 'political' texts such as Disagreement: 'political

activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible

divisions ofthe police order by implementing a basically heterogenous

assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption

that, at the end ofthe day, itselfdemonstrates the sheer contingency of

the order, the equality ofany speaking being with any other speaking

being'. 4 This collection ofessays will pursue both these aesthetic and

political paths, and the remainder of this introduction will indicate

one or two of the starting points that the contributors to the volume

will take up.

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'Which voice would speak of voice?' This second question poses

itself a little way into an essay which is at the very least a dialogue.

A meditation on the nature of voice itself, the piece calls up at

least two interlocutors, but also brings in a series of quotations on

voice, allowing them to speak, as ifit were ever possible, 'in their own

words'. Returning again and again to the relation ofvoice to language,

the whole is fr amed by a title in a 'dead' language, but one which

carries both a sense of traversal - it is a language that has been, and

through the viral fo rms of etymology remains, a lingua franca- and

an echo of fo undation. The title, 'Vox Clamans in Deserto', is itself

a quotation. Yet, despite the dificulties that would surround any

attempt to attribute this dialogue to an author in a way that would

not itself leave remains and remainders, the text is signed, implicitly

at least, by Jean-Luc Nancy. 5

This question ofvoice, then, is immediately doubled in the dialogue

seemingly staged here. Any dialogue on the nature of voice, it seems

to say, not only must confront voice as its object, but must also

recognize that there is something at stake in speaking of voice at all. 6

It would be hasty to think too obviously of describing this in terms of

a subject-object relation, however. The question is not ' hose voice

would speak of voice?' This is not a way of asking who would be

qualified or entitled to comment. But the temptation to move fr om

voice to subject always appears in such a scene. Nancy's text puts in

play precisely this temptation, intervening in what has come to seem

an over-worked area (which doesn't diminish the power of Nancy's

own text) . This is, fo r exam � le, where Roland Barthes begins his

1968 discussion of authorship. Similarly it is voice, and in particular

the relation between a 'subjective' voice and the impersonal or neutral

voice (of science, philosophy, literature, politics, and so on), that so

fa scinates Blanchot. 8 In both Barthes and Blanchot, of course, what

we ind is an insistent interrogation of the entanglements of speech

and writing, that is, of that problematic which particularly occupied

Derrida. 9 Such figures are cited simply to illustrate something of

the intellectual terrain against which Jacques Ranciere's work on

voice and speech has appeared. lO It is a terrain in which Ranciere's

contribution remains unique, not least because in addition to having

a distinct 'voice' (including certain key terms such as 'the partition

of the sensible', 'the part of those who have no part', and so on) ,

Ranciere has also invested the concepts of voice and speech with a

Hearing Vo ices 3

significance that makes them central to his work on both aesthetics

and politics. Indeed, it is perhaps through these concepts that we may

best begin to understand how, fo r him, aesthetics and politics are

indissociable.

Writing in 2004 fr om within the Anglophone academic world, it

is tempting to see the work ofJacques Ranciere almost as a recent

phenomenon. A series of translations in the last decade - he Names

of History (1994), On the Shores of Politics (1995), Disagreement (1999) ,

Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), Th e Philosopher and

His Poor (2004), The Flesh of Wo rds (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics

(2004) - has given an impression of relative novelty. 11 The history

that this translation suggests is, however, profoundly misleading. 12 The

Philosopher and His Poor, fo r example, was published in French in 1983.

There are also two other books - The Nights of Labor (1989) and he

Ig norant Schoolmaster (1991) - and several substantial articles which

had already reached an English-speaking audience. 1 3 Yet it is only

now that Jacques Ranciere is receiving wide appreciation as one of

the most significant of 'French' thinkers.

This situation could very easily have been diferent. Lire Ie Capital,

the influential work always associated with the names of Louis

Althusser and Etienne Balibar, was translated in 1970. 1 4 Its publi

cation helped to cement the reputations of these two thinkers in the

Anglophone context, but to describe Reading Capital as a translation

is more than usually problematic. In terms of its content it is, in fa ct,

more accurately described as the translation of a translation, in this

case the Italian volume. The French edition of 1965 included texts by

not two contributors but five. Alongside essays by Pierre Macherey

and Roger Establet, Lire Ie Capital also contained a piece, running to

over one hundred pages, by Jacques Ranciere. 1 5 In 1989, it inally

appeared in English as 'The Concept of"Critique" and the "Criti � ue

ofPolitical Economy" (from the Manuscripts of 1844 to Capita0'. 1

Perhaps it is fitting that Ranciere's work was not aligned too

closely with Althusser's at this point. Within a fe w years of the

appearance of Lire Ie Capital, Ranciere was to be critical both of his

own contribution to that volume, and of Althusser and his fo llowers

in La Lefon d'Althusser (1974) . 1 7 While much has been more or less

convincingly attributed to the experience ofMay '68, in this instance

it seems entirely reasonable to note a clear response to les evenements.

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Ranciere has himself noted the influence of these events on his own

intellectual trajectory and on that of many of his contemporaries. 1 8

In turning fr om political theory to the investigation of the writings

of workers themselves, Ranciere was able to engage in an analysis of

the concept of the worker that went fa r beyond ideology critique. In

The Nghts f Labor, The Philosopher and His Poor and associated editing

projects, Ranciere combined an acknowledgement of the extent to

which the worker and the poor are subjects of language (that is,

are subjected to linguistic definition, description and delimitation)

with an equally pressing sense of the roles that such people might

play as participants in language. 19 Indeed, it was the tension between

these two relationships to language that led Ranciere to rethink the

categories of 'poor' or 'worker' as identities or (self-) identifications.

I will say more about this in a moment.

What emerged fr om this period (the late '70s to the mid-'80s) ,

was what we may now see as a gesture characteristic of Ranciere's

intellectual trajectory. Ranciere's participation in the Althusserian

project led him to the essay in Lire ie Capital. But it was precisely

this work which also led him to move beyond it, in order to

examine more profoundly the very concepts (the worker, the poor,

the people, politics) in the names of which such work was carried

fo rward. Equally, it was the examination of such concepts that both

guided and led to the transformation of this second phase. The

recognition that it is the participation of the worker in the processes

of his linguistic and conceptual determination that renders the very

notion of the 'the worker' untenable seems to increase Ranciere's

distrust of the authoritative, philosophical voice itself Rather than

retreating into another discipline, Ranciere demonstrates that even a

sociologist as apparently opposed to philosophy as Pierre Bourdieu,

or the historians ofthe Annaies group, tend to repeat the fo undational

exclusions to which philosophy has itself repeatedly been prone. 2 0

His work remains extremely dificult to place, however, in terms of

disciplinary determinations. As Davide Panagia notes in an interview,

his work is at once philosophical and literary, historical and political,

but the attempt to ask what kind of thinker Ranciere might best be

described as is itselfmisleading in terms ofidentiying his project. 2 1 As

Ranciere himself explains in responding to Panagia's question, there is

no easy movement fr om the apparently abstract realm ofphilosophical

speculation into the supposedly more concrete arena of the historical

archive. Or at least, it is necessary to be clear about what such a

movement would and would not make possible:

Hearing Voices 5

In the early stages of my work there was, without a doubt, a desire on my part to

retun to some historical 'real' in order to overcome a 'metaphysics of history'.

Specifically, I began by searching in the archives for examples from the writings

of workers so as to respond to the Marxist discourse on history, on the workers'

movement, etc. But I quickly realized that such a return to the 'real' did not,

in and of itself, change the theoretical terms of the game. It was entirely useless

to discover a mode of speaking proper to workers [une parole ouvriere] that the

Marxist enterprise had overlooked. What is necessary is to liberate such a word

from the dictates of historicism itself since it is indubitably the case that historicism

is as much a discourse of propriety -of keeping things 'in their place' -as any

other. (DW, 121)

A refusal to observe the 'place' allocated to people and things (or at

least, to particular people and things, such as the worker or the voice

of the crowd) , is central to Ranciere's project. It is this process of

allocation that is the product ofa particular regime ofrepresentation,

or distribution ofthe sensible.

The strategic anachronism that is proposed as a methodology is

all about denying the time-boundedness of certain ideas, responding

instead to a contemporaneity that demands to be taken into account

in the present (such as Jacotot's 'Enlightenment' pedagogy in the

context of French debates on education in the late twentieth century

in The Ig norant Schoolmaster) . As such, Ranciere's work may also come

as a salutary warning to those who have pursued a historicist approach

to literary studies. The notion of voice, of speaking to and hearing

figures of the past, has long haunted literary critics. For example, in

a by now all too well known example, Stephen Greenblatt, the critic

credited with ushering in (or at least naming) a new historicism in

literary studies, opens one of his books with the phrase: 'I began with

the desire to speak with the dead'. 22 While Ranciere continues to

draw upon texts that many readers would think of as archival rather

than squarely part of 'the tradition', the pertinence of these texts

is always demonstrated by illustrating their urgency in relation to a

present concern. Thus, rather than abandoning philosophy in fa vour

of historical research, Ranciere calls into question the protocols and

practices of both philosophy and historiography through his own

participation in writing. Readers of several of Ranciere's texts may

often ind themselves disorientated by the lack of a clearly marked

distinction between the words of those whom Ranciere is discussing

and Ranciere's own 'commentary' upon them. In this way, Ranciere

might be said to allow the participation of these other voices to

continue into and beyond those texts which Ranciere has apparently

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