The Politics of Fiction

JACQUES RANCIRE

Under this title, I will propose some reflections about the interpretation of Realism. To bring
up the issue, I will start from a canonical text about Realism in the novel and its political
significance: Roland Barthes text on The Reality Effect published in 1968. This text starts
with focusing on a detail picked up in Flauberts short story A simple heart. As he describes
the living room of the house where her character lives, the writer tells us that An old piano
supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons. Obviously this
barometer is of no use and this pyramidal heap makes us see nothing determinate. As Barthes
puts it they increase the cost of narrative information. This judgement is in keeping with the
statements of many 20th century writers who denounced the futility of realistic description. In
the Surrealist Manifesto Andr Breton had discarded Dostoyevskys description of the
wallpaper and furniture of the usurers room in Crime and Punishment with a few words: He
is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room. In his prologue to Bioy Casares novel
The Invention of Morel, Borges made a similar point about Proust: he said, there are too many
pages in his work that we must accept as we do with the insipid and idle everyday. The
point then is not only about a superfluous element in the description: it is about description
itself. Description appears as an excess which covers an absence: the excess of things
substitutes a catalogue of clichs for the unsparing deployment of poetic imagination; it stands
in the way of the plot and blurs its lines; or it erases the play of literary signification and pits
its false obviousness against the task of interpretation.
I wish to re-examine the logic of that denunciation in order to bring to point out the political
issue which is at the stake in realist fiction and is, I think, largely ignored by those critiques.
I start with Roland Barthes formulation of the problem because it sets up an interesting
quandary. Barthes looks at the text from the structuralist point of view which sees the work as
the autonomous development of its own inner necessity against the old logic of resemblance
and referentiality. As an artistic paradigm, structuralism must dismiss such superfluous
objects as this barometer. But as a method of analysis, structuralism cannot dismiss it. It has
to account for the entire surface of the narrative fabric, thereby for the superfluous detail
too, which means that it must show that it is not superfluous, that it has a place and a function

in the structure of the work. This is where the reality effect comes in: the useless detail has a
function which is a function of mere attestation of the real. If an element is somewhere though
there is no reason for its being-there in the structure of the plot, this means precisely that its
being-there is unconditional, that it is there simply because it is there. So the useless detail
says: I am the real, the real which is useless and meaningless, the real which proves its reality
out of the very fact that it is useless and meaningless.
This explanation goes back over an opposition that structured the logic of
representation. Since Aristotle it had been taken for granted that poetic fiction consists in
constructing a plot of verisimilitude, a logical concatenation of actions, while history just tells
facts as they happen. From that point of view, the reality-effect breaks away from the logic of
representation. But, Barthes says, it does it by implementing a half-way strategy: as it takes up
the realistic principle of history by clinging to the real as real, it frames a new type of
verisimilitude opposed to the classical one. Now, he says, this new verisimilitude has become
the nucleus of a fetishism of the real, characteristic of media culture and illustrated by
photography, news reports, tourism devoted to monuments and historical places, etc. All this
stuff, Barthes concludes, tells us that the Real is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is
strong enough to deny any idea of a fiction, that its enunciation does not need to be integrated
in a structure and that the having-been-here of things is a sufficient condition for them being
told. That which is fascinating in this sentence is the way it may be overturned, an overturn
that will happen ten years after when Barthes makes the having-been-there of things the
punctum which is the truth of photography and repudiates the pointless informative content of
the studium. But in The Reality effect, the having-being there has a clear political
connotation. The self-affirmation of the real as real is the artistic translation of the Bourgeois
view of the world of Bourgeois riches as a stable world. It is part of the ideological process
that turns social and historical determinations into natural facts. The attestation of the real
provided by the superfluous object expresses the Bourgeois confidence in the eternity of the
Bourgeois world.

Barthes analysis sets up a simple alternative: either the functional rationality of the narrative
structure or the absolute singularity of the detail. I think that a closer consideration of the
pyramid of boxes and cartons on the old piano might have provided the analysis with a
third term that could disrupt this clear-cut opposition along with the interpretation of realism
as the expression of the Bourgeois view of the world. Ill try to show that the idle everyday
of realist novel is the place and time of a bifurcation of times more radical than the
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bifurcation of paths and narrative lines cherished by Borges, and that the focussing on the
reality effect misses the real disruption that is at the heart of aesthetic fiction. It misses it
because the modernist idea of the structure is still in keeping with the representative logic
that it pretends to challenge, so that it also misses the political issue involved in the realist
excess. The point is in fact that the opposition of the structure to the idle or pointless
notations of the real has nothing new about it. It re-enacts a much older criticism of realist
fiction that had already been made by many critics, and mostly reactionary critics, in the
times of Flaubert. Those critics already underlined the enumeration of details, the rage of
description that filled his novels and characterized more widely contemporary literature. For
instance Flauberts contemporary, the catholic writer and literary critic Barbey dAurevilly,
denounced his infinite, eternal, atomistic, blinding practice of description. As he put it

there is no book there; there is not this thing, this creation, this work of art constituted
by a book with an organized development (...) He goes without a plan, pushing ahead,
without a preconceived overview, not being aware that life, under the diversity and the
apparent disorder of its vagaries, has its logical and inflexible laws () it is a loitering
among the insignificant, the vulgar and the abject for the sole pleasure of the walking.

This criticism is clearly predicated on the principles structuring the classical logic of
representation. According to that logic a work of art is an organic totality, possessing all the
constituent parts necessary for life and nothing more; it is a living body endowed with all the
required limbs, assembled in the unity of a form, under the commandment of the head. The
realistic novel falls short of this requirement. The point is not only that there are some
details, which contribute nothing to the working of the fictional structure and only play the
part of the real affirming I am the real. The point is that the parts are not subordinated to the
whole; the limbs dont obey the head. The functional concatenation of ideas and actions,
causes and effects, no longer works. In the boxes of the new novelist, all things are lumped
together. This means that the artist has become a worker. He carries his sentences ahead,
Barbey says, just as a roadman shovels his stones ahead in a wheelbarrow. This way of
writing witnesses a new social world. Another critic of that time made the point about the
political signification of Flauberts writing: This is democracy, he said: democracy in
literature or literature as democracy. The insignificance of the details amounts to their
perfect equality. They are equally important or equally pointless. The reason why they are so
is that they deal with people whose life is insignificant. Those people clutter up the space and
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leave no room for the selection of interesting characters and the harmonious development of a
plot. It is exactly the opposite of the traditional novel, the novel of the monarchical and
aristocratic times, which benefited from the space created by a clearly stratified social
hierarchy: in this space, I quote

the human personality represented by all the superiorities of birth, mind, education and
heart left little room, in the economy of the tale, for secondary characters, still less for material
objects. This exquisite world did not look at poor people except through the door of carriages, or at
the countryside except through the window of its palaces. This left a great space, admirably filled, for
the analysis of feelings finer, more complicated, harder to disentangle in elite souls than in the
vulgar.

The reactionary critic bluntly tells us the social basis of representative poetics: the structural
relation of the parts to the whole rested on a partition between the souls of the elite and those
of the vulgar. When this partition vanishes, the fiction gets overfilled with the insignificant
events and sensations of all those common people who either were not counted within the
representative logic or were counted at their (lower) place and represented in the (lower)
genres fitting their condition. This is what the rupture of the logic of verisimilitude means.
When Barthes mentions the Aristotelian opposition between poetry and history, he forgets
that this formal poetic distinction was also a political one. Poetry was defined as a
concatenation of actions, opposed to the mere historical succession of facts. But action is
not the mere fact of doing something. Action is a sphere of existence. Concatenations of
actions could only concern individuals who live in the sphere of action and are capable of
conceiving great designs and of risking them in the confrontation with other great designs and
with the strokes of Fortune. They could not concern people who are bogged down in the
condition of bare life, devoted to the sole task of its infinite reproduction. Verisimilitude is not
only about the effect that can be expected from a given cause; it is also about what can be
expected from an individual living in this or that situation, what kind of perception, feeling
and behaviour can be attributed to him or her.
In other terms, the question of fiction contains two questions interwoven with each
other. Fiction designates a certain arrangement of events. But it also designates the relation of
a referential world to alternative worlds. This is not a question of a relation between the real
and the imaginary. This is a question of a distribution of capacities of sensory experience, a
question about what individuals can live, what they can experience and how far their feelings,

gestures and behaviours are worth telling to the reading public. This is precisely the case with
the short story Barthes is referring to, namely Flauberts A simple heart, a short story
dedicated to a poor servant whose dull existence is only marked by a succession of love
stories, all of which end in tragedy,with a lover, his mistress, a kid and finally a parrot. This is
when the barometer comes in. The barometer is not here to attest that the real is the real. The
question is not about the real, it is about life, about the moment when bare life - life
normally devoted to look, day after day, whether the whether will be fine or bad - takes on the
temporality of a chain of sensuous events that are worth writing. The idle barometer expresses
a still unheard-of poetics of life, evincing the capacity of anybody, for instance Flauberts old
servant, to turn the routine of the everyday into the depth of passion, whether it is for a lover,
a master, a kid or a parrot. The reality effect is an equality effect. But equality does not simply
mean the equivalence of all the objects and feelings described by the novelist. It is not the
case that all sensations are equivalent. It is the case that any sensation can produce for any
woman belonging to the lower classes the vertiginous acceleration making her able to
experience the abysses of passion.
This is the frightening signification of literary democracy: anybody can feel
anything. The object of this passion does not matter. Felicit, the servant in A simple heart is a
perfect servant. But she no longer serves as one must do, according to the hierarchical logic of
verisimilitude. She does it lovingly, with an intensity of feeling and passion that exceeds by
far the intensity of her mistresss feelings. This intensity is not only useless, it is dangerous.
Some years before A Simple Heart Flauberts colleagues, the Goncourt Brothers had
published the story of another servant, Germinie Lacerteux. Germinie too is fanatically
devoted to her mistress. But in the course of the novel it appears that the passion that makes
her a perfect servant also makes her a woman able of anything to serve her own passions and
her own sexual desires down to the last degree of degradation.
So the angelic Felicit and the monstrous Germinie are two sisters; both belong to the same
family as Emma Bovary, the family of those daughters of peasants who prove able to feel
every sensuous desire or every ideal aspiration as well. It is this new capacity of anyone to
live alternative lives which forbids the right subordination of the parts to the whole. There is
no book, says Barbey, but only pictures, nailed together. The aristocratic deployment of the
action is blocked by the democratic clutter of images. But what happens is much more a
double loss with respect to the representative logic. Just as the action has lost its former
structure of a concatenation of causes and effects, the image has lost the function of
conveying the emotional quality of the action or displaying pleasant views during its pauses.
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Action and perception, narration and image have become one and the same fabric of sensory
micro-events. The critics denounce them as images that obstruct the straight way of the
plot. But image is an ambiguous term. As a matter of fact, the so-called images dont give
us so much to see. Images are not descriptions of the visible. They are operators producing
differences of intensity. Now those differences of intensity evince a re-distribution of the
sensory capacities, or in platonic terms, of the hierarchy between golden souls and iron souls.
The democracy of the realist novel is the music of the equal capacity of anyone to experience
any kind of life. The image is not added to the narration, it has become the music of
equality in which the very opposition between action and image vanishes.
This is, I think, the real issue at stake in the so-called reality effect. Barthess analysis
does not take into account this political issue because the idea of structure which sustains his
investigation of the status of the real in literature is still in keeping with the representative
logic: the structure is a functional arrangement of causes and effects that subordinates the
parts to the whole. Structural analysis has to assign every narrative unit a place in the
structure. Therefore the structuralist analyst comes up against the same scandal as the
champions of the representative poetics: descriptive notations that fulfil no function and
thereby increase the cost of narrative information.
But I think that the criticism of the reactionary champions of the old verisimilitude felt
more accurately what is at stake: the invasion of democracy they said: a new stubborn
social reality exploding the right concatenation of actions. Barthes analyzes the reality
effect from the modernist point of view, equating literary modernity, and its political
import, with a purification of the plot-structure, brushing aside the parasitic images of the
real. But literature as the modern configuration of the art of writing is just the contrary: it is
the suppression of the boundaries delineating this space of purity. What is at stake in this
excess is not the opposition of the singular to the structure. It is the conflict of two
distributions of the sensible.
Nineteenth Century critics drew a straight line from democracy viewed of as the
Tocquevillian equality of conditions to the realistic proliferation of superfluous details. But
the link between political democracy and literary democracy is a bit more complicated. The
tension between action and description does not only oppose modern literature to the old
poetic rules. It also dwells in the very heart of modern literary fiction. The new capacity of
anybody to live any life goes along with a failure in the arrangement of causes and effects,
ends and means; it goes along with a failure in the strategic model of action. The issue of the
descriptive excess points to this inner tension. Ill try to show it by going back over one of
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the criticisms I mentioned at the beginning: Andr Bretons criticism of Dostoyevsky

description of the usurers room. I quote first his quotation, then his comment:
The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls,
geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by
the setting sun The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a
huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a lookingglass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny
prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their handsthat was
all.
I am in no mood, Breton comments, to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself
with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its
place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me.
Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.
By refusing to go into the room, Breton may have missed the crucial question: what does his
room mean or whose room is it? And this is precisely what Dostoyevskys description is
about. In fact he describes two rooms in one. Significantly Andr Breton has skipped in his
quotation two sentences that construct this duality. So let me read over the whole passage:
The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls,
geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by
the setting sun. So the sun will shine like this then too! flashed as it were by chance
through Raskolnikovs mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned everything in the room,
trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement. But there was nothing
special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with
a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a
looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three
half-penny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their
handsthat was all.
Dostoyevsky himself tells us that the description is pointless. But he also tells us why it is
so: because the inventory of the furniture does not play the role Raskolnikov assigns it. He
scans the room in order to map the scene of the murder he is planning. But there is nothing

special in the room, nothing that is worth including in the scheme of the planned murder.
What remains thus is another room, the room he had first perceived, an impressionist
room which is made of patches of colour: yellow paper, muslin curtains and the shining of a
sunset, producing a flash in his mind: So the sun will shine like this then too! This is a
strange indication: how can Raskolnikov know that the day of the murder will be sunny?
Precisely it is not a matter of knowing. The room of the murder, the room where it will take
place is not the room he is looking at knowingly as a criminal methodically planning his act.
It is the room of a hallucination. As a matter of fact the murder will take on the form of a
hallucination provoked by an access of fever.
The apparent banality of the description splits the room in too and shows a division at the
very heart of the action. As is well- known, Raskolnikov has planned his murder out of a
rational theory about society: poor talented people, as he is, can use extraordinary means to
get out of their misery and allow society to benefit from their capacity. He has a model,
Napoleon, the son of an obscure plebeian family who became the Emperor of the French and
the master of Europe. Therefore he plans his murder according to a strategic rationality of
ends and means. But the rationalization of the act does not result in a capacity of making a
rational decision and implementing it in cold-blood. On the contrary, he can do it only as an
access of fever. The so-called superfluity of the description is the staging of this inner
division. The new literary plot, the plot of the democratic times separates action from itself.
The failure of the strategic model characterizes at once the structure of the realist novel and
the behaviour of his characters. The ruin of the aristocratic/representational paradigm also
entails the ruin of a certain idea of fiction, which means a certain pattern of linkage between
thinking, feeling and doing.
I wish to illustrate this point by commenting on a strange episode in a novel which stages an
elder brother of Dostoyevskys Raskolnikov, Stendhals Julien Sorel. Julien Sorel, the main
character of Red and Black, is a son of the French Revolution, an admirer of Napoleon who
uses all means to get out of his low condition. Therefore, as the reader of the novel follows
the events of Juliens life, he is also introduced into the network of social relationships and
struggles for power that make up the post-revolutionary society. This is why Erich Auerbach,
in his book Mimesis, makes this novel an important step in the progress of the representation
of reality in western literature. He says that it initiates modern realism which implies that man
is involved in a political, economic and social reality in permanent evolution. But in order to

emphasize this idea of realism, Auerbach must forget some oddities in the plot. At the end
of the novel, Julien is in jail and expects a death sentence for having shot his former lover
who had denounced him to the father of his second lover. The latter and a friend are moving
heaven and earth in order to save Juliens life. But he tells them not to pester him with these
details of real life. He wants to live only the life of the imagination. So he spends his days
doing nothing, walking on the terrace of the prison and smoking cigars. I quote an extract of
the passage
In fact, he said to himself, it seems that my destiny is to die dreaming. A nonentity like
myself, who is sure to be forgotten in a fortnights time, would be a real sucker, you have
to admit, to get all theatrical.
Its strange all the same that Ive only understood the art of enjoying life since seeing the
end so close at hand.
There is no more here any description that stops the course of the action. What blocks
action is the division in the very heart of life. In prison Julien has discovered the art of
enjoying life. This late discovery does not only contradict the character of the ambitious
young man. It also contradicts the science with which the novelist had constructed his novel
as a journey across the networks of social relationships and social intrigues. All along the
narration, Julien has calculated all his attitudes, and the novelist has added to his calculations
the explanations arising from his own science of social relationships and individual
psychology. The course of the plot has coincided with the development of those intrigues. But
at the last moment the plot divorces from the logic of the intrigues. The gunshot is the first act
of the hero that has not been decided out of a calculation. Instead it bids farewell to all
calculations and sets the hero in a space and time which has no more any connection with the
space and time of ambitions and expectations, a space and time devoted to doing nothing but
enjoying life.
In order to understand the issue at stake in this blissful doing nothing that puts an end to the
career of the ambitious plebeian, I propose to connect it with another doing nothing
formulated in a very different text, a German philosophical text. Two years before the
publication of Stendhals novel, Hegel commented, in his lessons on aesthetics, upon two
paintings of Murillo representing beggar boys in the street of Seville. The first one shows a
mother picking lice out of the head of a boy while he quietly munches his bread. The second

one shows two ragged boys eating grapes and melon. The attention the philosopher pays to
those genre paintings representing the everyday life of low people illustrates the upheaval
of the hierarchical logic of the representative regime. But Hegel is not satisfied with merely
affirming that all subject-matters are equivalent. Instead he makes a strong connection
between the quality of Murillos painting and the activity of those little beggars, an activity
which consists in doing nothing and taking care of nothing. They show, he says, an absolute
lack of concern with the external reality, an inner freedom amidst this external reality which is
exactly what is demanded by the concept of the Ideal in Art. As they squat on the ground,
they enjoy a form of blissfulness that makes them almost like the Olympic Gods.
The paintings of the beggar boys that a prince had purchased in the representative age as
picturesque illustrations of the ways of being of the low people now express the new aesthetic
equality, the capacity of doing nothing and caring for nothing, the capacity of idleness
which belongs to the Olympic Gods. As he described them, Hegel probably had in mind
Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and his evocation of the evercontented divinities of Olympus, that the Greek sculptors had represented freed from the
bonds inseparable from every purpose, every duty, every care. As Schiller describes her, the
Juno Ludovisi reposes and dwells in itself, a creation completely self-contained and, as if
existing beyond space, never yielding nor resisting; here is no force to contend with force, no
frailty where temporality might break in. The beggar boys are given by Hegel this idleness
of the divinity which neither yields nor resists. But it is also the same idleness that
Stendhals character discovers: the state in which no force contends with force whereas all
his career, all the career of the plebeian who wants to make his way in society, had been a
question of force contending with force.
But if the careless young beggars and the ambitious plebeian can be offered the same
enjoyment of the Olympian idleness, it is because the idleness that Schiller and Hegel
attributed to the Olympic Gods is itself a plebeian invention, a mark of a plebeian form of
aesthetic upheaval. The state in which there is neither yielding nor resistance, in which no
force contends with force, has a name. In French it is called reverie. At the end of his life a
son of artisan, a writer who was a major inspiration for Schiller and Kant and for Stendhal as
well, namely Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote his Reveries of a solitary walker. One of those
reveries is devoted to describing the course of the idle days he spent in a little island in
Switzerland after having being condemned by the Parliament in France and threatened by the

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mob in Switzerland. This island, he says, was like a prison where he would have liked to
spend the rest of his life. His time there was devoted partly to collecting plants, partly to doing
nothing, spending hours lying on ones back in a small boat drifting on the lake, just enjoying
the mere feeling of existing, without any care, or, in other words, enjoying the farniente. The
farniente of the reverie is no laziness. Laziness is the vice of the bad worker. Instead idleness
is the virtue of those who have not to care for work. I remind you of Borgess criticism about
the idle everyday invading literature with Balzac, Flaubert or Proust. But this idleness is
not the superfluity that has perniciously invaded literature. Instead it is the upheaval in the
distribution of social temporalities that has made literature possible. In the old distribution of
the sensible, there was no idle everyday for the plebeian; the everyday meant either work or
laziness. We can put it in other terms: the traditional distribution of the sensible opposed the
realm of aristocratic action to the realm of plebeian fabrication. The doing nothing of the
plebeian is the upheaval of the opposition between acting and making. Anybody can enjoy the
idle state of reverie. This new equality frames a new sphere of aesthetic experience. One of
the main aspects of this regime is the disruption of the old structures of narrative performance.
The so-called reality effect, the focussing on the pointless or idle everyday, first means
this disruption, this splitting in the heart of the narrative performance. Words are in excess
because of this excess that is constituted by the entrance of the sons of artisans and peasants
into a new sensible world which is the realm of wild passion or the realm of idleness as well.
This aesthetic disruption is at the heart of literature and of the politics of literature. It also
separates aesthetic democracy and particularly literary democracy from political democracy.
This is what is witnessed by the oddities in Stendhals novel. For the plebeian and for the
plot which tells his rise and fall- equality appears to be split up from the very beginning. On
the one hand equality is the right adjustment of his capacity to a position that is refused to the
Men of his class. It is an end that he wants to conquer by opposing force to force and using an
appropriate set of means. But, on the other hand, equality is a new modality of sensible
experience that he can enjoy immediately, on one condition: bidding farewell to the play of
opposite forces, or the play of ends and means. Eventually Julien Sorel withdraws himself
from all the schemes he had plotted in order to conquer a place in society. He turns his prison
into the island that was Rousseaus metaphoric prison, a place for enjoying the pure feeling of
existence. The woman he has tried to murder will soon visit him in prison, and they will fall
in love again; he will revive with her the only happy moments of his past life: moments
devoted to the equal enjoyment of existence as such or, in other terms, to sharing sensuous

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equality. Again this is not only a question of fictional characters. It is a question of fictional
structure. The moment of perfect blissfulness of the character is the moment when the logic of
the plot, identifying the causal concatenation of narrative actions with the interplay of social
intrigues, collapses. As the fictional structure of the concatenation of ends and means or
causes and effects tends to identify with the struggle of social forces, it is bitten by a force of
inertia. In Red and Black, the force of inertia is the force of the plebeian reverie or the
plebeian enjoyment of sensible equality which parts with all forms of plebeian struggle
against the social hierarchy.
This splitting in the logic of action is not specific to one novel. It concerns by and large the
aesthetic plot, the construction of fictional plots within the aesthetic logic. It is no
coincidence, I think, that the first author who brought on the stage the failure of strategy was
also the thinker of the aesthetic state, Schiller, when he featured, in the trilogy of Wallenstein,
the strange character of a general, the archetype of the man of action and decision, unable to
act until the science of the astrologist tells the good occasion and ultimately forced to act in
the worst situation. After him the plot of the powerless omnipotent strategist took on a
multiplicity of figures. In the 1830s, Balzac imagined an association of thirteen intriguers
knowing all the secrets and pulling all the strings of the social machine. Those intriguers end
up failing in all their endeavours. Balzac gives us a strange reason for their failure. As he puts
it: since they could do everything in society, they did not care for being something within it.
Thirty years after Balzac, Tolsto set up on the wider stage of history the failure of the
strategic or the Napoleonic model of action. Generals think they are achieving their great
designs by ranging their troops on the battlefield according to their strategy. But the success
or the failure depends on random chances on the spot; it depends on a multiplicity of
interwoven little causes that no strategist can master. Thats why the best general, Kutuzov,
takes a nap when the staff discusses about strategy. Ten years after, Emile Zolas twenty
books cycle purported to offer the scientific account of the rise of a plebeian family equated
with the rise of modern democratic society and modern neurosis. But, in the last book of the
cycle, the whole scientific edifice shatters down: the records of the scientist demonstrating
how the laws of heredity determined this evolution are burnt and they are replaced on the
shelves by the clothes of a baby, the incestuous child of the scientist that symbolizes the
stubborn triumph of life, pursuing no end at all.

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So the realistic excess has nothing to do with the exhibition of the Bourgeois display of riches
and confidence in the reign of Bourgeoisie. What is at its heart is much more the trouble
introduced when the excess of passion and the emptiness of reverie are appropriated by the
souls of the lower classes. This is also why it does not offer much to the opposite
interpretation which gives him credit for its progressive sense of the historical movement.
According to Auerbach realistic novel makes individual destinies coincide with the knowing
representation of modern social and political forces. I think it is quite the contrary: it shows
the impossibility of the coincidence, the disjunction between knowing and acting, doing and
being. The literary ways of equality divorce from its political ways.
But, on the other hand, the broken plots of literature make us perceive the disjunction at the
heart of the global schemas of historical evolution and revolutionary politics. When the young
Marx opposes the human revolution to the merely political revolution, he is in keeping
with the discovery of a sensuous equality that goes beyond the transformation of
governmental institutions. But when he predicates revolutionary action on the existence of a
class of men entirely dispossessed of their humanity, he parts with the forms of emancipation
of those workers who affirm their capacity of enjoying here and now a world of sensible
equality. It turns out that political decision is bitten by aesthetic equality, by the plebeian
capacity of doing nothing. This is why Marx set out to annihilate this doing nothing by
the affirmation of a radical dispossession or a radical nothingness, the nothingness of the class
having nothing to loose but its chains. And he gave the power of getting out of this
nothingness to science. But the answer of the science of the social structure to the demands of
revolutionary action proved as problematic as the science of Wallensteins astrologist.
Revolution was supposed to happen as the handling of social contradiction predicated on the
knowledge of the concatenation of causes and effects that structure exploitation and
domination. But the process through which knowledge gets to the point where it can
determine the action postpones indefinitely this point. The time when scientific socialism tied
up the communist future with the intrinsic development of the productive forces is also the
time that broke away from the theories assigning a goal to life and giving science the task to
know this goal and to determine the means of reaching it. Life wants nothing, such is the
nihilist secret that bites from the inside the optimistic scientist narratives of late 19th century.
Marxist science indeed knew how to cope with this secret. It translated it in the terms of a
strategy of ends and means and of the expectation of the right time. It explained that the
march toward socialism could not anticipate the development of the process, that it could not

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impose its desires to the course of things. But, beneath the idea of scientific adaptation to the
movement of life, there was the deeper feeling that this movement leads nowhere and that the
will to change life does not rely on any objective process. This is why scientific rigor had to
reverse itself, to affirm itself as the mere necessity of the violent break that imposes a
direction to the endless movement of productive life. Revolution had to be either indefinitely
postponed or to be enacted as a sleight of hand, just like Julien Sorels gunshot. The straight
line of action thought of as the consequence of a knowing will was broken.
I am not willing to elaborate on this aspect. I will just draw from my analysis some
conclusions concerning the idea of artistic modernity which sustained the conceptualization of
the reality effect. That conceptualization entailed an idea of artistic modernity as a strategy of
subtraction, dismissing the realistic excess of things along with the constraint of resemblance.
Abstract painting became the emblem of that idea. I think that this analysis falls off target.
The heart of the problem in realism is not the excess of things but the break in the logic of
action, the self-contradiction of the causal logic. Neither the artistic nor the political response
to that self-contradiction could be found in a strategy of subtraction. Instead what it required
was a strategy of addition, exceeding the realistic excess, which means bringing to completion
the self-cancellation of the causal logic. What that completion entailed was a form of
coexistence of sensory experiences absorbing both the excess of plebeian passion and the
excess of plebeian reverie, a form of universal connection of experiences released from any
plot of causality. The best example of this strategy of excess, in the times of the Soviet
Revolution, is given by Dziga Vertovs films and notably by Man with a movie camera. This
work obeys an apparently simple principle: no plot, only reality. But this does not mean that
art has to represent reality and only reality. This means: no art, no representation of reality.
Cinema is not an art representing reality to viewers. It is a form of action connecting all forms
of action. This universal connection of movements frames a new sensorium in which the
distinction between reality and representation has vanished along with the distinction between
art and life. Everything is action: there is no doing nothing; yet, at the same time, action is
relieved of its dependency upon ends, wills and strategies. Man with a Movie Camera is a
symphony of movements which are all equal, no matter the end they pursue: production,
consumption, play or simulacrum. The connection of the movements steers them away from
their loneliness but also from their dependency on specific wills. The machines of socialist
industry and the tricks of the magicians express the same eurhythmy of life. Cinema frames
thereby a form of communism which escapes the dilemmas of communist strategies by

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overturning the nihilistic secret of the aimlessness of life. It offers the utopia of a world that is
spontaneously communist by constructing a common sensorium in which the oriented
movement of socialist construction is attuned to the deployment of all those movements in
which life expresses nothing but its equal intensity.
It can be said that is the privilege of the art of movement. But cinema achieves a dream that it
did not invent: it is in line with the Whitmanian attempt to write a book which is not a book,
but the voice absorbing the innumerable multiplicity of voices and forms of experience, in
line with the attempt by cubist, futurist and cubo-futurist artists to break up the surface of
the canvas into numerous enough facets to express all the intensities of modern life, whether it
be that of the machines or that of popular dancing. It is in line with the effort of the reporter
James Agee, describing the life of the poor sharecroppers in Alabama with an excess of
words, an emphasis on the value and beauty of any insignificant object on a chimney mantle,
which totally disrupts the normal logic of the journalistic balance between the description of a
state of things and the sense that is made of the description.
This is, I think, what Modernism historically meant: the construction of a sensorium of
radical equality, making art and life the same thing, to the extent that it made all experiences
equivalent and connected any of them with all of them. We know what happened to this
historical dream: it was dismissed twice: it was first repressed by the demand for socialist
realism, which did not only mean the demand that art serve the cause of the Soviet power but
that realism forget its own contradiction which is much more difficult. It was dismissed a
second time when western Marxists decided to do away with all those attempts to make art
register the new forms of lived experience of the common people, express the unanimous
rhythm of modern life or collect forms of popular expression, and set out to reinvent
Modernity as the commitment of artists to their own medium and the conquest of artistic
autonomy. Structuralism and the conceptualization of the reality effect are offshoots of this
reinvention. I think it might be fruitful to-day to revisit the whole story.
Jacques Rancire

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