This article was downloaded by: [Bogazici University]

On: 04 June 2015, At: 01:13

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Space and Polity

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cspp20

For a politics we have yet to imagine

a

Mark Purcell
a

Department of Urban Design & Planning, University of

Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Published online: 25 Jun 2014.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Mark Purcell (2014) For a politics we have yet to imagine, Space and Polity,
18:2, 117-121, DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2014.927960
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2014.927960

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Downloaded by [Bogazici University] at 01:13 04 June 2015

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Space and Polity, 2014

Vol. 18, No. 2, 117121, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2014.927960

INTRODUCTION
For a politics we have yet to imagine
Mark Purcell*

Downloaded by [Bogazici University] at 01:13 04 June 2015

Department of Urban Design & Planning, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

This special issue assembles a group of articles that explore the political thought of Jacques
Rancire. The idea was not only to understand and critique Rancires thought on its own
terms, but also to discover how Rancire can be of use, politically, today. We wanted to understand how he might inform contemporary political struggles for justice, democracy and
freedom, and also how he might need to be rethought or pushed farther in light of those struggles.

A too brief precis of Rancires thought

Rancire is part of a generation of radical thinkers people such as Agamben, Castoriadis,
Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lacan, Negri, Foucault, Benjamin, Vaneigem who were searching creatively (and more than a little anxiously) for another model of politics. Though in different
ways, each was seeking a political way forward that abandoned the old model of revolution in
which a workers party wins the state, nationalizes property, abolishes class and withers away.
For his part, Rancire proceeds by seeking to chart and understand the very ground of politics.
He wants to do more than merely stand the current balance of power on its head, to reverse
the current relations of domination and hierarchy while leaving their structures mostly in place.
Rather Rancire wants to understand the deeper workings of power, and he wants to discover
ways to challenge and destabilize that power at its root. For Rancire, politics is not merely a
question of who holds power within a given set of political relations, it is a struggle over the character of political relations themselves. Politics for Rancire is not a struggle among alreadyestablished parties over a given pool of resources. It is instead a struggle over who in fact is a
party to politics, over who can speak and be heard in political debate, over what the stakes of politics are, and over who denes those stakes.
For Rancire, one of the most archetypical political events was when the plebs of Rome spoke
for the rst time. In the time of the Roman Empire, the poor inhabitants of Rome came increasingly to see themselves as plebs, as a dened political group. On the Aventine Hill, they began to
enact this new idea, by participating in politics as though they were a legitimate party in the political arena. The Roman nobles responded by rejecting the very idea that the plebs existed as
plebs at all. And so the struggle of the plebs was not a struggle for more rights or resources
as against the nobles. Rather it was a struggle to exist as plebs, a struggle to take part in the
polity as the newly imagined political subject plebs, a subject with an idea of itself as a
subject, as a political body with a voice, and with a part to play in politics. For Rancire, the
plebs embody his signature idea of the part of those with no part. The political order, or
*Email: mpurcell@u.washington.edu
2014 Taylor & Francis

Downloaded by [Bogazici University] at 01:13 04 June 2015

118

M. Purcell

what Rancire calls the police, will always claim to have taken account of all parts of the polity,
to have arranged those parts into a just set of relations, and therefore to have established an order
that is legitimate. Drawing heavily even obsessively on Aristotle, Rancire insists that on the
contrary the polices accounting can never be complete, that there must always be a part of the
polity that has not been counted, that has not been given a part to play in the existing political
order, but which nevertheless exists, inchoate, waiting to emerge as a part. For Rancire, politics proper occurs when this part of those with no part comes to see itself as a part, as a legitimate party with a role to play in the political order, and begins to act as if it is in fact a legitimate
party to politics. Rancire calls this process of emerging awareness subjectication. Of course,
the prevailing order, which has staked its legitimacy on the claim that it has taken full account of
all the parts of the polity, must deny that this new part exists as a legitimate party. What is at stake
in political struggle, then, is whether this new part will be able to actually take up the part they
have claimed, whether they will be able to actually partake in the political order.
In addition to this central element of subjectication, but along the same lines, politics for
Rancire can also a be struggle over what kind of political relations exist among the parts and
what kind of new political relations are possible. The struggle over which parts exist determines
who has a voice and who can speak, but politics can also be a struggle over what kinds of speech
count as political speech, what places are appropriate for that speech to take place, what responsibilities others have to consider that speech seriously, and what political options are considered
reasonable and possible. It is the last struggle that manifests most often in the articles for this
special issue. Very often, the police claim that only a certain number of very limited political
options count as possible ways forward for the community, and politics thus often emerges as
a struggle to imagine and pursue other options, other forms of political life that are not sanctioned
as reasonable by the current police order.
The papers in the special issue
The papers in this special issue explore Rancires thought in a variety of stimulating ways.
I group them here into two main camps. The rst camp, consisting of Swyngedouw, Davidson
& Iveson and Hanson, is relatively more sanguine about Rancire. This camp argues that the
value of Rancire is that he helps us see things about a political situation that would remain
opaque without him. The articles by Swyngedouw and Davidson & Iveson apply this enhanced
political vision to the uprisings of 2011. Hanson applies it to a historical case, the riots in
Cleveland in 1966, but his analysis has clear implications for politics in the present day as
well. The second camp, consisting of articles by Purcell and Booth & Williams, generally
accept the strengths of Rancire identied by the rst camp, but they also raise some doubts
about Rancire. In different ways, they worry that Rancire does not go far enough politically,
that if we want to put him to use today, we need to push his thought in more radical directions.
The rst camp (1): Swyngedouw
Swyngedouw argues that we nd ourselves in a period of ossied consensus where the structure
of common sense poses only two options: austerity or economic collapse. We can either continue
on resolutely with new and more austere forms of neoliberalism, or we can return to the horrors of
state socialism. The right choice is obvious, according to the dominant common sense, and the
only real questions are technical: how do we best structure austerity so that the capitalist
economy can get working again? This is precisely what Rancire calls consensus: a broad
social agreement on the big issues that has brought us to the purported end of history. It is an
idea that the terms such as postpolitical, postdemocratic and the end of politics are also

Downloaded by [Bogazici University] at 01:13 04 June 2015

Space and Polity

119

trying to capture, although perhaps in slightly different ways. Rancire (in league with a host of
other thinkers whom Swyngedouw I think rightly groups with Rancire, e.g. Badiou,
Rosanvallon, Zizek, Agamben, Mouffe and Negri) wants to trouble this dominant consensus,
to introduce a measure of dissensus and disagreement that breaks consensus apart and allows
space for something else to emerge. Swyndegouw urges us to see the uprisings that swept the
world in 2011 as an instantiation of this dissensus. He suggests that the movements in 2011, in
general, manifested a clear, even if incipient, reassertion of the political (or what Rancire
calls politics) that disrupted the prevailing consensus and opened up the possibility of
another world beyond the stiing austerity of neoliberal capitalism.
I think we should give Swyngedouw room to make his point here without engaging in a
debate about what these movements as a whole were really about. I think it is hard to
dispute that one thread or desire or spirit present in at least many (if not all) of the movements
of 2011, was a rejection of the austerity dilemma, a rejection of the argument that we must do
what the global nancial interests say we must do. This act of interrupting the dominant
common sense functions as a kind of ground clearing, an unsettling of the dominant political
logic. The interruption is not itself an alternative politics. But positive alternatives were also
present in 2011. Indeed pregurative experiments in other ways of being together politically
were also a commonly expressed desire in (at least) Spain, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, the
USA and the UK. Swyngedouw suggests that Rancire mostly helps us see the interruption function of the movements, but it is easy to see (particularly in 2011) how that interruption can walk
hand in hand with a positive creation of new political worlds.
The rst camp (2): Davidson and Iveson
Davidson and Iveson agree with Swyngedouw that Rancire helps us understand 2011, and
especially, for them, the Arab Spring and Occupy, as the introduction of dissensus into a consensus. In Egypt, the movements rejected and exposed the common sense that Egypt would crumble
without Mubaraks strong hand. In the USA, they challenged the idea that austerity is the only
possible economic policy, and that liberal democracy is the only possible form of government.
In Spain, similarly, they rejected the idea that when citizens are unhappy with the economic
policy of the current government, the only possible behaviour open to them is to elect a different
party to lead the government. Que se vayan todos, they shouted instead. Git rid of them all.
But Davidson and Iveson also want to emphasize another aspect of 2011 that Rancire helps
us to see: the introduction of new subjectivities into the existing political eld. They suggest that
for many in 2011, it was not so much a question of making demands on the existing powers, of
asking established representatives to alter economic policy to direct more resources towards
already existing groups. They argue it was more a question of proposing new groups with new
sensibilities the indignados, the 99%, an active and capable Egyptian people new subjectivities that the prevailing order did not recognize, and to whom it had not assigned a legitimate part
to play in politics.
While they certainly sing Rancires praises, Davidson and Iveson also want to extend him in
an important direction, by spatializing him. That is, they want to help his thought take more
seriously the geographical dimensions of politics. Specically, they suggest we should see the
occupation of space, especially urban space, as a political act in Rancires sense because it disrupts what we might call the geographical police, the geographical order that denes who can be
where and what activities are appropriate for those people in those places.
I would second Davison and Ivesons argument here: Rancire needs to be spatialized. His
politics, following the Greeks he is so obsessed with, are primarily a politics that concerns
logos, or speech-and-reason. The police order primarily is concerned with dening who can

120

M. Purcell

Downloaded by [Bogazici University] at 01:13 04 June 2015

speak-and-reason, and what counts as good speaking-and-reasoning. The police, as Rancire

imagines it, do not so much determine the proper place for actors and things. Although Rancires
metaphorical language does seem at times to be talking about geography, his analysis mostly
forces any concern with the appropriate place of politics through the conceptual core of logos,
and so I nd Davidson and Ivesons call to spatialize Rancire is an important one.
The rst camp (3): Hanson
Unlike Swyngedouw and Davidson & Iveson, Hanson uses Rancire to read an event from the
past, the Cleveland riots of 1966. Similarly, however, Hanson nds Rancire useful because he
allows us to see past the conventional readings of the events, to see a politics we would miss
if we continue to think of politics merely as organized actions by existing groups to demand concrete gains from the current structures of power. For Hanson, the riots were not only a disorganized lashing out by a frustrated groups of victims. Hanson argues that we can see much more
agency and intentionality in participants actions if we know how to look for it, and he even
goes so far as to suggest we might read the riots, in the spirit of Rancire, as an instance of the
appearance of the demos, or people, who were seeking to present themselves in public and
verify their equality as speaking beings. This appearance is what Rancire understands by the
term democracy, but of course it is very different from liberal democracy, democracy as the
police order would have us understand it. And so Hanson argues that Rancire is useful
because he helps us redene our understanding of political agency, and he thus allows us to
see agency where we thought there was none. Of course, we can take inspiration from the insights
Hanson generates here to read anew any number of cases, among which the UK riots of 2011
perhaps spring most immediately to mind.
The second camp (1): Purcell
In broad outline, my article agrees that Rancire is useful for thinking about the novelty of 2011,
that it is valuable to read 2011 as a disruption of consensus and a forcing open of the possibility of
thinking politics differently. But I am worried about just how far we can to go with Rancires
vision. It may be, I suggest, that he catches us in a sad cycle whereby the police order is disrupted
by politics, but then it quickly reforms. My piece questions whether there is any possibility of
revolution in Rancire. Of course I do not mean the old revolution; I share his rejection of
that. I mean revolution that aims in some way for a world in which there is not a prevailing
police order. Or rather, a world in which the police order still exists, but where it is not operative,
where it is somehow held at bay, prevented from dominating the terms of political discourse. It
may be a logical contradiction, a police that exists but does not hold sway, that does not determine
who can speak, what counts as speech, etc. But I argue that we must aim at something more than
merely repeated disruptions-and-reformulations of the police order, and I suggest that we might
fruitfully turn to Deleuze and Guattari for a revolutionary political vision that is not at all the
old model of revolution, but that nevertheless pushes out beyond Rancires disruptions-andreformulations model of politics, into what Deleuze and Guattari call a new land.
The second camp (2): Booth and Williams
As with my article, Booth and Williams draw strength from Rancire, and they seek to push him
to radically expand his conception of politics. Rancires intellectual spirit relentlessly refuses to
accept limits placed on politics by the police, and Booth and Williams nd great strength in that
spirit. They draw on it to argue that we must explore how it would be possible to expand our

Downloaded by [Bogazici University] at 01:13 04 June 2015

Space and Polity

121

current assumption that political communities are made up only of humans. They ask whether and
how nonhuman entities can speak, whether they can participate meaningfully in a political community. We have long known that we are dependent for our survival on a complex assemblage of
human and nonhuman species, and so perhaps imagining something like nonhuman citizens is
really not such a bold leap. But such thinking certainly troubles our longheld and deeply
embedded assumptions about politics. And these assumptions are very much present in
Rancires thought too. As I have said, Rancire is focused intently on Aristotles denition of
the polity as citizens who engage each other in rational dialogue about the nature of the good
life. This logos imagination assumes that speech and reason are a sine qua non of political participation and membership. While Rancire probes and questions Aristotle relentlessly, I do
not think Rancire ever gets beyond this conception of politics as logos. And so if we are to
expand the political community to include nonhumans, we would either need to unseat logos
from its privileged position in our conception of politics, or, perhaps more in line with Booth
and Williams, we would need to expand our notion of logos so that it encompasses the ways
of speaking and reasoning that nonhumans practice.
Again, I think the second camp shares the positive assessment of Rancires thought, even if
they think Rancire does not yet go far enough. Nevertheless all ve articles agree that Rancire is
an essential inspiration for thinking politics and radical politics in particular in the present
moment.