Preface to the Proletarian Nights

Jacques Ranciere

Jacques Ranciere is an Algerian-born French philosopher who made important contributions to

political philosophy, the philosophy of education and aesthetics from the late 20th c. Ranciere
studied philosophy in Paris under the structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser. Therefore he
was very much influenced by him. Following the uprising of students and workers in Paris in
1968, he broke with his former teacher, charging that Althusser's emphasis on the necessary
role of the intellectual vanguard was contradicted by the self-directed popular revolts in the
streets of Paris that year. Ranciere held the view that the workers are capable of
understanding their own oppression and of emancipating themselves without guidance
from an elite class of theoreticians.

General background of the 1830s workers in France.

During the 1830s there was a struggle among the owners of the means of production and the
workers who possessed only their labor power. They were forced to sell their labor and were
also in need to resist the strong hold of capital whose demands continually threaten their
livelihood. This situation eventually led them to become aware of their shared socio economic
conditions of their fundamentally antagonistic relationship with the capitalists and hence of the
need for political struggle. This awareness signalled a new change which led to a class 'for
itself.' Thus a proletarian consciousness emerged. The revolution of 1830 also displayed that
they had well formulated political ideas of their own.

Nights of Labor: The Workers dream in the 19th Century France is a 1981 non-fiction book
which was based upon his doctoral thesis. The book was re-released in 2012, twenty years after
its first publication under the title 'Proletarian Nights' and the essay prescribed for study is the
preface written for this second edition. 'Proletarian Nights',one of Ranciere's most significant
works, dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not
rebelling against specific hardships and conditions, but against the unyielding predetermination
of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals and workee-poetry,
Ranciere reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the consistency of
these statements celebrating labor.

Many journalistic and scientific writings written by the workers emerged during this
period.Ranciere and other philosophers tried to revive the working class writing as an attempt to
chart proletarian dreams and desires.

Summary of the essay

Ranciere begins the essay by asserting that,there was wide spread exploitation,slavery and all
sorts of atrocities that were encountered by the workers of the 1830s. Though there was the
anguish at the daily theft of their time as they worked wood or stone, the humiliating absurdity of
having to beg day after day for work, Ranciere doesn't emphasize the usual class conflict, but
he sheds a light on the alternative perspective that existed among the workers. That is, it was
those nights wrested from the worker's normal sequence of work and sleep that he focused on
which included their writings of poetry, letters, drafts etc. According to him, those nights were
imperceptible or inoffensive breaks in the ordinary course of things. There was the suspension
of the ancient class hierarchy which subordinated those dedicated to labour to those endowed
with the privilege of thought. They were the nights of study, intoxication, days of labor, attending
lectures etc through which some will succeed while some will realise that their aspirations are
impossible( ie, the destruction of a world of utopia that the workers imagined). There were also
those who will spend the rest of their lives in that anonymity which occasionally comes up in the
name of a poet, organizer etc. A historian may ask about their poetic lines and what does that
mean( what does their poetic lines mean?) in comparison with the anonymous mass of factory
workers or activists. This is a method through which they proclaim that only the masses make
history and so they should enjoin those that speak in their name to represent them faithfully. But
there were masses whose leaders were men who were the other. Ranciere gives the examples
of the striking Parison tailors of 1830 and 1840 who appointed Andre Troncin or the 1848
painters who asked cafe owner Confais to draft a constitution for them. It is not because their
sermons on the dignity of working class people and on evangelical devotion the masses
normally avoid represent their daily labours or angers, but because they are 'other.' It is also not
because they can talk better but because what these masses want to represent to the upper
elites is something other than their issues regarding salaries. Their representation is that
proletarians have to be treated as if they have the right to more than one life . This is the
history of isolated utterances according to Ranciere. Because, the people will be more admired
the more they adhere strictly to their collective identity and they become suspect the moment
they want to live as anything other than a group or legionaries. The author puts forth certain
questions where he asserts that the philosophy of the intellectuals or activists blame some evil
third party ( petty bourgeois or ideologist) for the obscurities that get in their way between their
self- consciousness and self-identity. And he asks if this third party was deliberately created to
spirit away a more fearsome threat which is that of seeing the thinkers of night, ie, the workers
invade the territory of philosophy. Ranciere then talks about the contradictory relations between
the Proletariat of the night and the prophets of the new world which includes icarians,
saint-simonians etc and asserts that if it is the word of ' bourgeois' apostles which creates a
crack in their daily work through which some workers are drawn into the twists and turns of
another life, the problem begins when the preachers want to change it to a road that leads to the
dawn of New Labour. The first great newspaper of workers ' L'Atelier' suggest that once he is
the master of instruments and the products of his labour ( as a result of the new labour which
gave rights for the labourers to assert a control over their means of production) the worker
cannot manage to convince himself that he is working on his own interest. This further leads to
a series of certain other questions that includes the strange attempts that are at work to rebuild
the world around a centre,the very centre from which the inhabitants wanted to escape.
Thus he concludes the essay by claiming that it is to some extent the lesson of the impossible,
that of the rejection of the established order even in the face of the extinction of utopia.