User:Eric Strome/Ranciere Critical Notebook
From Studyplace
[edit] Notes
A pdf of some notes I took during the course, with two pages from Ranciere's talk first, then several from classes second.
[edit] Comments
First, the format of the course was good, in that it afforded an engagement with a good-enough-sized portion of Ranciere’s work to get a sense of his overriding concerns and ideas. I'd like to take more of these types of classes, and I think general demand for them would be high (yes, this is a shameless request of those who've offered 1 credit engagements with single authors in the past to offer them again...).
While our class discussions were fruitful and helped me to situate Ranciere in a larger context, his visit was most intriguing. This was in part because Ranciere used many terms and phrases that were not in the course reading, but were used synonymously or interchangeably with concepts I had read, thereby fleshing out the meanings discussed in class. One of these was “consensus of the sensible” as synonymous with distribution of the sensible, which added the notion of one’s own complicity in the police in a way that confirmed our small group’s suspicions. The idea that common sense evidence, notions of possibility and impossibility, and so on were acts of agreement rather than observations of instituted fact left more room for the kind of agency for which Ranciere calls.
Another clarification came from Ranciere’s comment that “the part of those with no part is different from those who are excluded.” Whereas in class our discussion of the distribution of the sensible focused largely on exclusion, with some going so far as to suggest that the simple right to vote achieved inclusion, the statement above indicates that one is within and yet voiceless. A different way this was put during the talk is that a shared landscape but a divided territory is the division of the sensible.
Ranciere’s response to Professor Mirzoeff’s question of the similarity between distribution of the sensible and Foucault’s episteme was instructive. Ranciere admitted some similarity, but claimed that a change of episteme is more structural than what he has in mind, since for him a change in episteme means that some things are now impossible. Ranciere did not go further to say whether this meant that with a re-distribution of the sensible there are only altered probabilities related to centrality/peripherality, but that would be my guess as to how he’d continue that line of thought. Much like Quine’s web of belief, it seems to me that Ranciere has in mind a web of the sensible.
This has implications that dovetail with Ranciere’s answer to the question I asked during the general q&a. My question was that if Ranciere is reordering things from Althuser’s theory (among others), which posits a flow from science to truth to liberation, to one which posits a flow from emancipation to pedagogic experiment to verification, what is the result of the latter, and how to feel/measure it? Steeped in pragmatism as I am, I had already attached to Ranciere a pragmatic bent while reading, especially in his claims about language and truth (see slides 11-16 of our group presentation). His answer – that measuring the results of politics is a matter of “what landscape of the possible exists” – confirmed my reading, and was strikingly similar to Rorty’s notion that the measure of anything is what vista it affords. For the record, I don’t think that Ranciere is anywhere near a sanguine progressivism, and I don’t think that this pragmatic bent entails a progressive incrementalism, but I have never seen that eventuality as the necessary end of the line for pragmatism anyway.
[edit] P.S.
Ranciere claimed that while there had been a time when a new medium meant new expressions, these days new mediums are mimetic of established expressiveness! Controversial to say the least, but I’m fairly sure I’m sympathetic.
