2.67
Agreeing to the terms then subsequently engaging in negotiation belongs to what Rancière calls the police. This circulation allows for the smooth operation of the police order which paradigmatically says, “there is nothing to see here.”[1] Politics, on the other hand, is the disruption of the established circulation and order of value, exchange, and aesthetics.[2] Politics disrupts the realm of the sensible (§2.24) and allows things to appear other than they have.
To agree that trees are resources, timber, lumber, and product is to already have agreed to too much. Trees can grab us, capture our attention, and reorient our conceptions. Attentive to this possibility, our words can disrupt the realm of the sensible for others.
I claim that the disruption of the realm of the sensible doesn’t always begin with, nor is it restricted to, humans. — The world disrupts the world. In this auto-disruption, there are two (or more) worlds in one. Auto-disruption is always hetero-disruption.
Why not accept that truths and worlds can be reconciled or synthesized in a grand vision of truth? Even if there are regional contexts for truths, why not accept that they can be lain just so and fit together like a puzzle?
Because this view isn’t consonant with phenomena. It reconciles difference by over-laying it with identity.[3] It presupposes we can come to a set of objective or meta terms of truth or agreement. – But the challenge that someone like Rancière puts forth is that politics precisely involves such terms. To assume that we can come to a consensus on terms is to already have excluded or denied politics, divergent ontologies, and hence rupture.
‘But why not think that through discussion, familiarization, and so on, we could come to a reconciliation of divergent ontologies? Perhaps they describe the world differently, starting from different premises, but couldn’t we still piece them all together: e.g., we think that X is Y, they think X is Z, and both views are acceptable.’
So, a kind of tolerant, multicultural view? Yes, this is one way to respond. But we need to be careful for the issue is that this response often implicitly understands groups, through individuals, to host beliefs or interpretations (which individuals ‘have’ in their heads and which lead to the enactment of customs and behaviours) that they use to understand reality, which we all agree is there: material that is atomistic, hard and solid, and so on. In other words, the picture is that we lay different interpretations over the same reality. This picture seems to legitimate other views, but actually sees them as legitimate only within the framework of reality it proposes and thus as beliefs or interpretations (§2.4). However, such a picture is, in its entirety, an interpretation, in the sense that it’s a way of disclosing reality and a way that reality is disclosed for or from a particular disclosure.
There are better and worse ways to engage with divergent views. It doesn’t seem that “dragging […] understanding in its native costume into technocracy’s court”[4] or “the isolated gypsy in the Tokyo Stock Exchange being asked to explain herself”[5] are the most honest or responsible ways. A museum or anthropological mentality that thinks ‘document these ways so that we have them before they change’ isn’t the most responsive way. “We aren’t more advanced if we were to somehow catalogue various ways things are seen — if we indexed how theis (or could be) seen” (§1.52).
My divergent view (§2.63) tries to accord better with phenomena. It tries to take seriously that different ways of being are just that: different. There are different ontologies. Yes, we have no choice but to see them from within our own ontological understanding and metaphysics — it’s unavoidable that we must do metaphysics. The question is how much we respect difference instead of subsuming it to an identity whose terms we dictate. We undertake a kind of onto-ethical methodological skepticism: where we know we haven’t fully or adequately responded to the phenomena.
‘But how does your view not fall prey to the same criticism you level towards multiculturalism or tolerance? After all, you also bring in metaphysical claims regarding the reality of being (as metaphoric, for instance).’
My claims aren’t making assertions about the reality of the situation, but are rather gestures to assert the multiplicity of the situation, the multiplicity of disclosures. ‘But this is still a picture of the structure of reality!’ Yes, it is and I’ve expressed some reservations about this (e.g., §2.47, §2.52).
Metaphoric ontology is a way to grapple with problems and questions that’ve emerged from a particular historical trajectory. It itself is posed as problem and question, not merely as response. Every response questions a question. — There’s no final resting place.
[1] “‘Move along! There is nothing to see here!’ The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.” (Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” par. 22, p. 9.)
[2] Rancière, Dis-agreement, p. 28–31.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), see in particular p. 42–50.
[4] Tim Lilburn and Jan Zwicky, Contemplation and Resistance: A Conversation (Saskatoon: JackPine, 2003), p. 5.
[5] Jan Zwicky, “Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation,” in Alkibiades’ Love: Essays in Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), p. 100.