I write out a sense that Ranciére is profoundly right, that he captures and expresses so much that is vital in his understanding of the redistribution of the sensible, and the ways in which dissensus can interrupt the police order. I also write from a sense that he misses, overlooks or fails to see so much that is vital in the politics of intersectionality. If ‘political dispute’ is ‘an interlocution that undermines the very situation of interlocution’ (DT 100, M 141), the politics of interpretation undermines the very articulation of the police order.
There is not one police order; there are many. There are conflicting worlds, which contest one another, which sometimes overlap with one another, which often collide with one another, collisions that can be dissensual. There are also underground worlds, worlds that cut across continents and seas, networks of feminist, queer and trans theorists, decolonial and race theorists, and communities of contestation within these worlds. As María Lugones puts it, ‘Resistant networks are often historically muted or distorted. Communication is complex. Expressive gestures, acts, movements, and behaviors are often incommunicative with respect to some audiences and communicative with respect to others; meaning is often conveyed obliquely, indirectly, sometimes in ways hard to access but always differentially accessible to audiences related in terms of social power’.1
There is not one dominant world, there are many, and the world that dominates in one context is not the world that dominates in another. While in one world, a work by the Guerrilla Girls might be political in the sense that Ranciére opposes, in another world it might function dissensually. Whether the message of an artwork is clear is dependent upon the world in which it is perceived. Perhaps it is impossible to capture all at once the complexity of miscommunication and communication, of significance, insignificance and missed significance. Yet, it is not impossible to acknowledge the salience and importance of registering that this complexity exists in ways that will make it difficult for all of us, even those of us who are interested in trying to do so, to see or understand the ways we are implicated in different forms of dominance. Rancière claims that ‘the name of an injured community that invokes its rights is always the name of the anonym, the name of anyone’ (1992, 60). Yet, the history of feminism, to take just one example, suggests otherwise. It suggests that the false universality of terms such as ‘men’, ‘citizens’ or ‘humans’ (1992, 60) is often replicated in political efforts to make visible invisible categories such as women, with the result that movements that take themselves to be in the name of women in general, in fact operate in ways that exclude women who are not white, cisgendered or able-bodied. This is not to contest that it should be otherwise. It is to acknowledge that the dream of solidarity Ranciére imagines is often absent, and to insist that it is there, is to fall prey to an imaginary that is constituted by sites of invisibility that demand to be excavated. To maintain that ‘the first motto of any self-emancipation movement is always the struggle against “selfishness”’ (1992, 59) is to risk overlooking that one’s own privilege will tend to make one blind to sites of vulnerability to which one’s habits of perception are not attuned, and to the work that needs to be done to become so attuned – the work of redistributing the sensible. To fail to be attuned to such sites of tension will not make them go away, just as to ignore what Aristotle has to say about women, and how it is interwoven with what he says about slaves, does not negate its political legacy.
In the introduction I suggested that Sojourner Truth’s appeal ‘ain’t I a woman?’ raises questions about the generality of the subject Ranciére assumes to constitute the category of humanity in the logical schema of social protest. Influenced by Lugones’s concept of multiple ‘worlds of sense’, the idea that lived worlds ‘organize the social as heterogeneous, multiple’, Talia Bettcher argues for an understanding of trans that illustrates how the term ‘woman’ operates differently according to the context of its signification.2 The claim to be a woman by someone belonging to a trans subculture might operate smoothly, in a way that is uncontested, while in dominant culture it might not.3 This suggests that belonging (or not belonging) to a community plays a crucial role in whether or not one’s claim to be a woman (in this case) is heard as intelligible. In one world it will make sense, while in another it will not. Similarly, whether one belongs to a community that identifies as feminist, trans or African American will affect one’s response to works by the Guerrilla Girls, Renée Cox and 2Fik.
If, as Ranciére suggests, Flaubert anticipates Adorno in writing the first anti-kitsch novel, I have suggested that in killing Emma, Flaubert also prepares the ground for the feminization of mass culture that is characteristic of high modernism, and that he does so by displacing his Orientalism onto the character he must kill. Flaubert makes Emma into the vehicle by which he himself, as the forerunner of critical theory, can transcend the temptation to which she succumbs, and for which she must be killed. Emma treats the equivalence of art and life as if art were life, she materializes the spiritual. She puts blue vases on her mantelpiece; she mistakes art for furniture. What differentiates Emma from Flaubert in the end? Emma is the matter, or the content of the literary form Flaubert administers, she is the matter shaped by Flaubert’s active form. Emma is the object, the objectified; Flaubert is the author, the writer, the inventor, the subject. Emma is the passive vessel through which Flaubert’s meaning flows. In this gendered division of labour, how far has Flaubert departed from the gendered Aristotelian metaphysics of form and matter, and how far does Ranciére reiterate this failure, when he fails to mention or to notice it? How far might Ranciére’s failure to see this gendering be underwritten b y his neglect of the complexity with which Aristotelian form and matter are embedded in a narrative that interweaves the inferiority of slaves to masters and women to men, and the legacy of this interweaving for political theory and aesthetics? In question is whether Rancière does not put back into play, in Panagia’s words, the very ‘forces of necessity that arrange [peoples and objects] according to a specific structure of correspondence and representation’ (2014, 293) that Rancière sees Flaubert’s style as breaking away from.
What must we say about Sojourner Truth? Must we say that her speech belongs to the ‘world police’ which ‘can sometimes achieve some good’ (DT 139, M 188)? Should we say that Sojourner Truth’s speech does not qualify as political in Rancière’s sense because it appeals to her identity as a black woman who is a slave? Or, should we say that it does qualify as political because it addresses itself to white women, who at the time of the speech were still fighting for their own recognition as political subjects, and as such did not constitute a party that was ‘already given’ (DT 102, M 143)? Or, should we rather turn the question around and ask how Rancière can fail to consider how Flaubert’s Emma embodies an Orientalist feminization of mass culture? Or, how he can represent Aristotle as if the rule of husbands over wives had no bearing on his Politics, and as if it were not interwoven with his discussion of slavery? Should we ask how Rancière can ignore the fact that the logic of social contract theory or that of Marx’s analysis of labour is thoroughly colonialist and sexist? What does it mean to disqualify in advance instances of political subjectification as insufficiently political or democratic in Rancière’s sense, when his own ‘political’ discourse itself often reflects invisible white masculinity? How can Rancière demand that properly political instances of subjectification will be ‘floating subjects that deregulate all representation of places and portions’ (DT 100, M 140), when his own discourse fails to deregulate such representation?
I have put into motion, during the course of this book, Rancière’s notions of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible. I have shown how these are notions indebted to Kant and Lyotard, along with other philosophers, notions that twist away from their authors even as they recall and recapitulate and regurgitate them. Rancière has a way of reading authors so that they say something else, say something slightly more than perhaps they wanted to, than they would have done, than they meant to; he moves them through a process of disidentification. He takes their texts, and reshapes their histories, he receives their concepts, and he bends them into something new, so that when you go back and read Kant and Hegel it seems as if they had always been saying something different, as if they were saying this new thing all along. He has the mark of a philosopher, a thinker, a cultural critic who makes it easier to dip into the history of philosophy, as if you were licking an ice cream, easier to find something there that is very much more to your taste than you might have found before. Kant’s conflict of the faculties becomes dissensual, and the monochrome universality of time and space starts to syncopate into different rhythms, mellow patterns that go up and down and round and round, and that do not always synchronize with one another. Art can make this happen, and so can politics.
In Fear and Loathing (2014) with the use of masks, through which we see the eyes and mouths of speakers, Gillian Wearing frames faces in ways that dislocate race, gender and age cues, as we listen to traumatic confessions of individuals whose identities are partially disguised.4 The masks cover most of the speakers’ faces, so that we only see their eyes and mouth – enough to discern the colour of their skin, but not enough to read their expressions. In a 1977 work 2 into 1, by having the words of a speaker lip-synched by another speaker, Wearing both makes visible and puts into question the gendered and age expectations we typically bring to what we see and hear, by disrupting these expectations.5 The sighs and repetitions, the tone of a voice, its hesitations, are transfigured because of the dislocation of the sentiments and thoughts these voices express from the cultural systems of reference that might normally render them legible and intelligible in relation to particular faces, genders or ages. Thus, when two young boys are seen to speak in the voice of their mother the mixture of sentiments she feels for her sons, the cruelty of some of their remarks is thrown into relief, but so too are the cultural, gendered systems out of which they arise. The material ticks and affects of the voices we hear, their despair, resignation, hopelessness, hate, love, admiration, self-doubt, humiliation, recrimination, impatience and derision are embodied in ways that are unexpected, such that the expectations we bring to what we hear are both made visible and put into question. In this way, Wearing’s work can be understood, in Rancière’s words to ‘und[o] the sensible fabric – the given order of relations between meanings and the visible’ (PA 64). The photographs and video installations of Gillian Wearing throw into relief the normative expectations we bring to our perceptions, in terms of race, gender and age, for example.
Wearing plays with the dominance of visual understanding, displacing and dislocating the smooth operation of visual cues with auditory cues. Daniel Barnes describes the effect of Wearing’s ‘iconic series’, Signs that say what you want them to say, and not Signs that say what other people want you to say (1992–3), in terms that also offer insight into her work 2 into 1.6 As Barnes says, Wearing ‘stopped people in the midst of doing something else’, and demanded that they ‘have a thought to share’, asking them to write down their immediate thoughts, allowing their ‘consciousness’ to ‘spil[l] over’. Barnes describes the effect of the placards, held by members of the public, which Wearing photographs in terms of the ‘disparity between the look on their faces and the thoughts written on their cards’. A policeman, who is supposed to help people, writes simply HELP. An urbane-looking business man in a suit writes on his placard ‘I’m desperate’. In 2 into 1 the effect of disparity is starker still, when Wearing undercuts the gendered, affective, and age-specific expectations produced by the visual cues of the two white middle-class twin brothers in school uniforms, sitting on chairs next to one another. As they lip-synch the words of their mother, who is reflecting on her relationship with the two boys, they appear to voice the conflicting, fraught and poignant sentiments their mother harbours for them, a mixture, as she says at one point, of love and hate. This technique calls up, among other things, the waywardness of generational transmission of affects, and parenting techniques, and the gendering thereof. At the same time, it persistently refuses to give way to one gender or the other, one age or another. Using the same technique, Wearing has the boys’ mother appear to voice the words of her sons, including the view that she has a flair for the dramatic, sometimes saying ‘I can’t go on’, as if she were in a ‘Laurence Olivier play’. We hear these words in the voice of her son, but we see her face, with her lips moving. One can all too easily imagine this characterization, intoned by one of the boys, to have been adopted from their father, who is unknown as far as the video installation is concerned; this simile is too mature to have come from one of the twins, no matter how ‘sophisticated’ they think they are. The boys concede that their mother is ‘good at looking after’ them, but think that she ‘is not very good at arguments’. As for their mother, she thinks that Lawrence is ‘adorable’, ‘very bright’ and ‘beautiful looking’, but that he can also be very cruel, and has a habit of putting his finger on the truth, as when he calls her a ‘failure’, something which she herself feels she is, and when he diagnoses her inability to follow through on things.
The way in which Wearing plays with our expectations in works such as Fear and Loathing and 2 into 1 highlights and problematizes the routine assumptions and expectations around gender, race and age that structure everyday life. There is a fabric, a warp and weft of the world that passes for acceptability. It happens every day, every second, every millisecond; it happens all over the world: in corridors, conferences, workplaces, streets, the tube, universities, in the desert; little instances of aggression, microaggressions, little gestures, not so little gestures, a series of words, a string of unchallenged assumptions feeding seamlessly into the fabric of things. You’ve seen it all before a million times.
A male tennis coach, who is coaching both men and women, in a social holiday resort setting refers to the serve of a top-twenty player as ‘girlish’. Glances are exchanged among all the women present. It is pointed out a few minutes later in the nicest possible way, thrown into the conversation, as if haphazardly, that it is interesting how Serena Williams serve is in fact faster than some of the men’s. The comment goes right over the male coach’s head, who concedes: Yes, Serena Williams serves ‘like a man’. And while we are on the subject of Serena, the racial context of her reception on court and off by tennis aficionados is brought to the surface by a series of observations by the poet Claudia Rankine, who in her book Citizen refers to all the manifestly incorrect line calls made by white umpires in crucial tennis games that Serena Williams would have won without those blatantly incorrect line calls. ‘Neither her father nor her mother’, says Rankine ‘nor her sister nor Jehovah her God nor the Nike camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world’ (C 26).
Rankine says the way in which Serena Williams’ body can appear in the ‘historically white space’ of the world of tennis reminds her of ‘Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”’ (C 25). If politics is, as Rancière suggests, a matter of aesthetics, and aesthetics is white, do black bodies ‘fluctuate’? Are their ‘moments, places, occurrences’ (DT 89, M 127) only achieved when ‘thrown against a sharp white background’ (C 25), or can they transform the colour of that background? How can those ‘fragile and fleeting’ inscriptions of equality that manage to establish themselves be extended and maximized, so that the power of these inscriptions is materialized? (DT 88, M 126).
When is anger insanity, and when is it something to let go? When does an individual become capable of claiming a right to anger in the face of the ‘low flame’, the ‘constant drip’ (C 32) that constitutes the ‘quotidian struggles against dehumanization’ (C 24)? When is silence acquiescence to invisibility, and when is it just exhaustion? How do you negotiate the short circuit between invisibility, visibility and hypervisibility? When do you carry what does not seem to belong to you, and how do you recognize that it is part of what made you you (see C 55)?
Thinking together Rankine’s reflections on what it takes to become a citizen (C 151) and Rancière’s reflections on the distribution of space and time suggests new ways of framing and counting subjects. If perception is structured by ‘the partition of the perceptible that defines the lot of individuals and parties’ (DT 63, M 97), such divisions inform what subjects see and hear, what we allow ourselves to feel, how we judge the world and gauge ourselves in relationship to its reality, its sanity or insanity, our sanity or insanity, how our perceptions and judgements are structured by doubts and disbelief, by blindness and failures.
‘He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?’ (C63) There is the incursion of the unconscious into the field of perception. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t see you. … No, no, no, I really didn’t see you’ (C77). When are the omissions of sanctioned perceptions just omissions, and when do they themselves become moments of insanity? When the frames of culturally sanctioned perception are tilted so that they momentarily come into view, can we take those moments and use them to reshape the wrongs of the world, rework the structures of perception that make the world the way it is? This question twists away from Rancière.
Rancière’s notion of dissensus operates by redistributing the sensible. When a political or artistic act intervenes in the fabric of the world it can reshape temporality and spatiality. Art can slow the world down or speed it up, it can make time stop in its tracks, it can freeze a black moment into a flower, spelling out the petals by tattooing them onto the pure bright shiny glistening limestone underfoot, or swirling it into a mosaic snake that curves its stretchy way along the entire length of the promenade. Waves of black that rise up to meet you, making the pavement come up at you as you run over them, engulfing you, nearly swallowing you whole, swelling and swerving like a roller coaster so that you feel like the ground is going to eat you up, and you are spilling over, falling through the world, and the ground is not flat any more, it is seething, curling so that you might just topple into the other side, where the waves are crashing and spuming onto the long, thin, white symmetrical steps that pave their way for you to walk on into the sea.
Art can zigzag time up and down a bronzed and burnished strip of a geometrically planed hill, it can turn the dark purple of a midnight sea into a night of unending blue from which you might never recover. It can spread itself out in a fragrant glory of blue and green and yellow tiled pavement for you to walk over and on top of and underneath in your imagination, twisting and turning into the simple, clear shapes of colour, better than Mondrian, because you can walk on them, and let their tones seep into you as the city bathes you in its, white, incandescent light, so luminous it tips not just into blue but sometimes into almost lemon yellow.
Notes
1 María Lugones, Pilgramages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against multiple oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 25.
2 Lugones, Pilgramages/Peregrinajes, p. 20.
3 Talia Mae Bettcher says, ‘When a trans woman says “I’m a woman” and her body is precisely the kind of body taken to invalidate a claim to womanhood in mainstream culture, the claim is true in some trans subcultures because the meaning of the word “woman” is different … Indeed, in some trans subcultures, trans women can be taken as paradigmatic women rather than as women who are only marginally so, i.e., on the border of male and female. This contestation is not merely verbal, since it tracks a contrast in underlying gender practices: there can be situations in which a trans woman lives a rich and vibrant life as woman, has friends as a woman, is loved as a woman, inhabits a social milieu in which she is a woman in a trans subculture, and perhaps experiences sexual violence as a woman while simultaneously being viewed as a man who lives as a woman in dominant culture. In that culture, for example, if she were incarcerated, she would be housed in jail as a man, with other men; her entire life as a woman could be obliterated’, ‘Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 39, no. 2 (2014): 383–406, see esp. p. 389.
4 See http://sfaq.us/2015/01/everyone-gillian-wearing-at-regen-projects/
5 https://youtube/36WUgFMDY-M
6 http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/public-faces-and-private-lives-gillian-wearing-whitechapel-gallery-london/ (accessed 27 July 2015).