Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality

Bibliographic Data

ID5339436
AuthorsTodd May (0000-0003-4369-931X, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume36
Issue2
Pages20-36
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.2007.0033
OpenAlexW2010382468
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited3

Jacques Rancière and the Ethics of Equality Todd May (bio) How shall we characterize what is proper to contemporary anarchism? What quality or qualities make it anarchist and not something else? What distinguishes its critique of capitalism from Marxism, or its anti-authoritarianism from nihilism? What draws the various threads of different anarchisms together into a single weave? At one time, people thought that the uniqueness of anarchism lay in its critique of the state. While Marxists sought to take over the state, or to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat until such time as the state would wither away, anarchists sought instead to abolish the state outright. Is it not Proudhon himself who writes, "To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so" (293-4). And Bakunin, in his criticism of Marx's program, points out that "the doctrinaire revolutionaries, whose objective is to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins, have never been and will never be enemies of the state...They are enemies only of existing governments because they want to take their place" (137). For Marx, the central category of oppression is exploitation, the extraction of surplus value from the worker. If exploitation is the problem, there is no bar to commandeering the forces of the state in order to dismantle it. True, the state will no longer be necessary once exploitation has ceased, and then it can disappear of its own accord. But in the meantime, the state must be seized as a powerful source for the revolution of the means of production. In contrast, it is said, anarchism finds the problem to lie not primarily in exploitation but in power itself. Any institution that can exert power is to be resisted, and the state, which possesses the most power, is to be resisted above all. This is a misreading of anarchism. We should not see the difference between Marxism and anarchism as lying in the argument between those who would lay the blame for oppression at the feet of the economy and those who instead would lay it at the feet of the state. While this [End Page 20] characterization captures Marxism rightly, it misreads anarchism. What anarchism criticizes is not power, strictly speaking, but domination. What is the difference? We might say that domination is power that operates deleteriously. The deleteriousness can happen in many ways. A boss dominates a worker by the mere fact that he can withhold the worker's means of subsistence. The mainstream media dominates the public by veiling the interests of the elites that fund it. Domination can happen in more subtle ways as well, ways that involve no conscious intention. Michel Foucault's works, especially Discipline and Punish and the first volume of his History of Sexuality, are analyses of domination without intentional dominators. In the former he details the ways people come to be dominated by the practices of discipline to which they become subject, and by the practices of psychology and psychiatry that form the epistemic basis of that discipline. There are those who benefit from this domination, in particular the economic elites of capitalism. But the beneficiaries do not engage in the domination; in fact, they are unaware of its occurrence. The History of Sexuality depicts how sexual domination has arisen over the course of the last several centuries. But again, it is not a history of how some people sexually dominate others, but of how the very category of the sexual can become a form of domination. Anarchism, then, should be seen as a critique of domination, rather than as a critique of the state. Unlike Marxism, anarchism does not concern itself with a particular type of oppression—exploitation—that arises in a particular arena—the mode of capitalist production. Rather, it concerns itself with the various dominations that occur throughout the social arena. The state may stand out as a particularly egregious instigator of domination, because of its concentration of bureaucratic

Aesthetics · Alienation · Authoritarianism · Capitalism · Criticism · Democracy · Dictatorship · Dystopia · Law and economics · Nihilism · Oppression · Political science · Proletariat · Sociology · State (computer science) · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy

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