After a frustrating summer trying to trace an elusive politics of noise in the pages of Jacques Rancière’s Disagreement, I’d pretty much abandoned all hope of explaining to my own satisfaction, let alone anybody else’s, just what Rancière means by “politics”, how it differs from “police” and what part exactly is played by “the part that has no part”. The problem was that all of my attempted explications collapsed back into Rancière’s own terms and these seemed to preclude in advance the production of any positive examples. However, after a diversion in the discussion of an article by Ross Chambers in the ASCA Articulations seminar on Friday took us back to Rancière, I’m going to give it another go and see if I can make some connections with other theorists of noise.
The article up for discussion was Chambers’ account of Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s ‘epistemology of the closet’, entitled “Strategic Constructivism? Sedgwick’s Ethics of Inversion” and published in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critcal Theory
To recap the article
Chambers takes us back to the 1980s when US gay and lesbian studies were stymied by arguments between essentialists who argued that homosexuality was hard-wired into biology, and constructivists who argued that sexuality is always a discursive construct.
It was an argument that had the uncomfortable corollary that political activism was most effectively propagated by essentialists (the philosophically conservative position) as constructivists were more or less condemned to denounce any gay-affirmative work as simply perpetuating the object of the action in their victimhood.
Sedgwick’s strategy was to rethink the essentialist/constructivist binary through the terms minoritizing and essentializing. She argued that there is an underlying incoherence in thought about homosexuality: most educated westerners think that there is “a distinct population of persons who really are gay” – the minoritizing (essentialist) view, but also believe that sexual identity is radically unstable – that homosexuality is closeted in Western masculinist culture. In Sedgwick’s account the closet is the device for managing or policing that incoherence.
Although Sedgwick undertook this move for ’strategic’ reasons, Chambers argues that there is much more at stake. He argues that the incoherence is inherent in any social taxonomy which attempts to sort people into different kinds or classes – thereby creating distinct classes out of a continuum of difference (whether sexual, racial, social, ethnic, or based on able-bodiedness, for example).
Paradigmatic thinking
Any such category will be minoritizing or essentialising in that its members will have been selected contrastively from a continuum. However, the categories themselves are totalizing or universalizing in that they make a claim to constitute all that there is: you must be either straight or gay, man or woman, rational or irrational. Consequently to be a member of one category necessarily involves carrying a trace of the constitutive other: there are no straights without gays, no men without women, no giants without dwarves. That’s just the way paradigms work: paradigms minoritize and essentialize their members by asserting equivalence between all their members (all homosexuals are sexually attracted to members of their own sex). However paradigms insofar as they claim to constitute a totality – to exhaust all the options – entail that any essentialist identity is destabilized by the traces of the other against which the membership is defined and upon which it depends.
The universalizing function of such paradigms means that other possible groupings are forgotten or occluded (paradigmatic thinking forgets the differences within the set in order to concentrate on the differences between members of other sets). This forgetting or invisibility can be represented schematically like this,
red y black y
red x black z
Where the shared qualities of ‘y’ cannot be seen because of the relationship of equivalence asserted between members of the category red and the universalising logic of the paradigm red/black as a whole.
Rancière
It’s at this point that Chambers’ account of Sedgwick seems to illuminate, or at least throw into relief, Rancière’s ideas of “politics”, the “partition of the sensible” and “the part that has no part”. Once again reverting to the simplicity of the schema: what passes for politics and that which JR wants to call police, seems to correspond directly with the categories red and black. Rancière dubs this kind of politics “police” because it is concerned with maintaining bodies in their existing places through the “partition of the sensible”:
The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of the ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise… (29)
Consequently minoritizing political strategies such as affirmative action are effectively “police” actions in that they maintain the paradigm or in Rancière’s terms, the existing partition of the sensible. For Rancière the truly political corresponds to the “part that has no part” the emergence, or the self-presentation of ‘y’-ness. Thus:
Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse that which was only heard as noise. (30)
For Rancière the emergence of the occluded, or ‘y’-ness, occurs through “literarity” – a “wandering excess” which Davide Panagea glosses thus:
This excess of words over the existing distribution of the common that establishes the communal order represents the egalitarian power of language – which Ranciere calls literarity – the abiltiy to disturb the existing circuits of words, meanings and places of enunicaition….
A gloss which seems to deliver us back at the door of William Paulson’s remarks about “literature as the noise of culture” and “literary language as that which is crafted to maximise the potential of noise.” Paulson’s idea that the noise or difficulty of a text stimulates the system’s self-organisation at a higher level then takes on an immediate political dimension. Literature comes to be defined in terms of re-partitioning the sensible, a re-partitioning which is achieved through its noise.
Queer noise
However, it’s the apparent equivalence between queerness and noise that I want to highlight here. Is this just a ’straight’ substitution or does the translation of queerness into noise bring anything else to the model?
One possibility is that noise spatializes and temporalizes the Chambers’ paradigm. Rancière speaks of noise because in the attempt to re-invent the political in the face of the apparent triumph of neo-liberal economics, he returns to Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between logos (sense) and phonos (sound).
For Rancière this distinction entails two different forms of spatial organisation [What Manuel DeLanda would term forms of structuration?] between the market (agora) and the city (polis). Attention to noise as the voice of the occluded, the part that has no part, provides a foundation for a model of community which is more than a market because it is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but in which the occluded defines the totality as a process of becoming. The aletheria, or process of unveiling, entailed by Sedgwick’s ‘ethic of inversion’, on the other hand seems to hold the paradigm in a condition of stasis.
This post is just to note that this is potentially useful approach for talking about Sinclair’s take on the transformation of London in the 1980s: another situation where at first sight there seems to be a profound mismatch between the progressive positions philosophically and politically. Rather than viewing his “occultism” (anachronistically) as a repsonse to Thatcher’s “voodoo economics”, it seems possible to invoke the “part that has no part” as the foundation of a radical visionary tradition within the presentation of London… but more on this later. Next post I think I want to see if DeLanda’s virtual abstract machines connect up with this distinction between the spatialisation of the polis and the agora.
