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A Thorn in the Side of Social History: Jacques Rancière and Les Révoltes logiques*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

Mischa Suter*
Affiliation:
Research Centre for Economic and Social History, University of Zurich E-mail: misu@fsw.uzh.ch
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Summary

The article explores the intersection of history and politics in the works of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, by focusing on the collectively edited journal Les Révoltes logiques (1975–1985). It argues that the historiographic project of Les Révoltes logiques took up specific forms of counter-knowledge that were embedded in radical left-wing politics of their day. It further traces both the engagement with historiography and the role of history in Rancière's later work after the dissolution of the journal. Its conclusion looks at certain shared interests between some of Rancière's themes and some recent writing of social history.

Résumés

Mischa Suter. Une épine dans le flanc de l'histoire sociale : Jacques Rancière et Les Révoltes logiques.

Dans cet article, l'auteur examine l'intersection de l'histoire et de la politique dans les œuvres du philosophe français Jacques Rancière, en se concentrant sur le journal publié collectivement Les Révoltes logiques (1975–1985). L'auteur argumente que le projet historiographique de Les Révoltes logiques a revêtu des formes spécifiques de contre-connaissance qui étaient ancrées dans la politique de gauche radicale de leur époque. Elle retrace en outre la participation à l'historiographie et le rôle de l'histoire dans l’œuvre tardive de Rancière après la dissolution du journal. Sa conclusion évoque quelques intérêts communs à certains thèmes de Rancière et à divers écrits récents de l'histoire sociale.

Zusammenfassungen

Mischa Suter. Ein Stachel in der Seite der Sozialgeschichte: Jacques Rancière und die Zeitschrift Les Révoltes logiques.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Schnittstellen zwischen Geschichte und Politik in den Arbeiten des französischen Philosophen Jacques Rancière und fokussiert dabei auf die kollektiv herausgegebene Zeitschrift Les Révoltes logiques (1975–1985). Es wird die These vertreten, das historiographische Projekt von Les Révoltes logiques habe spezifische Formen des Gegenwissens aufgegriffen, die in die linksradikale Politik der Zeit eingebettet waren. Darüber hinaus verfolgt der Beitrag auch die Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichtsschreibung und die Rolle der Geschichte in Rancières späteren, nach der Einstellung der Zeitschrift erschienenen Arbeiten. Abschließend wird einigen gemeinsamen Anliegen Rancières und der jüngeren Sozialgeschichte nachgespürt.

Resúmenes

Mischa Suter. Un en el lado de la historia social: Jacques Rancière y Les Révoltes logiques.

Este texto explora la intersección de la historia y la política en los trabajos del filósofo francés Jacques Rancière centrándose en la revista editada colectivamente Les Révoltes logiques (1975–1985). Se arguye que el proyecto historiográfico de Les Révoltes logiques promovió formas específicas de contra-conocimiento que arraigaron en la política radical de izquierdas de aquellos años. Además, se traza el compromiso con la historiografía y el papel de la historia en los últimos trabajos de Rancière tras la disolución de la revista. Su conclusión plantea la existencia de intereses compartidos entre los temas explorados por Rancière y algunas de las recientes orientaciones de la historia social.

Type
Surveys
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 2011

What is the meaning of a thinker of the inactuel, such as Jacques Rancière, becoming “actual”? The French philosopher, occasional historian, and former Maoist militant (born 1940) attracts attention today beyond narrow circles of academic specialists or theory-obsessed individuals. The art world has taken up Rancière's concepts, and the introductions and collective volumes are blossoming in literary and film studies, aesthetics, pedagogy, and political philosophy.Footnote 1 What has hardly been discussed, however, is Rancière's relationship to history. This may well be because since the late 1990s the philosopher has more rarely referred to the archives of working-class history to develop his arguments than he did for a while from the mid 1970s onwards. But an understanding of history as rupture lies at the heart of Rancière's project. In this sense, Rancière has practised historiography in order, as a philosopher, to shift his questions to a different terrain. He has also critically commented on the politics and poetics of historical science. His texts form, according to the historian Arlette Farge who has been involved in Rancière's projects,Footnote 2 a “thorn in the side” of social history.Footnote 3

Rancière writes of a collection of some of his earlier essays that they contain words “today seen as awkward”, such as “people, poor, revolution, factory, workers, proletarians” – and it is not enough to point out that at the time these texts were written, this kind of vocabulary was current usage.Footnote 4 It is rather that when they were written Rancière was already bringing different time periods together, resorting to stories and characters from the nineteenth century in order to shake the certainties of the surrounding present – the debates of the radical Left in France after 1968. I shall discuss here this double untimeliness, the connection between historiography and militant intellectual practice. This was the purpose for which a collective historical project was set up in which Rancière was involved: the periodical Les Révoltes logiques that was published from 1975 to 1981.

I shall go on to show how Les Révoltes logiques, and Rancière in his individual work, deployed the specific perspectives and methods of the radical Left movement. These included forms of “militant investigation” that have been discussed recently, particularly in connection with Italian operaismo.Footnote 5 In France, similar practices were linked with the bywords établissement and enquête – albeit against a different background and with a pronounced shift of emphasis. Établissement referred to the movement of students who went into the factories in search of the working class. The disruption of social categories by the reciprocal connection of two revolts, in the factories and the universities, also governed Rancière's assessment of 1968.Footnote 6

The present article maintains that Les Révoltes logiques sought, at a moment when the revolutionary impulse of 1968 was on the decline, to transfer certain practices of the movement into new fields. With its thirteen volumes, a special issue published in 1978 on the subject “1968”, and two collections, published 1984 and 1985,Footnote 7Les Révoltes logiques is an example of the various historical initiatives that arose in the mid 1970s, and not only in France.Footnote 8 Rancière also discussed the encounter between workers and intellectuals in his major historiographic work La nuit des prolétaires (1981).Footnote 9 Starting from a concern with working-class history, he later commented on the difficulty faced by the historical and social sciences of conceptualizing the space for a personal, emancipatory break on the part of the agents involved. I shall seek to trace the path he followed, starting with an explanation of the periodical, and going on to sketch some of Rancière's arguments.

A Collective Historical Initiative After 1968

“J'ai été amené sur le terrain de l'histoire”, Rancière said, looking back in an interview with Le Monde, “par les impasses de la grande idée des années 1968–1970: l'union de la contestation intellectuelle et du combat ouvrier.” [“I was led onto the terrain of history by the impasses of the great idea of the years 1968–1970: the union between intellectual challenge and workers’ struggle.”]Footnote 10 This turn to history started with a rejection of the theory that had marked the beginning of Rancière's intellectual development. As a student of philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS), Rancière had been, in the 1960s, a pupil of Louis Althusser. Althusser pursued the theoreticist project of defending the scientific character of Marxism against the forms of what he saw as humanistic ideology. Althusser's approach found great resonance in the Cercle d'Ulm, the ENS division of the communist student organization, which was seeking new fields of activity after the end of the Algerian war – a decisive moment of politicization for that generation.Footnote 11

Althusser's seminar led to the immensely influential publication of Lire Le Capital in 1965, with a contribution by Rancière along with those of Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet.Footnote 12 A year later, a section of the Union étudiante communiste broke away and the increasingly Maoist-inspired Union des Jeunesses Communistes (Marxistes-Léninistes) was formed.Footnote 13 With the founding of the Vietnam support committees, and the établissement movement (for more on which see below), the UJC (M-L) turned increasingly to practical forms of politics; the revolt of 1968 finally dealt a deathblow to the prestige of Althusserianism. Rancière too, under the influence of 1968 and the search for new forms of practice, made a break with his former teacher. In his critical rejection of Althusser, Rancière formulated themes that would recur later in his philosophy. Althusser, according to Rancière, pursued philosophy as a discourse of order, raising intellectuals to a controlling instance,Footnote 14 to which Rancière opposed the political concepts of “vérifications d'identité” and “interdictions de séjour”.Footnote 15 Against this “raison policière” it was necessary to pursue a “decalibration” of theoretical knowledge.

L'idéologie prolétarienne, ce n'est ni le sommaire des représentations ou des vertus ouvrières, ni le corps des doctrines ‘prolétariennes’: c'est une chaîne arrêtée, une autorité bafouée, un système de divisions entre postes de travail annulé, une riposte de masse aux innovations ‘scientifiques’ de l'exploitation, c'est aussi la médecine aux pieds nus ou l'entrée de la classe ouvrière dans l'Université chinoise. [Proletarian ideology is neither a summary of working-class representations of virtues, nor the body of ‘proletarian’ doctrines; it is a stopped assembly-line, a flouted authority, a cancelled system of divisions between jobs, a mass response to the ‘scientific’ innovations of exploitation; it is also barefoot doctors and the entrance of the working class into Chinese universities.]Footnote 16

Moreover, this was not just a turn away from the theoretical thinking of an elite. Anyone who sought to take “mass practices” seriously, from a philosophical point of view,Footnote 17 was forced to recognize the actual contradictory character of social struggles. Rancière's first publication in book form, Althusser's Lesson (1974), was accordingly the attempt at a political cartography in the wake of 1968. The question was to locate Althusser's thinking historically and politically – to trace the conditions of its emergence, what it meant in terms of intervention, and the blockages that it produced. The occasion for it was provided by Althusser's Reply to John Lewis, which had been published the previous year; a moment when gauchisme had lost its coherence and Althusser, as Rancière saw it, proposed unification in the name of the party. For gauchisme at this point had no answer to the new movements and forms of struggle that arose in the 1970s. The struggles of the women's movement, of school pupils, immigrants, and rural workers, for example, could not be brought down to a single common denominator: “It is not just that these struggles, which attack power in its varied and sometimes contradictory manifestations, present us with a multiplicity that makes achieving a synthesis more complicated. It is, more importantly, that they are themselves a multiplication of the discourses of the revolt.”Footnote 18

This “multiplication of the discourses of the revolt” was pursued by Rancière from 1969 onwards at the new university of Vincennes (Paris VIII), where Michel Foucault, who had built up the philosophy department there before he was called to the Collège de France, had intensively recruited intellectuals from the radical Left.Footnote 19 At Vincennes, non-hierarchical forms of collaboration were possible.Footnote 20 At the end of 1974, the Centre de recherches pour les idéologies de la révolte was set up. The founding manifesto of the Centre was signed by Rancière along with the feminist philosopher and historian Geneviève Fraisse, later co-editor of the nineteenth-century volume of the Histoire des femmes,Footnote 21 as well as the philosopher and author Jean Borreil. The editorial collective of the first issue of Les Révoltes logiques, in winter 1975, included Pierre Saint-Germain, Michel Souletie, Patrick Vauday, and Patrice Vermeren. In mid-1978 they were joined by Christiane Dufrancatel, Stéphane Douailler and Philippe Hoyau, and in late 1980 also by Serge Cosseron, Arlette Farge, Daniel Lindenberg and Danielle Rancière, who all had already published in the periodical.

Les Révoltes logiques combined archival research with the explicit intention of theoretical development (and particularly of not falling back on the philosophical canon). Its aim was to restore the “memory of the people”. What Les Révoltes logiques meant by this was neither the history of progress fixed on the state that marked the official historiography of the workers’ movement, nor an left-radical heroics of the worker, but also not the disillusion with gauchisme that the nouveaux philosophes (André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and others) displayed, which sought to “sprinkle Marx with the muddy waters of Kolyma” – the Siberian river that gave its name to the gulag.Footnote 22 What was characteristic of the periodical was rather the turn that is evoked in its title. On the one hand, it recalls the slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which appears in French as “on a raison de se révolter contre les réactionnaires”.Footnote 23 On the other, the expression “les révoltes logiques” is a phrase from Arthur Rimbaud's poem “Democracy”, in Illuminations, on the defeat of the Paris Commune. The full lines of this text express the triumphalism of the victors: “Aux centres nous alimenterons la plus cynique prostitution. Nous massacrerons les révoltes logiques.” [“In the metropolis we will feed the most cynical whoring. We will destroy all logical revolt.”] Taken out of context, the meaning is shifted: the inner logic of revolt is opposed to the pervasive assertion of order by the victors.Footnote 24

The journal was interested in “the materiality of the ideologies of revolt”: “les formes de perception de l'intolérable, la circulation des mots d'ordre et des idées pratiques de la révolte, les formes de savoir – manuel et intellectuel – qui transforment l'outil en arme et le lieu de l'oppression en lieu de l'insurrection”. [“the forms of perception of the intolerable, the circulation of slogans and practical ideas of revolt, the forms of knowledge – manual and intellectual – that transform the tool into a weapon and the site of oppression into a site of insurrection”.] Three directions of research were thematically sketched out: the history of feminism, of national minorities, and of working-class emancipation.Footnote 25 The journal was likewise oriented against both a traditional movement history and the modern social history and history of mentalities, prominently represented by the journal Annales, which depicted the life of the masses as almost unchanging, and relegated historical change either to structural forces or to the elites. This oppositional stance, however, was not designed to lead to any counter-history of spontaneous revolts against organized forms. It was rather a matter of putting this opposition itself in question, by confronting different versions of history (for example, an official movement and local struggles).Footnote 26

These goals were pursued by way of archive-based research initiatives, around half of these focusing on the emancipation of workers and women between 1830 and the Paris Commune of 1871, being followed in frequency by contributions on the twentieth century and a few on the eighteenth.Footnote 27 The continuous representation of women's history was exceptional in French historiography of that time – apart from Pénélope, a journal of women's history founded in 1978.Footnote 28 The essays of that time often presented a situation of concrete contradiction, as shown by a glance at the first issue. Here we see workers visiting the Paris world exhibition of 1867 and scrutinizing the machines presented there – how was the thinking of a class formed in this connection, in the contradictory field of male wage-labour and female domestic labour? How did feminists in the revolutionary year of 1848 seize the word, and what arguments for a feminine moralization of society presented in this connection were passed to and fro between bourgeois and proletarian women? How did anarchists organize power, for example the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Barcelona in 1936? Or, as was pursued by oral history called témoignage, what combatant ideal did young French communists in the early 1920s develop after the October Revolution, and how did this ideal intersect with the tradition of syndicalism?Footnote 29 The spectrum of articles stretched from the deserters of Year II of the French Revolution, who refused to defend the Republic in the name of democratic arguments, via the legal status of artists, the retail trade in printed matter and French settlement in Algeria in the nineteenth century, through to the struggle against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.Footnote 30

When the journal of social history, Le Mouvement social, asked Les Révoltes logiques for a comment on the occasion of its one hundredth issue, its editors took the opportunity to demarcate themselves from the project of the cumulative advance of knowledge that, in their eyes, characterized social history. Social history, for Les Révoltes logiques, served only to fine-tune the “already known”.Footnote 31 The editorial collective rejected the pressure of contextualization, which social history pursued and which in the last instance only reproduced the perspective of the masters. Instead, the politics of the archive should be included in the investigation, to show what in the tradition is kept silent. Utterance should therefore not be taken as an outpouring of social circumstances that can be completely reconstructed, but rather as making a political break: “Ce qui nous intéresse: que les archives soient des discours, les ‘idées’ des événements, que l'histoire soit en chaque instant rupture, questionnable seulement d'ici, seulement politiquement.” [“What matters to us is that archives should be discourses, ‘ideas’ should be events, that history should be at each moment a rupture, to be questioned only from here and now, only politically.”]Footnote 32

“To question history on the basis of revolt and the revolt on the basis of history” meant intervening politically with a polemical and archeological perspective.Footnote 33 In this connection, the perspectives and methods of this research were marked by forms of practice of the Left: the search for counter-knowledge that students pursued in their sojourns in the factories, and the project of letting prisoners be heard which Foucault's Groupe d'information sur les prisons had pioneered. In the following section we shall deal with Les Révoltes logiques’ relation to those practices, which were linked with the bywords établissement and enquête.

Militant Investigation Between Archive, Factory, And Prison

In its founding manifesto, the journal had linked the experience of intellectuals in the factories with the reference back of contemporary struggles to historical experience.Footnote 34 An important point of reference was the ten-month strike at the watch factory Lip in Besançon, where workers had resumed production for themselves.Footnote 35 Self-management (autogestion) at Lip meant “a slap in the face and a lesson” for the Maoists,Footnote 36 who were simply not present in this path-breaking strike – a historical study showed seventeen actively producing strikes in the immediate wake of Lip.Footnote 37 At Lip, according to Les Révoltes logiques, old forms of struggle were rediscovered – such as the guiding idea of the association of producersFootnote 38 – that the CGT trade-union federation, the Communist Party and the Maoists had all let be forgotten.

Through the interest in modes of counter-knowledge and the encounter between different modes of speech, Les Révoltes logiques was linked with the établissement movement. The final issue from 1981 contained the autobiographical reports of two former établis: the thematic focus was on politiques du voyage, what Rancière later called “the core political experience of our generation”.Footnote 39 A “journey” of this kind into the factory was made in France between 1967 and 1989 by some two or three thousand individuals, of whom around one-third were women.Footnote 40 Retrospectively, the établissement movement has been frequently categorized as akin to scouting or para-religious sacrifice.Footnote 41 That assessment, which according to the historian Donald Reid followed the narrative of lost Catholic faith, reduced the complex motivational situation of the individual militants to a simple model, and obscures more than it illuminates.Footnote 42

Factory work out of political conviction was generally no fleeting episode. Out of a sample of 283 établis who were questioned, 45 per cent had stayed for 6 years or more (22 per cent longer than 10), 31 per cent between 2 and 5 years, and 24 per cent less than 2 years.Footnote 43 The origin of the movement lay in an enquête campaign.Footnote 44 In summer 1967 some forty members of the UJC(M-L), following Mao Zedong's motto “no investigation, no right to speak”,Footnote 45 began to question port, factory, and rural workers.Footnote 46 In May–June 1968, the organization was surprised by events: an ouvrierist position had led them to underestimate the student revolt, and they proved incapable of intervening in the greatest strike movement in French history.Footnote 47 As a result, the UJC(M-L) broke up, with some of its members forming the Gauche prolétarienne, along with others from the Mouvement du 22-Mars. A core tenet of the group's politics – according to Jacques Rancière, a member of it until 1972 – was the demand to abolish the separation between mental and manual labour.Footnote 48

There had been analysis of everyday factory life from a perspective of struggle long before the Maoist movement. And in France after 1968, this was by no means pursued only by Maoists. The originally Trotskyist group around the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, which had increasingly developed council-democratic, autonomous positions, had pursued investigations in the 1950s in car factories and among white-collar workers.Footnote 49 Its point of departure was that only attention to experience, conceived as the link between objective relationships and subjective agency, made it possible to pursue the movements of the class.

The post-1968 enquêtes shared the concern not to objectify workers as a sociological “object of investigation”, but to use research as a moment of intervention for their ability to act.Footnote 50 The Gauche prolétarienne took this idea further and, in contrast to the UJC(M-L), demoted analysis far behind a more activist politics.Footnote 51 It sought to endow workers with their own voice.Footnote 52 The search for other forms of representation, and the interest in local and concrete conditions, went together with rejection of the myth of a transcendental working class. This also meant abandoning certain ideas. “J'y ai rencontré ce que j'avais cherché: l’échec de mes discours”, [“I found there what I was looking for: the failure of my speeches”], one établie at Peugeot-Sochaux recalled from her first factory experience in early 1968.Footnote 53 Robert Linhart, a leading member of the UJC(M-L) who had worked as a semi-skilled worker (ouvrier spécialisé, OS) at Citroën-Choisy, wrote in his memoir, L’Établi (1978):

In the outside world the “establishment” appears spectacular, the papers make it into quite a legend. Seen from the works, it's not very important in the long run. Everyone who works here has a complex individual story, often more fascinating and more embroiled than that of the student who has temporarily turned worker. The middle classes always imagine they have a monopoly on personal histories. How ridiculous! They have a monopoly on speaking in public, that's all.Footnote 54

The prisoners’ movement constituted another field in which the counter-knowledge of the enquête could bear results. In late May 1970, the Gauche prolétarienne and other groups were banned and in summer a wave of arrests followed. As Daniel Defert later recalled, Jacques Rancière contacted him with a view to building a support cell.Footnote 55 Initially, the prisoners struggled for the status of political prisoner, following the model of the fighters in the Algerian war, and organized two hunger strikes. When Foucault, at the request of his partner Defert in early February 1971, announced the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP), its orientation had significantly changed. The organization operated as an anonymous network behind three prominent representatives, who included, besides Foucault himself, the former Resistance fighter and publisher of Esprit, Jean-Marie Domenach, and the historian of antiquity Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who had exposed the practice of torture by the French army in Algeria. The group began to problematize the prison institution as such.

The GIP intended to confine itself strictly to the transmission of information, and give prisoners themselves a voice. The key concept for this was intolérable. This was not only the title of a series of pamphlets in which their research was published, but also their general theme.Footnote 56 According to Danielle Rancière, the enquête intolérance combined two distinct strands, bourgeois-philanthropic investigation of the living conditions of the lower classes in the nineteenth century, and the Maoist investigation of factory agitation, and in this way developed an original form of production of knowledge.Footnote 57 In this way, discussion about conditions in prison was tackled not from an external, scientific, and social-reforming standard, but rather from the fact that prisoners clearly did not tolerate these conditions and fought against them. This determined the impetus of the first enquête, on which Claude Liscia and Christine Martineau were the main collaborators of Danielle Rancière's, who already had experience with factory enquêtes.Footnote 58

The members of the GIP sometimes distributed questionnaires to visiting relatives on Saturday mornings outside the prison gates. In the first enquête, the group stressed that it was not conducting a sociological investigation, its aim was to let those affected by the prison system speak for themselves: “Notre enquête n'est pas faite pour accumuler des connaissances, mais pour accroître notre intolérance et en faire une intolérance active.” [“Our investigation is not designed to build up knowledge, but to increase our intolerance and make it an active intolerance.”]Footnote 59 This “active intolerance” took place in an increasingly heated atmosphere. In September 1971, two prisoners attempting to break out of Clairvaux took a woman nurse and a male guard as hostages and killed them. The Minister of Justice demanded a collective penalty, and prohibited the reception of Christmas parcels in prisons throughout France, provoking massive insurrections.Footnote 60 As Danielle Rancière recalled, those involved had to demand rights for the prisoners, even if at the same time – from a Marxist perspective – the concept of human rights was rejected.Footnote 61 The model of the enquête was in this way stripped of global claims. It would be effective only in local circumstances, and was confined to the description of concrete discordances, without this leading on to reformist demands.

Where then were the points of contact and parallel perspectives between the model of the enquête and the historiography of Les Révoltes logiques? The GIP sought to show who it was that spoke in the conditions of the penal system, who was reduced to silence, and how something was brought to light that had previously remained invisible. The mechanisms by which voices emerged also formed a major interest of Les Révoltes logiques. The abandonment – often linked with disappointments – of a class concept burdened with a philosophy of history,Footnote 62 as experienced by the établi(e)s, likewise lay at the origin of the kaleidoscopic archival work of the journal. But at a practical level too, Les Révoltes logiques took up the experiences of movements, printing declarations of solidarity with political prisoners, analysing penal justice or reporting on strikes under way.Footnote 63

A special issue of 1978, with the title Les lauriers de mai, ou les chemins du pouvoir 1968–1978, was devoted to the transformations of the Left itself. This material was to have appeared in Les Temps modernes, but an article by Jacques and Danielle Rancière dealing with the trajectory of intellectuals after 1968 was rejected. Benny Lévy of Les Temps modernes, at one time a leading exponent of the Gauche prolétarienne, must have seen his own development attacked in this commentary on the sharp right turn of the nouveaux philosophes.Footnote 64 The Rancières discuss the double revolt of 1968 in their contribution. If an egalitarian space arose for a moment through the connection between the factory revolt and that in the universities, the movement of établissements posited a contradictory ideal: the self-extirpation of intellectuals. Proletarianization, according to the Rancières, would also be experienced as an individually liberating break. To leave academic careerists the diligent concern for “the latest epistemological or semiological shading of Marxism”, and instead immerse themselves “in the reality of the factory”, was far from being lacking in consolation.Footnote 65

Yet the rejection of academic intellectuals involved a further figure, that of the militant leader who claimed to be a transparent medium for the “voice of the people”. The GIP contributed to this turn by declaring information as such to be a weapon. The nouveaux philosophes drove this spiral still further. While in the name of a suffering declared as absolutely powerless they fought against the “Marxist master-thinkers”, they once again enthroned the intellectuals – themselves.Footnote 66 The special issue on Les lauriers du mai was a self-critical questioning of many of the conceptions from which the metamorphosis of forms of left practice and figures of thought proceeded, without maintaining an underlying essence from which this later development was derived. And yet the defeat of gauchisme also affected Les Révoltes logiques – the cessation of the journal coincided with the election of Mitterrand in 1981, which signified the disappearance of a certain constellation of the Left. Like other historical initiatives, Les Révoltes logiques remained a project tied to the situation of the 1970s, and its thematic strands were now pursued further by most of the authors involved individually.Footnote 67

From Displaced Thinking To The Poetics Of Knowledge

In his book La nuit des proletaires (1981), Rancière had attempted to look at the connection between mental and manual labour – a basic theme of gauchisme – from the opposite direction, he said in a later interview. The theme was no longer the proletarianizing of intellectuals, but rather intellectual appropriation on the part of workers.Footnote 68 His thèse d’état was presented as the result of a series of displacements: workers’ history instead of philosophy, but instead of a social history of changing forms of work, organizations, or cultural practices, a history of the collision of arguments and fantasies that occupied a few hundred workers between 1830 and 1851.Footnote 69

At the start of this enterprise lay the intention to trace the thinking of a class before Marxism had transformed this thinking. Rancière proceeded from the assumption that this thinking was to be found in utopian religions and forms of plebeian sociability. In the introduction to the collection of sources La Parole ouvrière, published in 1976, a unity of the class anchored in social practices had still been postulated.Footnote 70

This idea, that the reciprocal working of forms of struggle and cultural identity would form a unitary thinking as a class, was one that Rancière subsequently abandoned.Footnote 71 For him, the question now was one of individual breakthroughs in which workers discarded a simple affinity declared to be “natural”: people who, instead of sleeping at night and reproducing their labour-power, wrote poems and invented philosophies. This shift of focus from the class as a collective in struggle to personal emancipation initially meant focusing on a structure of thinking through the utterances of workers themselves. The theories of the Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, or Icarian emigrant communities were not to be investigated by the explanation of programmes, but rather by way of dialogues and stories. This procedure departed from the priority given by social history to social conditions or cultural practices. Rancière intended not to “disqualify” this “verbiage”, brush it away in favour of a deeper reality, but to follow the windings of an alien thinking.Footnote 72 Freeing the speech of the actors, therefore, did not mean maintaining that this thinking had an authentic core. What is made visible is not a primordial subject, but an ever new and different picture of working men and women.Footnote 73

At an initial level, the constituting of a “proletarian subject” took place in opposition to the bourgeois image of the “dangerous classes”: a stress on pride in one's trade and the idea of a civilization of producers, so as to refute the bourgeoisie's accusation of “barbarism”.Footnote 74 This was strategic thinking that in one minute emphasized the community of all mankind across class divisions,Footnote 75 and in the next a separatist class discipline.Footnote 76 The discursive figure of emancipation was also open to a repressive mode of deployment: a traditional strand (one of many such) of “praise for labour” can be traced through to the “national revolution” of the Vichy regime.Footnote 77

As a response to this view, the nouveaux philosophes introduced their substitute concept of the plèbe, which postulated the muteness – or the carnavelesque laughter – of the powerless against an all-pervasive power.Footnote 78 But another path was also open, and Rancière maintained that it was the carpenter and philosopher Louis-Gabriel Gauny (1806–1889) who had shown him this.Footnote 79 Gauny had thematized proletarian existence as a daily theft of time by labour, thus leading to a second level of investigation. Rancière found in Gauny an autonomous philosophical reflection on the uncertainty of the proletarian condition, marked by “Brownian movements that constantly affect precarious and transitory forms of existence”.Footnote 80

The starting-point of Gauny's writing was not the gradual formation of consciousness, but the demand to be someone else, to take leave of ascribed relations. This led to a singular production of meaning on the part of someone who did not speak in the name of others, and not even in his own – but wrote simply so as no longer to be identical with himself. Central in this leave-taking was the encounter with the other – in Gauny's case the Saint-Simonian missionaries and poets of bourgeois origin. The meeting between working men and women who no longer wanted to be such, and bourgeois who saw the dawning of a new age among the workers, enabled personal emancipation.

These emancipations, however, could not be generalized, on the grounds of a double impossibility. They were beset by constant disillusion about “class brothers” who would not be convinced or who sought only material support from the associations. And they experienced misunderstandings with the bourgeois “brothers in spirit” who expected appropriate proletarian behaviour on the part of workers: “[a]lways be what you are”, Victor Hugo told a worker poet.Footnote 81 According to Rancière,

And the argument would be that it is in this spiral of impossibility that a certain image and identity could develop, giving body to the discourse of workers’ emancipation; that this would be the discourse of the working class or workers’ movement, matching the actual inability of its bearers to find the principle of their own identification.Footnote 82

Politics makes its appearance in Rancière's work by circumventing the boundaries between the social and the ideological, the scientific and the literary, historiography and philosophy. La nuit des prolétaires traces a narrative of equality, as the intellectual division of labour is rejected and the transgression of philosophizing workers is given pride of place. Rancière's writing plays on complicity with historical actors, and lets strangeness turn into surprising familiarity.Footnote 83 The book's lack of actuality, and the “impossible” actualizings that its reading may suggest, aim at an “estrangement effect” in its own political present.

Surprise, interested acceptance, but also marked rejection characterized the effect of La nuit des prolétaires in the field of labour history.Footnote 84 In a debate with specialists on the question as to how far professional skill and worker militancy hung together, Rancière underlined as key points questions of equality and of the effect of words, ideas, and feelings in the genesis of the labour movement. In an essay in International Labor and Working-Class History, Rancière challenged the view that handicraft tradition and pride in work were constitutive of the early workers’ movement, seeing these rather as a subsequent invention of tradition on the part of trade-union leaders. Labour historians tended to short-circuit political statements by workers with working practices, and in this way asserted a homogeneous workers’ culture, instead of concerning themselves with individual encounters with other cultures. To emphasize identitarian difference threatened involuntarily to lead to exoticizing, or promoting an “intellectual racism”.Footnote 85 In response to participants in the debate, especially William Sewell, Jr and Christopher Johnson, who both stressed capitalist restructuring, Rancière insisted that in his view, the demand for participation and expansion of social life bordered on workers’ militancy.Footnote 86

Two paths are opened by Rancière's postulate of a genesis of workers’ thinking from a project of dis-identification and an impossible identification: a critique of social and historical sciences that assigns the lower classes their proper place, and an attention to aesthetics, as in the last analysis the emancipation of working men and women amounts first and foremost to an aesthetic revolution.Footnote 87

Exemplary for the critique of the social sciences was the example of Pierre Bourdieu, whom Rancière particularly attacked.Footnote 88 Interest in mixed forms and areas of contact between the classes clashed with the demarcation Bourdieu's twin concept of habitus and distinction implied, which – according to Rancière – eliminated zones of exchange.Footnote 89 Already in an article of 1978, on the subject of the Paris pleasure district in the nineteenth century, Rancière had emphasized the salience of a mixed cultural space – a thesis that became central in La nuit des prolétaires.Footnote 90 With the concept of habitus, the singular seizure of speech that characterized the poetizing workers of La nuit des prolétaires was rationalized away.Footnote 91 Rancière found that Bourdieu – similarly in this respect to Althusser – pursued a discourse of order, a “science of right opinion”.Footnote 92 Ambiguity and heresy can only appear in this context as a deficient misunderstanding of the rules of the game.Footnote 93

According to Rancière, Bourdieu deploys a radical critique to illustrate the radical unchangeability of conditions, pointing out relations of domination yet claiming that the concealment of these relations is absolute. This is done by the tautology according to which domination functions only through ignorance, an ignorance that domination itself produces by its reproduction, as shown by the example of education. Firstly, the university remains closed to children of the people because they cannot see the real reasons why it is closed to them, and secondly, the reason why they cannot recognize these real reasons is a structural effect of the system that excludes them.Footnote 94 All that remains for the sociologist is a banal “ethics of suspicion”, which dispenses with explanation and does not prove anything more than that the dispossessed are dispossessed.Footnote 95

Rancière's polemic against Bourdieu was vehement, but seems to have supplied the foundations for a stronger deconstructive enterprise, which investigated the necessity of the assignment of social place in historical science. Les noms de l'histoire (1992) focused on the question of the way in which modern historiography raised its speech to the status of science.Footnote 96 According to Arlette Farge, the historical profession reacted to this attempt at a “poetics of knowledge” partly with organized silence, partly with angry rejection.Footnote 97 What Rancière investigated here were the literary rules and procedures with which history took up its precarious position between narrative and science.Footnote 98 It did this by conceptualizing its newly discovered historical subject – the masses – in a particular way. For Rancière, modern historical science had found ways to make the masses visible in history – but at the price of keeping them silent. It tamed the “excess of words” of the poor, who, as soon as they began to speak, left their assigned domain.Footnote 99 Modern history-writing ceased to consider only the “great” events of the rulers, yet it did so by purging history of all events altogether – of the countless incidents that involve those speaking individuals that history is made of.Footnote 100

At the origin of modern historiography stands Jules Michelet, who transposed the Revolution – the event par excellence – into an epic. Instead of the revolt's confusion of voices, he had a new collective subject speak – the Nation – and depicted the surrender of the people to the Nation without allowing the bearers of this surrender to speak for themselves. The modern historical science of the age of the masses has perfected this achievement in moderation. In place of events it puts the facts, conjunctures, and structures of the longue durée.Footnote 101 The spatialized history of Annales manages to allocate each speech a place. This explains the history of mentalities’ interest in heresies, as a legacy of Michelet's historiography. Michelet's book La sorcière (1862) had literally domesticated the witch: as guardian of the hearth in popular belief, who was only diabolized by the church's drive for domination. Heresy – and as further examples Rancière cites among others Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's village of Montaillou and Carlo Ginzburg's miller in The Cheese and the Worms – is explained as provincial religion, tied to tradition and anchored fast in its territory.Footnote 102

Heretical History And Its Non-Actuality

What then would be the approach of a heretical historiography, according to Rancière?Footnote 103 It has first of all to acknowledge the excess of words in the modern age, when breaches in social order lead to previously unknown new communities, such as “that class that is no longer a class but the ‘dissolution of all classes’ ” (Karl Marx).Footnote 104 This leads to identifications with empty names: “Proletarian!”, Blanqui answered when the judge asked him his profession.Footnote 105 In Rancière's political philosophy, this is the starting point for the conceptualization of politics as event, which then happens when those without part articulate their part – a paradox that puts the entire order in question.Footnote 106 The subjectivity being constituted here must grasp itself as generality and invoke a universality. Historiographically, this is “the age of hazardous subjectification” that forms the celebrated opening scene of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class – the London Corresponding Society founded by nine workers in 1792, which resolved “[t]hat the number of our members be unlimited”.Footnote 107

Thompson, according to Rancière, described the genesis of the working class on the basis of a process of thought: as the appropriation of reference texts and the reinterpretation of writings. In order to explain this origin, it was not enough to locate it in popular culture and sociability. The struggling class was rather “the invention of a name for the picking up of several speech-acts that affirm or challenge a symbolic configuration of relations between the order of discourse and the order of states of affairs”.Footnote 108 Modernity, under the sign of a break, demanded a specific poetics for historiography. This referred to the relationship of historical science to time, and therefore to change,Footnote 109 what Rancière subsequently continued in reflections on anachronies and anachronisms, directed against the idea of epochs as closed spaces of thinking.

The Annales co-founder Lucien Febvre, in his classic 1942 study on “the problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century” had called anachronism “the worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven” for a historian.Footnote 110 Against the contention that Rabelais had been a disguised atheist, Febvre furnished meticulous examples that the conditions of this very possibility were lacking for people in the early modern age. In this way, according to Rancière, Febvre did two things. First, he proved the impossibility of unbelief by sketching a panorama in which unbelief seemed improbable. Febvre located Rabelais in a world of perfect synchrony, in which no one could be “before” their time and every life was pervaded by religion from baptism to death.Footnote 111 Secondly, Febvre, who characterized this synchronic world of early modernity, posited his own text as outside of time and in this way solved a philosophical problem by way of a poetic procedure, without reflecting on this change of register. Historiography would accordingly be a speech that narrates in the system of the past and explains in the system of the present.Footnote 112 In this way, Rancière argued, it is precisely anachronism that characterizes historiography as a science.Footnote 113 However, the subjection of historical actors to the “possible” of an era is ultimately anti-historical. For history precisely arises when people are dissimilar to their time and make a break with the temporal line that assigns them their place. There are a plurality of temporal lines at work in history, arising through encounter, displacement, and appropriation.Footnote 114 Only untimeliness therefore makes history possible.

Untimeliness also appears, however, as a forming principle of Rancière's procedure.Footnote 115 The present article began with the question as to what it means if a thinker of non-actuality becomes actual. The principle of non-actuality, it was argued, was pursued by Rancière and Les Révoltes logiques by way of a temporal estrangement of themes and debates. Les Révoltes logiques stood for an attempt, in the aftermath of revolt, to shift its own politics into history, and in this way – as shown by the counter-knowledge of the enquête and the établie(s) – maintain an analytic orientation that had arisen from the movement. In this orientation, critique as power of separation is combined with attention to the event. This point of departure might lead to various destinations.

Some historians oriented to the linguistic turn saw in Rancière's perspective a welcome challenge to what they experienced as an economic determinist straitjacket. I would like, however, to highlight another orientation – the untimeliness of the insistence on “words today seen as awkward”, such as “factory”, “proletarians”, or “revolution” that were mentioned at the beginning. Linked with this could be an idea of emancipation in which a subject – neither endowed with an authentic core, nor autonomous – acts, seizes the word, and thereby alters the coordinates of the situation itself. Subjectification would accordingly then be the historically recuperable moment of a visibility or appearance, when an existing identity is abandoned. Conceiving “hazardous subjectification” as dis-identifying, as a process of surprise, offers a promising alternative to a prevailing view that, with a kind of “Weberized” Foucault, reduces processes of subjectification to streamlining and inscription.

Today, the widespread interest in Rancière's work could be a token that such a perspective, insisting on an emancipatory break that is untimely in the double sense, is gaining ground. For example, some of Rancière's arguments have been used to reflect on the situation of gender history.Footnote 116 The recently founded journal History of the Present, refers explicitly to Les Révoltes logiques, without, however, intending simply a new edition of the French journal.Footnote 117 This journal aims at practising historiography as critique, by challenging the implicit assumptions and uninvestigated foundations of social certainties.Footnote 118

To conclude, the recent interest in Rancière should be situated in a broader context of social history, and for this purpose – fragmentarily – some positions should be indicated that share certain characteristics with his procedure, without being in debt to something like a Rancièrean perspective (the polemicist of La leçon d'Althusser has no lesson to give himself). Some works on the history of emotions, such as those by William Reddy, share an interest with Rancière in taking account of the historical actors’ agency beyond representation.Footnote 119 Other historians formulate a critique comparable with Rancière's of the social a priori: for example, Carolyn Steedman has shown with her recent works on domestic servants how people – individually or as a whole occupational group – withdrew themselves from a certain dominant script of social history.Footnote 120 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, in The Many-Headed Hydra, sketch the genesis of a trans-Atlantic proletariat through the history of unsuspected connections and solidarities; the “motley crew” were characterized not by a common structural positioning, but rather by participation in “broader, more creative forms of identification”.Footnote 121 Finally Arlette Farge, in her book on the “impossible”, ever fleeting history of the voice in the eighteenth century, focuses on articulations in the literal sense.Footnote 122

I mention these very different books, chosen quite subjectively, not because they “appeal” to Rancière, but because in various ways they display a strengthened attention to seizing the word, to a rupture, or to the intersection of different temporal lines. In that sense, history-writing might help in the need for untimeliness in our own political present.

References

1. To give a limited and necessarily subjective selection: Bowman, Paul and Stamp, Richard (eds), Reading Rancière (London [etc.], 2011)Google Scholar; Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.), Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts (Durham, NC, 2010)Google Scholar; Rockhill, Gabriel and Watts, Philip (eds), Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Durham, NC, 2010)Google Scholar; Hewlett, Nick, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-Thinking Emancipation (London, 2007)Google Scholar; Nordmann, Charlotte, Bourdieu/Rancière. La politique entre sociologie et philosophie (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar; Cornu, Laurence and Vermeren, Patrice (eds), La philosophie déplacée: autour de Jacques Rancière (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar; also see the journal issues: “Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics, Politics, Philosophy”, Paragraph, 28 (2005); “Jacques Rancière, l'indiscipline”, Labyrinthe, 17 (2004); “Autour de Jacques Rancière”, Critique, 601/602 (1997).

2. Deslypper, Camille and Dreux, Guy, “La parole comme evénément. Entretien avec Arlette Farge”, Nouveaux regards, 30 (2005), online at http://www.parutions.com/index.php?pid=1&rid=4&srid=100&ida=6299 (last accessed 14 November 2011)Google Scholar.

3. Farge names among others, as similar “thorns”, Paul Veyne, Michel Foucault, and Italian microhistory; Arlette Farge, “L'histoire sociale”, in François Bédarida (ed.), L'histoire et le métier d'historien en France 1945–1995 (Paris, 1995), pp. 281300Google Scholar, 290ff.

4. Jacques Rancière, “Preface to the English Edition”, in idem, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, David Fernbach (transl.) (London [etc.], 2011). This volume, and its successor, The Intellectual and His People (London [etc.], 2012), contain Rancière's contributions to the periodical Les Révoltes logiques that are discussed below. The argument repeated here is presented more explicitly in Rancière, Jacques, “Préface”, in idem, Les scènes du peuple. Les Révoltes logiques 1975–1985 (Lyons, 2003), pp. 718Google Scholar.

5. Alberto Toscano, in a gripping and pertinent article, has criticized Rancière's challenging of scientific practice, and indicated as a counter-example for consideration the inchiesta of Italian operaismo, a particular modus of counter-knowledge. I would like to argue, on the other hand, that Rancière proceeded precisely from related forms of counter-knowledge, even if in a specific context, and that his trajectory led him to different conclusions; cf. Toscano, Alberto, “Anti-Sociology and Its Limits”, in Bowman, Reading Rancière, pp. 217–237Google Scholar. Of the comprehensive historical literature on militant investigation in operaismo that has meanwhile appeared, I can only indicate here Wright, Steve, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London, 2002)Google Scholar, and Heinz Roth, Karl, “Benedetta sconfitta? Die Zeitschrift ‘Primo Maggio’ in der dritten Phase des Operaismus”, suppl. to Wildcat, 83 (2009), pp. 1330Google Scholar.

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7. Collectif Logiques, Révoltes (ed.), L'empire du sociologue (Paris, 1984)Google Scholar; idem, Esthétiques du peuple (Paris, 1985). Peter Schöttler mentions that after the periodical was closed, a “bulletin” was still produced for a while but this is not dealt with in the present article; Peter Schöttler, “Von den ‘Annales’ zum ‘Forum-Histoire’. zur, Hinweise ‘neuen Geschichte’ in Frankreich”, in Hannes Heer and Volker Ulrich (eds), Geschichte entdecken. Erfahrungen und Projekte der neuen Geschichtsbewegung (Hamburg, 1985), pp. 5871Google Scholar, 66.

8. Just to mention here what should be done but is not possible on this occasion: a comparative look at the various historical projects of that time. Cf. Schöttler, “Von den ‘Annales’ zum ‘Forum-Histoire’ ”; Kristin Ross's survey of the afterlife of May 1968; as well as Donald Reid's introduction to the English translation of La nuit des prolétaires – the present article owes more to both the latter texts than can be expressed in a few footnotes. See Ross, Kristin, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, IL, [etc.], 2002), pp. 116137CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, Donald, “Introduction”, in Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, John Drury (transl.) (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), pp. xvxxxviiGoogle Scholar.

9. Rancière, Jacques, La nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar, translated as Rancière, Nights of Labor.

10. El Maleh, Edmond, “Jacques Rancière”, in Christian Delacampagne (ed.), Entretiens avec Le Monde, 6 vols, I: Philosophies (Paris, 1984), pp. 158166Google Scholar, 159.

11. Rancière, Jacques, La Leçon d'Althusser (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar, now in English translation as Althusser's Lesson, Emiliano Battista (transl.) (London [etc.], 2011), pp. 41ff. Ironically, Althusser's philosophy in its theoreticist phase actually had thoroughly political effects for Rancière, whereas his latter interventions, after the decisive rejection of theoreticism, remained completely behind the situation; ibid., pp. 23ff.

12. Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, and Pierre Macherey, Lire Le Capital, I (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar; Althusser, Louis, Balibar, Étienne and Establet, Roger, Lire Le Capital, II (Paris 1965)Google Scholar. The abbreviated republication as a paperback in 1968 (without the texts by Rancière, Establet and Macherey) sold 78,000 copies within two years. When the publisher François Maspero planned a new edition of the original version, Rancière asked to add a criticism and self-criticism to his contribution; Maspero refused, appealing to the original contract of 1965, whereupon Rancière published this text in Les Temps modernes; François Dosse, History of Structuralism, II: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present, Deborah Glassman (transl.) (Minneapolis, MN, 1997), pp. 181ff.; Rancière, Jacques, “Mode d'emploi pour une reédition de Lire le Capital”, Les Temps modernes, 328 (November 1973), pp. 788807Google Scholar.

13. For a new English-language presentation of the Maoist intellectuals in France, with a very different interpretation from that put forward here, cf. Wolin, Richard, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ, 2010), especially pp. 109154Google Scholar. Bourg, Julian argues in a similar vein in “The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism in the 1960s”, History of European Ideas, 31 (205), pp. 472490CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview, cf. Fields, Belden, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

14. Rancière, , Althusser's Lesson, pp. 113, 67, 68Google Scholar.

15. Rancière, Jacques, “Sur la théorie de l'idéologie – politique d'Althusser”, L'Homme et la société. Revue internationale de recherches et de synthèses sociologiques, 27 (1973), pp. 3161Google Scholar, 34. These quotations are taken from the “avertissement” to the essay, which was omitted from the reprinting in English translation of the appendix to Althusser's Lesson.

16. Rancière, “Sur la théorie de l'idéologie”, p. 34, 35 (original emphasis). On “police reason”, cf. among others: Rancière, Jacques, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Julie Rose (transl.) (Minneapolis, MN, 1999)Google Scholar, originally published as La mésentente (Paris, 1995); idem, “Ten Theses on Politics”, Theory and Event, 5:3 (2001) (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3Rancière.html, last accessed 30 August 2011), originally published as “Dix thèses sur la politique”, in Jacques Rancière, Au bord de la politique (Paris, 1998).

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18. Rancière, , Althusser's Lesson, p. 119Google Scholar. This quotation varies from Emiliano Battista's translation, which renders “révolte” as “struggle”; cf. the French original, Leçon d'Althusser, p. 219. For a later comment on Althusser, , cf. “La scène du texte”, in Sylvain Lazarus (ed.), Politique et philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Louis Althusser (Paris, 1993), pp. 4766Google Scholar; as well as the short textbook article: “Althusser”, in Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (eds), A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Malden, MA, 1998), pp. 530–536.

19. Charles Soulié, “Le destin d'une institution d'avant-garde: Histoire du département de philosophie de Paris VIII”, Histoire de l’éducation, 77 (1998), pp. 4769CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 50ff. On Foucault at Vincennes, cf. Macey, David, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York, 1993), pp. 219236Google Scholar, especially 221ff.

20. Cohen, Paul, “Happy Birthday Vincennes! The University of Paris-8 Turns Forty”, History Workshop Journal, 69 (2010), pp. 206224CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 212.

21. Duby, George and Perrot, Michelle (eds), Histoire des femmes en occident, 5 vols (Paris, 1991–1992)Google Scholar, IV: Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (eds), XIXe siècle (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar.

22. Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), inside front cover.

23. This slogan was particularly known through a book of interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre under the same title conducted by two leading members of the Gauche prolétarienne; cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Philippe Gavi, and Pierre Victor (Benny Lévy), On a raison de se révolter: Discussions (Paris, 1974).

24. Rancière, , “Les scènes du peuple”, p. 10; Davis, Jacques Rancière, pp. 39ffGoogle Scholar.

25. Collectif Logiques, Révoltes, “Le Centre de Recherches sur les Idéologies de la Révolte (définition des objectifs et projets de recherches pour l'année 1975)”, Le Doctrinal de Sapience. Cahiers d'enseignants de philosophie et d'histoire, 1 (1975), pp. 1719Google Scholar, 17. The fourth direction was given as the history of peasant movements, but this was seldom broached in the journal itself.

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27. Ibid., pp. 37f.

28. Schöttler, “Von den ‘Annales’ zum ‘Forum-Histoire’ ”, p. 66Google Scholar; Cécile Dauphin, “Pénélope: une expérience militante dans le monde académique”, Les Cahiers du CEDREF, 10 (2001), pp. 6168Google Scholar.

29. Jacques Rancière and Patrice Vauday, “En allant à l'expo: L'ouvrier, sa femme et les machines”, Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), pp. 522Google Scholar, translated into English as “Off to the Exhibition: The Worker, His Wife and the Machines”, in Rancière, Staging the People, pp. 64–88; Geneviève Fraisse, “Les femmes libres de 48. Moralisme et féminisme”, Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), pp. 2350Google Scholar; Borreil, Jean, “Barcelona 36: L’été rouge et noir”, Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), pp. 5171Google Scholar; “Les lendemains d'Octobre: La jeunesse ouvrière française entre le bolchevisme et la marginalité. Entretien avec Maurice Jaquier et Georges Navel”, Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), pp. 72–95.

30. Ruffet, Jean, “Les déserteurs de l'an II”, Les Révoltes logiques, 4 (1977), pp. 722Google Scholar; Ivens, Maria, “La liberté guidant l'artiste”, Les Révoltes logiques, 10 (1979), pp. 5294Google Scholar; idem, “La liberté guidant l'artiste (deuxième partie)”, Les Révoltes logiques, 11 (1979/80), pp. 43–76; Borreil, Jean, “Circulation et rassemblements”, Les Révoltes logiques, 7 (1978), pp. 324Google Scholar; Hoyau, Philippe, “Des pauvres pour l'Algérie”, Les Révoltes logiques, 10 (1979), pp. 328Google Scholar; Roy, Olivier, “Afghanistan, la guerre des paysans”, Les Révoltes logiques, 13 (1980/81), pp. 5064Google Scholar.

31. Collectif Logiques, Révoltes, “Deux ou trois choses que l'historien social ne veut pas savoir”, Le Mouvement social, 100 (1977), pp. 2130Google Scholar, 26.

32. Ibid., p. 30 (emphasis in original).

33. Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), inside front cover; Rancière, Les scènes du peuple, p. 15Google Scholar. This procedure has a tense proximity with Foucault's genealogical perspective. For a critical exchange with Foucault, cf. “Pouvoirs et stratégies. Entretien avec Michel Foucault”, Les Révoltes logiques, 4 (1977), pp. 89–97. On Foucault's principle of genealogy in the mid 1970s, cf. Ulrich Brieler, Die Unerbittlichkeit der Historizität. Foucault als Historiker (Cologne [etc.], 1998), pp. 345–401.

34. Collectif Révoltes logiques, “Centre de Recherches sur les Idéologies”, p. 17.

35. For an analysis demonstrating the significance of Lip and focusing on the CFDT trade-union federation, cf. Pierre Saint-Germain and Michel Souletie, “La raison syndicale”, Les Révoltes logiques, special issue “Les lauriers de mai” (1978), pp. 26–48Google Scholar.

36. Vigna, Xavier, L'Insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68. Essai d'histoire politique des usines (Rennes, 2007), p. 298Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., p. 109.

38. Collectif Logiques, Révoltes, “Centre de Recherches sur les Idéologies”, p. 17Google Scholar.

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40. Dressen, Marnix, De l'amphi à l’établi. Les étudiants maoïstes à l'usine (1967–1989) (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar, p. 11; Reid, Donald, Établissement: Working in the Factory to Make Revolution in France”, Radical History Review, 88 (2004), pp. 83111CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 90.

41. The comprehensive sociological investigation of Marnix Dressen thus follows the interpretative model of a “political religion”. Cf., for example, idem, De l’ amphi à l’établi, pp. 175ff. For a critique of Dressen's theoretical framework, cf. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle, “À propos des militants établis”, Mouvements, 18 (2001), pp. 148152Google Scholar.

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44. Linhart, Virginie, Volontaires pour l'usine. Vies d’établis 1967–1977 (Paris, 2010), pp. 3137Google Scholar; Dressen, Marnix, “Le lancement du mouvement d’établissement, à la recherche de la classe perdue”, in René Mourinaux (ed.), 1968, exploration du mai français, 2 vols, II: Les acteurs (Paris, 1992), pp. 229246Google Scholar.

45. Tse-Tung, Mao, “Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys (March and April 1941)”, in idem, Selected Works, 5 vols (Beijing, 1965), III, pp. 1116Google Scholar, 13. The expression “s’établir” comes from a further text of Mao Zedong that deals with “the question of the integration of the intellectuals with the masses of workers and peasants”. A section of the intellectuals, Mao says, “go to the factories or villages”, where many “can stay for a few months, conducting investigations and making friends”, and others “can stay and live there for a considerable time, say, two or three years or even longer; this may be called ‘settling down’ [s’établir]”; idem, Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work (12 March 1957), in idem, Collected Works, 5 vols (Beijing, 1977), V, pp. 422–435, 426.

46. For a UJC(M-L) document that stresses the centrality of the enquête in Maoist politics, cf. “Edifions en France un parti communiste de l’époque de la Révolution culturelle”, Garde rouge, 6 (May 1967), reprinted in Kessel, Patrick, Le mouvement ‘maoïste’ en France, 2 vols (Paris, 1972), I, pp. 250257Google Scholar.

47. Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism, pp. 93, 100ff.; Wolin, Wind from the East, pp. 133ff.

48. Rancière, Althusser's Lesson, pp. 221ffGoogle Scholar.

49. The following draws on Gabler, Andrea, Antizipierte Autonomie. Zur Theorie und Praxis der Gruppe “Socialisme ou Barbarie” (1949–1967) (Hanover, 2009), pp. 125ffGoogle Scholar. Reid, “Établissement”, p. 87ff. names as forerunners of the Maoists the reportages of Jacques Valdour in the 1920s and Simone Weil, as well as the early movement of worker priests during World War II.

50. Ross, May ’68, pp. 109ffGoogle Scholar.

51. Linhart, Volontaires pour l'usine, pp. 43–77Google Scholar; Vigna, L'Insubordination ouvrière, pp. 291–300Google Scholar.

52. Ibid., pp. 287ff.

53. Cited after Dressen, De l'amphi à l’établi, p. 180.

54. Linhart, Robert, The Assembly Line, Margaret Crosland (transl.) (Amherst, MA, 1981), p. 76Google Scholar.

55. Defert, Daniel, “L’émergence d'un nouveau front: Les prisons”, in Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds), Le Groupe d'information sur les prisons. Archives d'une lutte, 1970–1972 (Paris, 2003), pp. 315326Google Scholar, 316.

56. Intolérable 1: Enquête dans 20 prisons (May 1971), reprinted in Artières, Groupe d'information sur les prisons, p. 80.

57. Rancière, Danielle, “Brève histoire du Groupe d'information sur les prisons (G.I.P.) 1971–1972”, Mana. Revue de sociologie et d'anthropologie, 5 (1998), pp. 221225Google Scholar, 222ff.; Philippe Artières, “Militer ensemble. Entretien avec Danielle Rancière”, in idem et al. (eds), Michel Foucault (Paris, 2011), pp. 5356Google Scholar.

58. Defert, , “L'emergence d'un nouveau front”, p. 318Google Scholar.

59. J'Accuse, 3 (15 March 1971), reprinted in Artières, , Groupe d'information sur les prisons, p. 52Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

60. Defert, “L'émergence d'un nouveau front”, pp. 322ff. On the background and conditions in the Clairvaux prison, cf. an article that compares an analysis of the contemporary situation with archival material from around the turn of the century: Stéphane Douailler and Patrice Vermeren, “Mutineries à Clairvaux”, Les Révoltes logiques, 6 (1977), pp. 7795Google Scholar.

61. Rancière, Danielle, “Bref histoire du G.I.P”, p. 225Google Scholar; idem, cited after Bourg, Julian, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal [etc.], 2007), p. 93Google Scholar; idem, “Les contributions accidentelles du marxisme au renouveau des droits de l'homme en France dans l'après-68”, Actuel Marx, 32 (2002), pp. 125–138, 131.

62. For Rancière, the disappointments and subsequent accounts of the établi(e)s were also a result of the notion that the working class was shaped by capital in such a way that anyone who recounted the social conditions of exploitation had “grasped” their kernel; cf. Rancière, Jacques, “L'usine nostalgique”, Les Révoltes logiques, 13 (1980), pp. 8997Google Scholar, 90.

63. Douailler and Vermeren, “Mutineries à Clairvaux”; Collectif Logiques, Révoltes, “Pour Marc Sislan”, Les Révoltes logiques, 7 (1977), p. 2Google Scholar; Pierre Saint Germain and Michel Souletie, “Le voyage à Palente”, Les Révoltes logiques, 7 (1977), pp. 6780Google Scholar; Stéphane Douailler and Patrice Vermeren, “La stratégie judiciaire hier et aujourd'hui. Entretien avec Jean Lapeyrie du comité d'action prisons-justice (CAPJ) et Jacques Vergès, avocat, ex-défenseur du FLN”, Les Révoltes logiques, 13 (1980/81), pp. 6481Google Scholar.

64. Ross, , May '68, p. 132Google Scholar.

65. Danielle Rancière and Jacques Rancière, “La légende des philosophes (les intellectuels et la traversée du gauchisme)”, Les Révoltes logiques, special issue “Les lauriers de mai” (1978), pp. 7–25, 14Google Scholar.

66. For a debate with the nouvelle philosophie, cf. Rancière, Jacques, “La bergère au Goulag (sur ‘la cusinière et le mangeur d'hommes’)”, Les Révoltes logiques, 1 (1975), pp. 96111Google Scholar; idem, “Réponse à Lévy”, Le Nouvel observateur, 31 July 1977, translated into English as “Reply to Lévy”, Telos, 33 (1977), pp. 119–122.

67. Ross, , May '68, pp. 136ffGoogle Scholar.

68. François Ewald, “Qu'est-ce que la classe ouvrière? Entretien avec Jacques Rancière”, Magazine littéraire, 175 (1981), pp. 6466Google Scholar, 65; Reid, “Introduction”, p. xxxi.

69. Rancière, , Nights of Labor, p. viiGoogle Scholar. The working title of the thèse was originally “La formation de la pensée ouvrière en France”, and finally “Le prolétaire et son double”. For a concise idea of the line of argument, see Rancière, Jacques, “The Proletarian and His Double, Or, The Unknown Philosopher”, in idem, Staging the People, pp. 21–33Google Scholar, 21; originally published as “Le prolétaire et son double, ou: le philosophe inconnu”, Les Révoltes logiques, 13 (1980/81), pp. 4–12, 4.

70. Alain Faure and Jacques Rancière (ed.), La parole ouvrière 1830–1851 (Paris, 2007, first published 1976), 17Google Scholar.

71. Rancière, “Postface” (2007), in ibid., p. 339Google Scholar.

72. Rancière, Nights of Labor, p. 11Google Scholar.

73. Ibid., p. 10.

74. Rancière, “The Proletarian and His Double”, p. 22Google Scholar.

75. Rancière, Nights of Labor, chs 5, 7.

76. Ibid., ch. 10.

77. A complex genealogy from a minority position of syndicalism through to Vichy is drawn by Rancière in “From Pelloutier to Hitler: Trade Unionism and Collaboration”, in idem, Staging the People, originally published as “De Pelloutier à Hitler. Syndicalisme et collaboration”, Les Révoltes logiques, 4 (1977), pp. 23–61.

78. Originally a much-discussed figure of gauchisme, André Glucksmann's “plèbe” was deployed sharply against the left; cf. idem, La Cuisinière et le mangeur d'homme. Essai sur les rapports entre l’État, le marxisme et les camps de concentration (Paris, 1975); Scott Christofferson, Michael, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York [etc.], 2004)Google Scholar, ch. 2, and for his argument against Glucksmann, Rancière, “La bergère au goulag”.

79. Idem, “The Proletarian and His Double”, p. 25. For a selection of Gauny's writings, see Gabriel Gauny, Louis, Le philosophe plébéian. Textes présentés et rassemblés par Jacques Rancière (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar.

80. Rancière, , Nights of Labor, p. 31Google Scholar.

81. Idem, “The Proletarian and His Double”, p. 25; idem, Nights of Labor, p. 13Google Scholar.

82. Idem, “The Proletarian and His Double”, p. 28Google Scholar.

83. Idem, Nights of Labor, pp. 78–87. Rancière further radicalized this principle of complicity in his account of the views of the pedagogue Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840). Jacotot postulated a deep equality of intelligence amongst all people, taking this equality as the starting point of his method of instruction (instead of a goal to be strived for), designed to allow illiterate parents to help their children to read and write. Rancière explained this maxim of equality as a prerequisite of emancipation, the abolition of boundaries, and a re-appropriation of the world; Rancière, Jacques, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Kristin Ross (transl. and introd.) (Stanford, CA, 1991)Google Scholar, first published as: Le maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris, 1987).

84. It is only possible here to give two examples of a fascinated acceptance, or argued rejection. For the first, cf. Reid, Donald, “Reflections on Labor History and Language”, in Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana, IL [etc.], 1993), pp. 3954Google Scholar. An in-depth, but definitely negative discussion is in Palmer, Bryan D., Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), pp. 125128Google Scholar; cf. also Palmer's review of Nights of Labor, in Labour/Le Travail, 27 (1991), pp. 340–342.

85. Rancière, Jacques, “The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 24 (1983), pp. 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 10. The same text is reproduced in Kaplan, Steven L. and Koepp, Cynthia J. (eds), Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, NY [etc.], 1986), pp. 317334Google Scholar.

86. Rancière, Jacques, “A Reply”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 25 (1984), pp. 4246CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 42ff., 45.

87. Rancière, Jacques, “Afterword to the English-Language Edition (2002)”, in The Philosopher and His Poor, Andrew Parker (ed. and introd.), John Drury, Corrine Oster, and Andrew Parker (transl.) (Durham, NC, 2002), pp. 219227Google Scholar, 219ff., 226. This point is made more clearly in the afterword to the German edition; cf. Rancière, Jacques, “Nachwort (2006)”, in idem, Der Philosoph und seine Armen, Richard Steurer (transl.) (Vienna, 2010), p. 296Google Scholar. We cannot deal here with this path leading on to aesthetics, but only indicate that this is the starting-point of Rancière's concern with aesthetics as a potential for a new arrangement of the sensible: “Politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field, and in that it makes audible what used to be inaudible. […] Politics is completely an affair of the antagonistic subjectivation of the division of the sensible”; Rancière, “Afterword to the English-Language Edition”, p. 226. Cf. idem, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Gabriel Rockhill (transl. and introd.) (London [etc.], 2004), originally published as Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris, 2000); Révoltes logiques (ed.), Esthétiques du peuple; this already explicitly draws on Friedrich Schiller's “On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind”, a text that Rancière repeatedly refers to.

88. It is beyond the scope of the present article to judge the extent to which this critique is pertinent, but only how it fits into Rancière's project. For a comparative undertaking of this kind, cf. Nordmann, Bourdieu/Rancière; Toscano, “Anti-Sociology and Its Limits”.

89. Rancière, , Philosopher and His Poor, p. 189Google Scholar.

90. Rancière, Jacques, “Good Times, Or, Pleasure at the Barrière, in idem, Staging the People, pp. 175–232, originally published as “Le bon temps ou la barrière des plaisirs”, Les Révoltes logiques, 7 (1978), pp. 25–66Google Scholar.

91. Rancière, “The Proletarian and his Double”, p. 30Google Scholar.

92. Rancière, Philosopher and His Poor, pp. 166ffGoogle Scholar.

93. Ibid., p. 186. On cultural allodoxia, i.e. “all the mistaken identifications and false recognitions”, which lead people “to take light opera for ‘serious music’, popularization for science, an ‘imitation’ for the genuine article”, see Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice (transl.) (London [etc.], 2003, first published 1979), p. 323Google Scholar.

94. Rancière, Jacques, “L’Éthique de la sociologie”, in Collectif Révoltes logiques, Empire du sociologue, pp. 13–36Google Scholar, 28ff.; idem, Philosopher and His Poor, pp. 171ff.

95. Idem, “Éthique de la sociologie”, p. 33.

96. Idem, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Hassan Melehy (transl.), foreword by Hayden White (Minneapolis, MN, 1994), first published as Les noms de l'histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris, 1992).

97. Farge, Arlette, “L'Histoire comme avènement”, Critique, 601/602 (1997), pp. 461466Google Scholar, 464.

98. Rancière, Names of History, pp. 7ffGoogle Scholar.

99. Ibid., pp. 16ff., 24ff.

100. Farge, “Histoire comme avènement”.

101. Two of the seven chapters are devoted to Fernand Braudel's narrative mode.

102. Rancière, Names of History, pp. 67ff. Nostalgia, heritage, and regionalism were problems that repeatedly occupied Les Révoltes logiques. Cf. Borreil, Jean, “Des politiques nostalgiques (Montaillou, village occitan – Bretons de Plozevet – Le cheval d'orgeil – Être un peuple en marge)”, Les Révoltes logiques, 3 (1976), pp. 87105Google Scholar; Hoyau, Philippe, “L'année du patrimoine, ou la société de conservation”, Les Révoltes logiques, 12 (1980), pp. 7078Google Scholar.

103. For example, the title of ch. 6 of Rancière, Names of History: “A Heretical History?”.

104. Rancière, Names of History, pp. 92, 34ffGoogle Scholar.

105. Ibid., p. 93.

106. On the imbrication of class struggle and politics, cf. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 18ff., 83ff.

107. Idem, Names of History, p. 92.

108. Ibid., p, 97.

109. Ibid., pp. 101ff.

110. Febvre, Lucien, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, Beatrice Gottlieb (transl.) (Cambridge, MA [etc.], 1982, first published 1942), p. 5Google Scholar.

111. Rancière, Jacques, “Le concept d'anachronisme et la vérité de l'historien”, L'Inactuel, 6 (1996), pp. 5368Google Scholar, 58.

112. Ibid., pp. 63ff.

113. Ibid., p. 65. Starting from this point, the historian of antiquity Nicole Loraux, in debate with Rancière, pleaded for the targeted formulation “controlled anachronism”. Applying such modern categories as “public sphere” to antiquity leads to a reciprocal destabilization between the category and the field of investigation. Cf. Nicole Loraux and Jacques Rancière, “Eloge de l'anachronisme en histoire”, Le Genre humain, 27 (1993), pp. 2339Google Scholar.

114. Rancière, , “Concept d'anachronisme”, p. 66Google Scholar.

115. Ross, Kristin, “Historicizing Untimeliness”, in Rockhill, Jacques Rancière, pp. 15–29Google Scholar; Geneviève Fraisse, “À l'impossible on est tenu”, in Cornu, Philosophie déplacée, pp. 71–77Google Scholar.

116. Arni, Caroline, “Zeitlichkeit, Anachronismus und Anachronien: Gegenwart und Transformationen der Geschlechtergeschichte aus geschichtstheoretischer Perspektive”, L'Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 18 (2007), pp. 5376Google Scholar.

117. The editorial team is made up of Scott, Joan W., Aisenberg, Andrew, Connolly, Brian, Kafka, Ben, Schafer, Sylvia, and Sinha, Mrinalini; cf. “Introducing History of the Present”, History of the Present, 1 (2011), pp. 14Google Scholar.

118. For more detail on this programme, Scott, Joan W., “History-writing as Critique”, in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alan Munslow (eds), Manifestos for History (London [etc.], 2007), pp. 1938Google Scholar.

119. To repeat, this does not mean that this interest is conceptualized in the same way. Out of the wide field of the history of emotions, we can only indicate here the works of William Reddy, especially as he was connected with Les Révoltes logiques; Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge [etc.], 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley, CA [etc.], 1997); idem, “L'ouvrier mauvais public: A travers trois chansons d'Alexandre Desrousseaux”, in Collectif Révoltes logiques, Ésthétiques du peuple, pp. 175–184. For a short critique of what in his view is a one-sided attention to representation, taking the collective work Histoire des Femmes as an example, cf. Rancière, Jacques, “L'histoire ‘des’ femmes entre subjectivation et représentation (note critique)”, Annales ESC, 48 (1993), pp. 10111019Google Scholar.

120. Steedman, Carolyn, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge [etc.], 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the incompatibility between individual actors and social-historical assumptions; idem, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge [etc.], 2009) for the rewriting of state formation and modernization through the lens of waged domestic service.

121. Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London [etc.], 2000), p. 246Google Scholar. My reading of this is indebted to Eiden-Offe, Patrick, “Historische Gegen-Bild-Produktion. Zur Darstellungsweise eines nicht-identischen Proletariats, am Beispiel der Vielköpfigen Hydra”, Sozial.Geschichte Online, 3 (2010), pp. 83116Google Scholar.

122. Farge, Arlette, Essai pour une histoire des voix au dix-huitième siècle (Paris [etc.], 2009)Google Scholar.