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.

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):

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,

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.