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Rancire, Jacques. Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthetics.: Continuum International Publishing, . p 161http://site.ebrary.com/id/10427317?ppg=161Copyright Continuum International Publishing. . All rights reserved.May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher,except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

52

CH PTER ELEVEN

The Polit s o Literature

I will start by explaining what my tit le means - and first of a ll what it doesnot mean . The polit ics of literature is not th e polit ics of its wr iters. It does n otdea l w ith their persona l commitment to the social and polit ical issues andstruggles of their times. Nor does it de al with the m odes o f represe nt ationof polit ical events or the social structure and the socia l strugg les in theirbooks. The syntagm a politics of literature means tha t lit erature doespolit ics as literature - that there is a spedfic link between po litics as adefin ite way of doing and literature as a definite practice of writ in g

To make sense of this statement, I will first briefly spe ll out the idea ofpolitics this in volves. Po liti cs is commonly viewed as the practice ofpower or the embodime n t o f co llect ive wills and in terests and th e enactment of collective ideas . Now, such enactments or embodiments implythat you are tak en into account as subjects shar ing in a common world,making statements and not simply noise, discussing things located in acommon wor ld and not in your ow n fantasy . What really deserves thename of po liti cs is the cluster of percept ions and pract ices that shape thiscommon world . Politics is first of all a way of fra ming , among senso rydata, a specific sphere of expe rience . t is a partition of the sens ible, of thevisible and the sayable, which allows or does not allow ) some specificdata to appear ; wh ich allows or does not a llow some specific sub j ects todesignate them and speak about them . t is a specific intertw inin g of

ways of being , ways of doing and ways of speaking .The politics of literature thus means that lit erature as literature isinvo lved in this partit ion of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and sa y in g that frames a polemical common wo rld.


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TH P OLITI CS OF LIT R TUR

Now the point is: what is meant by literature as l iterature ? Surpris-ing ly few among the political or social commentators of literature have

pa id attention to literature s own historicity. We know, however, thatclass ifying the art of writing under the notion of literature is not old .We can trace it back to approximately the beg inn ing of the nineteenthcentury. But critics have not often deduced any consequence from th is.Some of them have tried desperately to connect literature (taken as thea-h istor ica l name of the art of writing in general) with po litics conceivedas a historical set of forces, events and issues. Others have tried to give aspec ific content to the notion of literature. Unfortunately this was done

on a very weak basis, by referring literature s modernity to the search foran intransitive language. On th is bas is the connection was initiallyflawed. Either there was no way of binding together literary intransitivityand po litica l action, with art for art s sake opposed to po litica l comm it-ment, or one had to assume a quite obscure relationship between literaryintrans itivity (conceived of as the materialistic primacy of the sign ifier)and the materialistic rationality of revolutionary po litics .

Sartre proposed a kind of gent leman s agreement, by opposing the

intrans itivity of poetry to the trans itivity of prose writing. Poets, heassumed, used words as things, and had no commitment to the po litica luse of communicative speech . Prose wr iters, by contrast, used words astoo ls of communication and were automat ica lly committed to the fram-ing of a common world. But the distinction proved to be incons istent .After having attr ibuted the opposition to the very d ist inct ion of twostates of language, Sartre had to exp lain why prose writers like Flaubertused words in the same intrans itive way as did poets . And he had topursue endlessly the reason for this, both in the sad realities of classstrugg le in the 1850s and in the neurosis of the young Gustave Flaubert .In other words, he had to pursue outside of literature a political comm it-ment of literature, wh ich he had first purported to ground on its ownlingu ist ic specificity. t is not a casual or a personal fa ilure. In fact, theident ificat ion of literature w ith a spedfic state or use of language has norea l lingu ist ic re levance, and it cannot ground any spedficity of literatureor its political invo lvement. Moreover, it proves very ambiguous in itspract ica l use, and we have to deal with this amb igu ity if we wantto move forward in understanding literature as a new system of theart of writ ing, as well as its relationsh ip to the political partition ofthe sens ible.

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I would highlight this point by compar ing two political read ings of thesame nove list, taken to be the embodiment of art for art s sake and the

autonomy ofli

terature . I have just referred to Sartre s analys is ofFlaubert . From h is po int of view, Flaubert was the champion of anaristocratic assault against the democrat ic nature of prose language.He used prose s transparency of words to create a new form of opac ity.As Sartre put it, Fiaubert surrounds the object , se izes it immobilizes itand breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well .Sartre explained th is petrification as the contribution of bourgeois writers to the strategy of their class. Flaubert, Mallarme and their colleagues

purported to challenge the bourgeois way of thinking, and they dreamtof a new aristocracy, living in a wor ld of pure words, conceived of as asecret garden of precious stones and flowers . But the ir pr ivate paradisewas noth ing but the celestial pro ject ion of the essence of pr ivate ownership. In order to shape it, they had to tear words away from those whocould have used them as tools of social debate and struggle.

So the literary petr ificat ion of words and objects went along with thebourgeo is anti -democratic strategy. But the argument of petrification of

the language had a long history.Long before Sartre , the same argument had been made by contempo

rary commentators of Flaubert. They pointed out in Flaubert s prose afasc inat ion for detail and an indifference towards the human meaningof act ions and characters that led him to give the same importance tomaterial things and to human be ings . Barbey d Aurevilly summed uptheir criticism by saying that Flaubert was carrying his sentences j ust asa worker carries his stones before him in a wheelbarrow. All of them

agreed that his prose was the petrification of human action and humanlanguage. And a ll of them, like Sartre a century later, thought that thispetrification was not a mere literary device, that it carr ied a deep politicalsignificance. Now the po int is that the nineteenth -century criticsunderstood th is differently. For them, petr ificat ion was the symptom ofdemocracy. Flaubert s disregard for any difference between high and lowsubject matters , for any hierarchy between foreground and background,and ultimate ly between men and things, was the hallmark of democracy.Indeed, Flaubert had no political commitment. He desp ised equallydemocrats and conservat ives, and assumed that the writer should beunw illi ng to prove anything on any matter. But even that attitude ofnon -commitment was for those commentators the mark of democracy.


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THE POLITICS OF LITER TURE

What is democracy, if not the equal ability to be democrat, ant i-d emocrator indifferent to both democracy and ant i-d emocr acy? Whatever Flaubert

m ight think about the common people and the republican form ofgovernment, his prose was the embodiment of democracy.There would be little point in proving that Sartre mistook a reactionary

argument for a revolutionary argument . t is more relevant to have acloser look at the link betw ee n the indiff erence of a way of writing andthe oppos ite statements it allows for. t appears that three things arebound togeth e r a way of writing without meaning anything, a way ofread ing th is wr iting as a symptom that has to be interpreted and two

oppos ite ways of making this political reading.I wou ld like to show that this very link betw een a way of writing, away of read ing and two ways of interpreting can lead us to the core ofthe question . The indifference of writing, the practice of sympto mat icread ing and the political ambigu ity of that read ing are woven in thesame fabric. And this fabr ic might be literature as such : literature con-ce ived ne ither as the art of writing in general nor as a specific state ofthe language, but as a historical mod e of visibility of writing, a spec i fic

li nk between a system of meaning of words and a syste m of visibilityof things.

Th is mode of visib ili ty involves a spedfic system of the efficiency ofwords, wh ich dismisses another system. The contrasting of literature assuch, li teratur e as the modern regime of the art of writing, to the oldworld of representat ion and elles lettres is not the opposition betweentwo states of the language. Nor is it an oppos ition between the serv itudeof mimesis and the autonomy of self - referential wr iting . t is the oppos i

tion of two ways of linking meaning and action , of framing the re lat ionbetween the sayable and the visible, of enab li ng words with the power offraming a common world. t is an oppos ition betw een two ways of do ingth ings with words.

This is what was invo lved in the crit icism made by the French champions of the old literary reg ime, not only aga inst Flaub ert, but against all thenew wr iters: they had lost th e sense of human action and human meaning. For us, this means that they had lost the se nse of a certain kind ofaction and of a certain way of understanding the link between action

and meaning. What was that sense? In order to understand it, we have toremember th e old Aristotelian princ iple that sustained the edifice of representation . Poetry, Ar istotle assumed, is not a spe cific use of language .

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Poetry is fiction. And fiction is an imitation of acting men. We know thatthis poetic principle also was a po li tica l pr inc iple . t set forth a hierarchy

opposing the causa l rationality of actions to the empiricism ofli

fe as itunfo lds .Poetry, Aristotle said, is more ph il osoph ical than history, because

poetry builds causal plots binding events together in a whole, whilehistory on ly tells the events, as they evolve . The privilege of action overlife distinguished nob le poetry from base history, to the extent that itdistinguished those who act from those who do nothing but live , whoare enclosed in the sphere of reproductive and meaningless life. As a

consequence, fiction was divided into different genres of imitations.There were high genres, devoted to the im itat ion of noble actions andcharacters, and low genres devoted to common peop le and base subjectmatters. The hierarchy of genres also submitted style to a principle ofhierarchical convenience: kings had to act and speak as kings do, andcommon people as common people do. The convention was not simplyan academic constra int . There was a homology between the rationalityof poetic fiction and the inte lli gibility of human actions, conceived of

as an adequation between ways of being, ways of do ing and ways ofspeaking.

From that point of view we can figure out, at first sight, what upset thedefenders of the elles lettres in the works of the new writers. t wasthe dismissal of any pr inc iple of hierarchy among the characters andsub ject matters, of any principle of appropriateness between a styleand a subject matter. TJ e new principle was stated in all its crud ity byFlaubert : there are no high or low subject matters. Further, there is nosub ject matter at a ll , because sty le is an abso lute way of see ing things.This abso lut ization of sty le may have been identified afterwards with ana -political or aristocratic pos ition. But in Flaubert s time, it could only beinterpreted as a radical egalitarian principle, upsett ing the whole systemof representat ion, the old reg ime of the art of writing. t turned upsidedown a certain normality, put as an adequation between ways of being,ways of doing and ways of speaking. The new principle broke thatadequation. The aristocratic absolutization of style went along with thedemocratic principle of ind ifference. t went along w ith the reversal ofthe old hierarchy between noble action and base li fe.

On that ground we cou ld easily construct a po li tics of literature,contrasting the ega li tar ian principle of ind ifference to the hierarchical


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law of the old regime . Such a po li tics of literature cou ld square with deTocqu eville s idea of democracy, conceived as the e qua li ty of cond itions .

But we cannot end matt ers that easily. Democracyis

more than a socia lstate . t is a specific partition of the sensible, a specific regime of speak ingwhose effect is to upset any steady relationship between manners ofspeak ing , manners of doi ng and manners of bei ng. t is in this se nse thatli terature opposed its democr acy to the representationa l hi e rarchy .When Vo lta ire accounted for the pow er of Corne ill e s tragedies, h e madea s ign ificant argument. He said that his tragedies were per formed in frontof an audience made of orators, magistrates, preachers and generals. e

meant an audience made of people for whom speaking was the same asact ing . Unfortunately, he assumed, the aud ience of his own time was nolonger composed of those specialists of th e acting word. t was onlymade , he sa id, of a numb er of young gentlemen and young ladies . Thatmeant anybody, nobody , no addressee. The representat ional regime ofwriting was based on a definit e idea of th e speech -act. Writing wasspeak ing . And speaking was viewed as the act of the orator who ispersuad ing the popu lar assemb ly (even though th ere was no popu lar

assembly). It was viewed as the act of the preacher uplifting souls or thegenera l haranguing his troops. The representationa l pow er of doing artwith words was bound up w ith th e power of a soc ial hierarchy basedon the capacity of addressing appropriate kinds of speech -acts to appropr iate kinds of audiences.

Flaub ert and his p ee rs , on the contrary, addressed the aud ience stigmatiz ed by Voltaire: a numb er of young ladies and young gentlemen .Literature is this n ew regime of writing in which the wr iter is anybodyand the reader anybody . This is why its sente nces are mute pebb les .They are mute in the sense that they had been utt ered long ago by P latowhen he contrasted the wandering of the orphan letter to the liv inglogos, planted by a master as a seed in the sou l of a d isciple, where itcou ld grow and live . The m ut e letter was the letter that went its way,without a father to guide it. t was the letter that spoke to anybody,without know ing to whom it had to speak, and to whom it had not. Themute letter was a letter that spoke too much and endowed anyone

at all with th e power of speak ing. In my book Les noms de l histoire, I proposed to g ive the name of li terar iness to this ava il ability of the so -calledmute letter that determines a partition of the percept ible in which one

can no longer contrast those who speak and those who only make no ise,

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those who act and those who only live. Such was the democratic revolution pinpointed by the reactionary cr itics . The Flaubertian ar istocracy of

sty le was originally tied to the democracy of the mute letter, meaning theletter that anybody can retr ieve and use in his or her way.Literature discovers at its core this link w ith the democratic disorder of

literariness. Literature is the art of writ ing that specifically addressesthose who should not read. This paradoxical relationship is the subjectmatter of many nineteenth -century works. I will take as a telling caseBalzac s novel Le cure de village which is str ict ly speaking, a fab le ofdemocracy as literariness. The novel recounts the disaster caused by one

single event: the reading of a book by somebody who shou ld never haveread one. t is the story of a young girl, Veronique, the daughter of anironmonger. She lives in the lower end of the small prov inc ial town ofLimoges, in an atmosphere of labour, religion and chastity. One day, asVeron ique is strolling with her parents, she sees on display in a bookseller s shop a book adorned with a nice engrav ing . t is Paul et Virginie anove l famed for its childlike innocence . She buys the book and reads it.And everything goes wrong: the pure and chaste book in the hands and

mind of the pure and chaste girl becomes the most dangerous poison.From that day on, Veronique enters a new life, carried away, Balzacwr ites, by the cult of the Idea l, that fata l relig ion . She dreams of meeting her Paul and liv ing w ith him a life of pure and chaste love . Disasterensues. Veronique, becomes rich, enters a loveless marriage with abanker of the town. As a wea lthy patron, she meets an honest, noble andpious young worker . They fall in love . He becomes crazy about theirdesperate love and, in order to flee with her, he robs and kills an oldman. He is arrested, sentenced to death and dies without denouncingVeron ique .

Thus the democrat ic availability of the dead letter becomes a powerof death . Th is evil must be redeemed . So in the last part of the book,Veron ique, now a r ich widow, ret ires to a small village and tries to gainher salvation, gu ided by the country parson . But the means of her salvation are very strange. The parson does not up lift her soul with piousdiscourse and the Holy Scr iptures . The reason for this is clear: the evilthat caused the whole disaster was the intrus ion of a book in the life ofsomeone who should never have entered the wor ld of wr iting . The evilmade by the mute letters cannot be redeemed by any word, not evenby the Word of God . Redemption must be wr itten in another kind of


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writing, engraved in the flesh of rea l th ings . So the parson does not makeVeronique a nun, but a contractor, a businesswoman. He teaches her

how to make her fortune and increase the prosperity of the village byco llect in g th e forest s waters in sluices and irrigation trenc hes . Thusbarren lands become rich meadows nourish ing prized cattle . And j ustbefore dy in g Veronique can show her repentance wr itten on th e land.She says, I have engraved my repentance upon this land in indelib lecharacters, as an ever last in g record. t is written everywhere in the fie ldsgrown green ( in the mountains streams t urned from their coursesinto the pla in, once wild and barren , now fertile and productive .

Th is makes for a consistent conclusion. The cause of the evil was thevery partition of the perceptible grounded on democrat ic litera ri ly. Theredemp tion of the evil is another pa rtition of the pe rceptible: no morethe old h ierarchy of ran ks no mo re the old priv ilege of the acting word,uttered by the master, th e pr iest, or the general, but the new power of amean ing written in the ve ry fabric of real th ings . That which can hea lthe evil done by the democratic mute letter is another kind of mutewriting : a wr iting engraved on the body of things and w ithdrawn from

the attempts of th e greedy sons o r daughters of plebeians. The mutepebbles thus take on another meaning. The collapse of the representation al paradigm means not only the collapse of a hierarchical system ofaddress ; it means the collapse of a whole reg im e of meaning. The ru lesand hierarchies of representation hung onto a definite link betweensaying and doing. f poetry was identified with fiction and fict ion withthe imitation of acting men, it was because the highest accomplishmentof human act ion was supposed to be the action made by speaking itself.

t is that power of the acting word that the popula r orators of the Revo lution had torn away from the hierarchical order of rhetor ica l cu lture andappropr iated for unexpected aims . But that idea of the speech -act itselfre lied on a definite idea of what meaning means: meaning was a re lat ionof add ress from one will to another . The hub of the system was th e ideaof speaking as us in g words to produce appropriate a ims : specific movesin the sou ls and motions of bod ies .

The new regime of literature dismissed that connection betweenmean ing and willing . The parson could no longer use words to mora lizeto the plebe ian s daughter . Nor could the reactiona ry critics use them tomora lize to the wr iter Flaubert and teach him which subject matters andcharacte rs he should choose . But the plebe ian s daughter, the worker -poets

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and the militant workers were equa lly subjected to the consequences ofthe new reg ime of meaning. In the I 790s the ir fathers had appropriated

for themselves the words and sentences of Anc ient rhetoric. But the ageof rhetoric was over. Meaning was no more a relationship between onewill and another. t turned out to be a relationship between signs andother signs.

Such was the reverse side of the democracy of literature . The muteletters offered to the greed iness of plebe ian ch ildren were taken awayfrom them by another kind of muteness. The react ionary cr itics themselves discovered th is double bind of literary muteness. This is the reason

they did not teach Flaubert what he should have done. They explainedto their readers that Flaubert could not have done otherw ise, becausehe was a writer of democratic times . They did not behave as defendersof ru les or teachers of good taste. They behaved as interpreters ofsymptoms . In so doing, they endorsed the idea that the books they werefau lting for the sin of muteness spoke in another way, that they spokeout of their very muteness. The muteness of literature is another wayof speak ing , another link between things and words. Flaubert s or Hugo s

sentences were made of mute pebbles . Now, in the age of archaeo logy,paleontology and philology, which was also the time of German Romanticism, everybody knew that pebb les, too , spoke in th e ir own way. Theyhad no voice. But they wore on their very bodies the testimony of theirown history. And that testimony was much more fa ithful than anydiscourse. t was the unfalsified truth of things, opposed to the liesand chatter of orators. Such was the language of li terature, its system ofmeaning. Meaning was no longer a relationship between one will and

another. t turned out to be a relationship between signs and other signs.The words of li terature had to display and decipher the signs and symptoms written in a mute writing on the body of things and in the fabricof language .

From that point of view, the muteness of literature took on anothermeaning, and that meaning involved a different politics . This new ideaof mute writing had been pioneered by Vico when he set out to upsetthe foundations of Aristotelian poetics by d isclos ing the character of thetrue Homer . The true Homer was not a poet in the representational

sense, meaning an inventor of fictions, characters, metaphors andrhythms . His so-ca lled fictions were no fictions to him, for he lived in atime when history and fiction were mingled. H is characters, the valiant


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Ach ill es or the wise Nestor, were not characters as we have them butperson ified abstractions, because the men of his time had neither the

sense of individuality, nor the capacity for abstract ion .is

metaphorsbore w itness to an age where thought and image, ideas and things cou ldnot be separated . Even h is rhythms and metres reflected a time whenspeak ing and sing ing were interchangeab le . In short, Homeric poetry,the essence of poetry, was a language of childhood. t was, Vico sa id,sim il ar to the language of dumb persons. Another idea of the mutenessof li terature was linked to this new regime of mean ing that boundtogether muteness and significance, poeticality and historicity . And it

involved another idea of politics, contrasting the historicity enclosed inthe letter to its democratic availab il ity.

Th is m ight account for the way the very name of literature, in its newsense, replaced the old belles lettres. t is usua ll y said to have occurredaround 1800, and Germaine de Stae l s book, De a litterature published in1800, is often taken as a turning point. But this turning point has twostr iking features. First, it does not point out any nove lty in the pract iceof writing. What was changed was the visib ili ty of wr iting . Germa ine de

Stae l said that she would not change anything in the rules of belles lettres Her sole concern was to highlight the relationship between types ofsoc iet ies and types of li terature . But this little addition was enough to setup a new system of visib ili ty of writing . And that new system appearedas a response to a definite po li tica l issue. Madame de Stae l wrote at theend of the French Revolution, and she was the champ ion of a third way,opposed both to revolution and to counter -revo lut ion . She wanted toprove that the ideas of progress and perfectib ili ty, uttered by the ph il oso

phers of the En li ghtenment had not caused the revolutionary bloodshedand terror, as charged. They had not, because the ideas stated by thewriters did not act as wills. Further, they were the expression of movements in sodety and civ ili zat ion that do not depend on anybody s will.

Literature did not act so much by expressing ideas and wills as it did bydisp laying the character of a time or a society. In this context, literatureappeared at the same t ime as a new regime of writing, and another wayof relating to politics, resting on this pr inc iple : writing is not impos ingone will on another, in the fash ion of the orator, the pr iest or the general.

t is disp laying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things. t isrevealing the signs of history, delv ing as the geo log ist does, into theseams and strata under the stage of the orators and politicians - the

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seams and strata that underlie its foundation. Forty years after e alitterature Jules Michelet would set out to write the history of the Frenc h

Revo lut ion .He

undoubtedly was a great Rep ubli

can . But h e was aRepub lican of li terary times . When he re lated the revo lut ionary festiva ls in the sma ll villages, he enthu siastically referred to the testimonieswr itten by local orators .

But h e did not quote those writings. He conveyed what was speaki ngthrough their speeches : the vo ice of the soil at harvest time, or the mudand th e clamour of the industrial c ity s street. In the times of literature,mute th ings speak bette r than any orator. Th is is not a matter of political

engagement. t is a politics carried by literature itself. The Republica nhistorian puts it into play, the reactionary novelist does so as well. Thisnew reg ime and new po li tics of li teratur e is at the core of the so -calledrealistic nove l. Its principle was not reproducing facts as they are, ascritics claimed. It was disp laying the so -called world of prosaic activitiesas a huge Poem - a huge fabric of signs and traces, of obscure signs thathad to be disp layed, unfo lded and deciphered . Th e best example andcommentary of this can be found in Balzac s La Peau de chagrin At thebeg inn ing of the noveL the hero, Rapha eL enters the showrooms of anant ique shop. And there, Balzac writes, this ocean of furni shings,invent ions, fas hion s works of art and relics made up for him an endlesspoem . The shop was indeed a m ixture of worlds and ages: th e soldier stobacco-pouch a longs ide the priest s ciborium; the Moor s yatogan andthe go ld slipper of the seraglio; stuffed boas grinned at stained -glassw indow s; a portrait of Madame Du Barry seemed to contemplate anIndian chibbouk; a pneumatic machine was pok ing out the eye of theemperor Augustus and so on. The mixture of the curiosity shop mad e allob jects and images equa l. Further, it made eac h object a poetic element,a sensitive fo rm that is a fabr ic of signs as well. A ll these objects wore ahistory on the ir body. They were woven of signs that summarized an eraand a fo rm of civilizati on . And their random gathering made a hugepoem, each verse of wh ich carried the infin ite virtuality of new stories,unfo lding those signs in new contexts. t was the encyclopedia of all thetimes and a ll the worlds, the compost in which the foss ils of them wereblended together. Further on in the same book, Ba lzac contrasts Byron,the poet who has expressed w ith words some aspects of spiritual turmoil,to the true poet of the time , a poet of a new kind - Cuvier, the naturalist,who has done tru e poetry : he has re -bu il t cities out of some teeth,


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re-popu lated forests out of some petrified traces and re -discovered racesof giants in a mammot h s foot. The so-ca lled rea list novelist acts in th e

same way . He displays the fossils and hierog lyphs of history andciv

ili zation. H e unfolds the poet ica li ty, the histor icity w ritten on the bodyof ord inary th ings . In the old representationa l regime, the frame of inte lligibility of human actions was patterned on the mode l of the causa lrat iona li ty of voluntary actions, linked together and aimed at defin iteends . Now, when mean ing becomes a mute re lat ion of signs to s igns,human actions are no longer intelligible as successful or unsuccessfu lpursu its of aims by willing characters . And the characters are no longer

in te lli gible through the ir ends. They are intelligib le through the clothesthey wear, the stones of thei r houses or the wa ll paper of their rooms .

Th is results in a very interesting linkage between literature, sc ien ceand po li tics . Literature does a kind of side -politics or meta -po li tics . Thepr incip le of that politics is to leave the common stage of the confl ict ofwills in order to investigate in the underground of society and read thesymptoms of history . t takes soc ial situat ions and characters away fromthe ir everyday, earthbound rea li ty and displays what they truly are, a

phantasmagoric fabric of poetic signs, which a re histor ica l symptomsas well. Fo r their nature as poetic signs is the same as their nature ashistor ica l results and political symptoms . This po li tics of literatureemerges as the dismissal of the politics of orators and militants, whoconce ive of politics as a strugg le of wills and interests .

We are moving towards a first answer to our question regarding thepo li tics of literature as literature . Literature as such displays a twofo ldpo li tics, a twofold manner of re-configuring senso ry data. On the one

hand, it d isplays the power of literariness, the powe r of the mute letterthat upsets not on ly the hierarchies of the representat iona l system butalso any princ ipl e of adequation between a way of being and a way ofspea kin g. On the other hand, it sets in motion another po li tics of themute letter : th e side -politics o r metapolitics that substitutes the decipher ing of the mute meaning written on the body of things for th edemocratic chatte ring of the letter.

The dup licity of the mute letter has two consequences . The firstconsequence regards the so-ca lled political or scient ific explanation ofli terature . Sartre s flawed argument about Flaubert is not a persona land casual mistake. More deeply, it bears witness to the strange status ofcr itica l discourse about literature . For at least 150 yea rs dar ing cr itics

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have purported to disclose the political import of literature, to spell outits unconscious discourse, to make it confess what it was hiding and

revea l how its fict ions or patterns of writing unwittingly ciphered thelaws of the soda I structure, the market of symbolic goods and the structureof the literary field. But all those attempts to tell the truth about literaturein the Marxian or Freud ian key or in the Benjaminian or Bourdieusiankey, raise the same prob lem that we have a lready encountered. The patterns of their critical exp lanation of what literature says relied on thesame system of meaning that underpinned the practice of literature itself.Not surprising ly they very often came upon the same problem as Sartre.

In the same way, they endorsed as new crit ical ins ights on literature thesoc ial and politica l interpretations of nineteenth -century conservat ives.Further, the patterns they had to use to reveal the truth on literature arethe patterns framed by literature itself. Explain ing close - to -hand realitiesas phantasmagor ias bearing witness to the hidden truth of a society, thispattern of intelligibility was the invent ion of literature itse lf. Tellingthe truth on the surface by travelling in the underground, spelling outthe unconscious social text lying underneath - that also was a plot

invented by literature itse lf.Benjamin explained the structure of Baude la ire s imagery through the

process of commodificat ion and the topographical figures of passagesand loitering. But the exp lanat ion makes sense on the ground of a definite model of intelligibility - the model of deciphering the unconscioushieroglyph, framed by n ineteenth -century literature, re -elaborated byProust and borrowed from him by Benjam in . Benjam in refers to theMarxist analysis of the commod ity as a fet ish . But the Balzacian para

digm of the shop as a poem had to ex ist first, to allow for the ana lysis ofthe commodity as a phantasmagor ia, a thing that seems obvious at firstglance but actua lly proves to be a fabric of hieroglyphs and a puzzle oftheological quibb les . Marx s commodity stems from the Ba lzac ian shop.And the analysis of fet ish ism can account for Baudelaire s poetry, sinceBaudelaire s loitering takes place not so much in the passages of theParisian boulevards as it does in the same Balzacian shop or workshop.The symptomatic reading that underpins the practices of historical orsociological interpretation was first of all a poetical revolution . And thesesciences had to borrow from naive literature the patterns for highlighting its na ivete and telling the truth about its illusions. Now, the secondconsequence concerns literature itself. The po litics of literature turns out


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to be the confl ict of two politics of the mute letter : the po li tics of literar iness and the politics of symptomatic reading. Balzac s ud e village

st illis

a good case in po int . The evil done by democratic literariness hasto be redeemed by the pow er of a writing engrave d in the very flesh ofth ings . But this fictional solution is a dead -end for literature itself. Wereit taken at face value, it would mean that the writer must stop wr iting ,must keep sil ent and cede the place to th e engineers, who know the rightway to bind men together, the right way to wr ite without words in theflesh of things. This was no t simply a fict iona l inv ention . t was the coreof the utopia spelled out in the 1830s, a few years be fore Balzac wrote his

novel , by the Sa int -Simonian eng ineers and priests : no more words,no more paper or literature. What is n eeded to bind people together isra il ways and canals.

a lzac did not stop writing, of course . But he spent five years comp leting the book. He re-wrote it and re -arranged the order of the chapters inorder to have th e hermeneutic plot match the narra tive plot. But hefailed to so lve the contrad ict ion . Tha t contradiction did not oppose therea li st ic writer to the Christian moralist. t was the self -contradiction of

the po li tics of literature. The nov elist writes for people who should notread nov els . The remedy to the ev il that he evo kes is another kind ofwriting. But that other kind of writing, pushed to the ext reme, meansthe suppression of literature. Th e po li tics of literature carries a contrad iction that can be solved only by self -suppression. This contrad ict ion is atplay in the ca se of th e apolit ica l wr iter as well as in the writer who wantsto convey a political message and hea l social problems.

When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary h e was unwilling to denounceany moral or social tro ubl e. He only wanted to do literature. But do ingli terature meant erasi ng the old differences between low and high su bject matters; it m ea nt dismissing any kind of specific language. The aimof the writer was to make art invisib le . Th e mistake of Emma Bovary, bycontrast, was her will to make ar t visib le, to put art in her life - ornamentsin her hous e, a piano in her par lour and poetry in her destiny . Flaubertwould distingu ish his art from that of his charact e r by putt ing art only inhis book , and making it invisible. In order to trace the border -line separa t ing his art fro m that of his character, his prose had to go overboard onthe muteness of common life. That n ew kind of mute writing would nolonger be the silent language engraved in the flesh of material things. twould fit the radical muteness of things , wh ich hav e ne ither will nor

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meaning. t would express, in its magnificence, the nonsense of life ingeneral. The prose of the artist distinguished itself from the prose of

everyday life insofar as it was st ill muter, still more deprived of poet ry .That other kind of mute wr iting results in another kind of self -suppression. In Flaubert s last novel, Bouvard et Pecuchet, the two clerks fail in alltheir endeavours to manage their life according to the pr inc iples writtenin the ir books of medicine, agronomy, archaeo logy, geo logy, ph ilosophy,pedagogy, etc. In the end they dedde to go back to their old job of copy ing.Instead of trying to apply the words of the books in rea l life, they willonly copy them. This is good med idne for the disease of literariness and

its political d isorder . But this good medicine is the self -suppression ofliterature. The nove list h imse lf has nothing more to do than to copy thebooks that his characters are supposed to copy. In the end he has to undohis plot and blur the boundary separating the prose of art for ar t s sakefrom the prose of the commonplace. When art for ar t s sake wants toundo its link to the prose of democracy , it ha s to undo itself. Once more,it is not a matter of personal failure. Balzac s Christian and conservativecommitment comes up against the same contradiction as F laubert s

nihilism. The same goes for the revolutionary attempts to create, out ofthe hermeneutic power of literature, a language that would make lifeclearer to itse lf and change the self -interpretation of life into a new kindof poem, taking part in the fram ing of a new world and a new collectivelife . In the times of the Par isian revolutionary Commune, Rimbaud calledfor a new poetry that would, as h e descr ibed it, no longer give its rhythmto action, but run before it in advance. He called for poems filled withnumbers and harmony, for a language open to the five senses, a lan

guage of the sou l for the souL containing everything - smells, soundsand colours. This idea of a poetry of the fut ur e was in line with theRomantic idea of ancient Greek poetry as the mus ic of a collective body .And i t might sound strange that such an idea of poetry came to the forein the times of fr ee verse and prose poetry, when poetry was becomingless and less a matter of rhythm and metre, and more and more a matterof image. But this incons istency is cons istent with the politics of literaturethat put th e Balzacian shop in the place of the trag ic chorus. Accordingto the log ic of literature, the rhythm of the future had to be invented outof the commod ities and fossils of the curiosity shop. Th e Rimbaldianantique shop was the poor man s shop . t was the shop of those scrapsthat Rimbaud lists at the beg inn ing of his Alchimie du verbe : stupid


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pa int ings , popular engrav ings, little erotic books , door panels, sillyrefrains

Rimbaud wanted to connect two ideas of poetry : poetry as rhythm ofa living body and poetry as archaeology of the mute signs s leeping on thebody of ordinary things. But there was no path from the shop of themute signs and the poet icality of outmoded refrains to the poetry ofthe future and the hymn of the collective body .

Literature had become a powerful machin e of self -interpretat ion andse lf-poeticization of life, converting any scrap of every day life into a s ignof hi story and any sign of history into a poetica l e lement. This politics of

li terature enhanced the dream of a new body that wou ld give voice toth is re -appropriat ion of the power of common poetry and historicitywritten on any door panel or any silly refra in . But th is power of the muteletter cou ld not result in bringing back this living body. The living bodyvoicing the co ll ect ive hymn had to remain the utop ia of writing. In thetimes of futurist poetry and the Soviet Revo lut ion, the Rimbaud ianproject wou ld be attuned to the idea of a new life where art and lifewould be more or less ident ica l After those days, it would come back to

the poetry of the curiosity shop, the poetry of the outmoded Par isianpassages celebrated by Aragon in his aysan de aris Benjamin in turnwould try to rewrite the poem, to have the Messiah emerge from thekingdom of the Death of outmoded commodities. But the poem of thefutur e exper ienced the same contrad ict ion as th e nove l of bourgeo isli fe, and th e hymn of th e people exper ienced the same contradiction asthe work of pure literature. The life of literature is the life of this contradiction . The cr itical , political or sociologic al interpreters of literaturewho fee l challenged by my ana lysis might reply that the contradiction ofli terature goes back to the old illusion of mistaking th e interpretat ionof life for its transformation.

My presentat ion has been an a ttemp t to quest ion the opposition inboth ways. F irst, I have tried to su bstant iate the idea that so -called interpretat ions are political to the extent that they are re-configurations ofthe visibility of a common world. Second, I would suggest that the discourse contrasting interpretive change and rea l change is itself part ofthe same hermeneut ic plot as the interpretation that it cha ll enges. Thenew reg ime of meaning underpinning both li terature and social sc iencehas made the very sentence contrasting changing the wor ld and interpret ing the world into an enigma . The invest igat ion of this po li tics of

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Rancire, Jacques. Dissensus : On Politics and Aesthetics.: Continuum International Publishing, . p 177http://site.ebrary.com/id/10427317?ppg=177Copyright Continuum International Publishing. . All rights reserved.

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literature th t is much more th t a m tter of writers m y help us tounderst nd th is ambiguity nd some of its consequences. The political

dimension of literature has been usually explained through socialscie nce nd po litical interpretat ion . y turning matters upsid e-dow n ,I have been unw illi ng to account for politics nd social sciences throughthe mere transformations of poetical categories. My wish has beensimply to propos e a closer look t their intertwin ings .

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