The Philosopher and His Poor
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The Philosopher and His Poor
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Overview
Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else” than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822385707 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/23/2004 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 460 KB |
About the Author
Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris–VIII (St. Denis). His many books include The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France; The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation;and Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy.
Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College. He is a coeditor of Nationalisms and Sexualities and Performativity and Performance.
Read an Excerpt
The philosopher and his poor
By Jacques Ranciere
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3274-4
Chapter One
The Order of the City
In the beginning there would be four persons. Maybe five. Just about as many as the needs of the body. A farmer for food, a mason for housing, a weaver for clothing. To these let us add a shoemaker and some other worker to provide for material necessities.
That is how Plato's republic presents itself. Without a deity or founding legend. With individuals, needs, and the means to satisfy them. A masterpiece of economy: with its four or five workers Plato founds not only a city but a future science, sociology. Our nineteenth century will be grateful to him.
His own century had a different judgment of it. His disciple and critic Aristotle put it succinctly: a city is not simply a concentration of needs and a division of the means of production. Right from the start something else is needed-justice, the power of what is better over what is less good. There are greater or less noble tasks, jobs that are more or less degrading, natures appropriate for one group or for another, and all these must be distinguished. Even in a republic of four or five citizens, there must be someone to represent and ensure respect for the common good that defines the aim [la fin] of the city above and beyond the satisfaction of needs. How else could justice ever come about from simply gathering together equally indispensable workers?
There must be amisunderstanding somewhere. Or a trick. For justice is, precisely, the subject of Plato's dialogue, and in order to define it he constructs his society as a magnifying glass. So justice must be there already in his egalitarian gathering of workers, or else it will never turn up at all. It is up to us to look for it.
The Fifth Man
A first clue might be a slight fluctuation concerning the number of equals. Four or five, we do not know exactly. But whether the number is even or odd ought to have some consequence for a philosopher infatuated with mathematics. Later on he will subject even the couplings of his warriors to the golden number, but for the moment he seems indifferent to the details of his inventory. In the city of necessity he leaves open the possibility that there is one person too many.
That may be a first reply to our question and to Aristotle's objection. No one among the equals is superior, but one of them could be less indispensable than the others. Could it be the fifth man, whose essential function is not spelled out any further? Or could it be the shoemaker? Is a specialist in footwear really needed when a single worker suffices to handle all aspects of building houses? It is no big deal to provide Attic peasants with footwear, and Plato himself tells us later on that they will carry on their work in summer "for the most part unclad and unshod." If so, should one-fourth of this primitive labor force be assigned to that office? Or should we assume, rather, that the shoemaker is also there for something else? The fact is that at every strategic point in the dialogue-whenever it becomes necessary to think about the division of labor, to establish difference in natures and aptitudes, or to define justice itself-the shoemaker will be there in the front line of the argument. As if he were doing double duty behind the scenes. As if this worker who is not to judge anything but footwear retained some usefulness for the philosopher that goes far beyond the products of his trade: the marginal and at first glance paradoxical function of allowing a doubt to hover about the actual utility of useful workers.
And yet our shoemaker and his fellow tradesmen are there to teach us a fundamental principle: a person can do only one thing at a time. It would be inconvenient for the farmer to stop his labor in the fields and devote three-fourths of his time to repairing his roof, making his clothes, and cutting out his shoe leather. The division of labor will take care of that problem. It will assign a specialist exclusively to each activity, and all will be for the best: "More things are produced, and better and more easily, when one man performs only one task according to his nature, at the right moment, and is excused from all other occupations."
Many things in such few words. First, a question: it is true that more will be produced under this system, but why is it necessary to produce so much? Apparently these people are already living within a market economy, even if this market is quite limited. And one need not have read Adam Smith to realize that such a division of labor will quickly produce unexchangeable surpluses. Starting with shoes, of course. With such a limited population and such limited needs, the division of labor is an absurdity. It may not be "more convenient" for the shoemaker to cultivate a plot of ground, but it is certainly a safer bet for him to do so.
So argues the economy of Adam Smith. Plato's economy differs in that the needs of the first members of his society are not restricted-indeed, at the beginning they are infinite. He tells us at the start that these men need many things. Later he will tell us that these workers need many tools. From the very outset it is necessary to make more, and for that, time is lacking. It is not that the worker must work all the time, but he must always be available to do his work at the right moment, and that is why he must have only one job. An observation then occurs to Socrates just in the nick of time: experience shows that nature provided for this necessity by distributing diverse aptitudes to different individuals. These aptitudes will be suited in turn to various occupations and everything will run smoothly.
Though not very clearly. The argument about time is itself already not so simple. If it is true that the job does not wait for the worker, the converse is not true as well. Nature may have given the farmer exactly the right dispositions for working in the fields, but it has also given vegetables their growing cycles. And it has made the seasons, which put unequal demands on the exercise of these agricultural dispositions. Is the farmer really supposed to spend the whole off-season and bad-weather days waiting for the right moment to turn over the soil? Isn't there a right moment for him to cultivate his field and another moment, just as right, for him to make his clothes and those of others? That is what many farmers still will think in the very midst of the Industrial Revolution, without agriculture or industry having anything to complain about-except wages. But that is a different matter.
Would a philosopher so expert at describing for purposes of comparison the operations of artisans be so ignorant of the conditions surrounding their exercise? That is highly unlikely. If he pretends not to know whether nature leaves the farmer and the mason with sufficient leisure, and whether society does the same for their fellow workers, it is because he has decided that they should not have all the time that circumstances, sometimes too generously, have given them. The very principle of a social nature shaping temperaments to functions could be the price of this omission. Behind the apparent paradoxes of this economy another game is being played, slightly askew, as four terms arrange themselves into a pattern: countless needs, time in short supply, workers who are more or less indispensable, and aptitudes among which we do not know how to distinguish. For while we readily admit that nature gives individuals different aptitudes and tastes, and that it forms some bodies better suited to work in the open air and others to the workshop's shade, how are we ever to differentiate a weaver-nature from a shoemaker-nature except through that absence of time which, combined with the urgency of the tasks at hand, never allows the one worker to be found in the other's place?
And so the argument moves ahead on its two lame legs. The difference in natures comes to rescue the poorly demonstrated impossibility of performing two separate functions. And that impossibility, in turn, evades the questions posed by the same enigmatic difference that would shape in advance the division of labor. If this economically improbable division can be expressed in the natural evidence of social utility, the reason is that this is where the arbitrariness of nature and the conventionality of the social order exchange their powers. The agent of this exchange is a notion too trivial to engage much attention: time.
Questions of Time
Time, Feuerbach will tell us, is the privileged category of the dialectician because it excludes and subordinates where space tolerates and coordinates. Again we must be precise. The time of which Plato is speaking here is not that of physical necessity, the time of generation, growth, and death. It is that more ambiguous entity-half philosophical and half popular, half natural and half social-which determines one's availability for a task or the right moment for supply to meet demand. It is not the time needed to accomplish a task (ergon) but the time that permits or prohibits a pastime (parergon)-i.e., the fact of being beside the necessity of work. It is not the time measured by water clocks but the time that compels some people to its measure and exempts others from it. It is leisure (schole) or its absence (ascholia).
The factor of exclusion is the absence of time, or absence of leisure, ascholia. The notion is not peculiar to Plato; it is a commonplace in discussions about the relationship of the order of labor to the political order. But if the place is common, the paths leading up to it are anything but: from Plato to Xenophon, or from Xenophon to Aristotle, the absence of leisure lends itself to the most contradictory and disconcerting lines of argument. For Xenophon, it is impossible for artisans to participate in the political life of the city. They are always working in shadows, seated by a corner of the fire. Theirs is an indoor life, an effeminate life that leaves them no leisure to concern themselves with anything but work and family. Farmers, on the other hand, out in the open air and bright sunshine, are the best defenders of the city because they have-a strange way of putting it-not the most leisure but the least absence of leisure.
In Aristotle the same criterion produces the same alternative, but his argument is exactly the reverse. Artisans are effectively the ruin of democracy, but the reason is that they have too much leisure. They spend all their time loitering in the streets or the agora, which means they can attend all the assemblies and meddle in everything indiscriminately. The democracy of farmers, on the other hand, will be the best-or rather, the least bad. Farmers are confined to their fields, and the assembly is too far away; they will not have the leisure time to go to town and exercise their power, so things can only run better. Because if they did go to town, they would behave like men who do not possess the only leisure that counts, the leisure of thinking. Farmers make the least bad sort of democracies, those in which the democrats do not have the time to exercise their power. But for the very same reason, in a well-governed state they will not have their place.
Thus leisure and its absence zigzag in these cases to produce the same result: the artisan cannot be a good citizen. The originality of Plato's Republic, however, lies in its not posing this question as such. Aristotle, Xenophon, and Plato himself in the Laws frame the question in its alternate form: can one be a citizen while engaging in a trade? Which occupations qualify or disqualify people, provide the time to participate in political life or take it away? In the Republic, on the other hand, citizenship is neither a trade nor a status but simply a matter of fact. One belongs to the community, and this community knows only different occupations. Where Aristotle, for example, distinguishes between four types of manual labors, Socrates can raise in passing the case of people whose bodies are sturdy but whose minds are rather slow, all of whom will be admitted into the community nevertheless-they will be the common laborers, the unskilled wage earners. There are different natures but apparently no differences in nature. The jobs themselves are all equivalent. There are no slaves.
So there is only one principle of exclusion. Plato's Republic does not decree that one cannot be a shoemaker and a citizen at the same time. It simply establishes that one cannot be a shoemaker and a weaver at the same time. It does not exclude anyone by reason of the baseness of his job, but simply establishes the impossibility of holding more than one job at a time. It knows only one evil, but this is the absolute evil: that two things be in one, two functions in the same place, two qualities in one and the same being. Only one category of people, then, finds itself de facto without employment, those whose specific occupation consists in doing two things in one-the imitators.
The Order of the Banquet
There is no reason for the imitators to trouble the first city's order. To expand beyond its four or five pioneers, the city needs only three or four supplementary categories: some joiners and smiths to make the tools for work; some wage earners for the heavy labor; and two kinds of tradesmen to handle exchange-small shopkeepers for the local market, and merchants for trade between cities. Since the merchants must have goods to exchange for those that will satisfy the needs of the community, the number of producers will be increased accordingly. And with that we can consider the community complete and perfect. The citizens will live joyously in harmony and piety; crowned with myrtle and reclining on beds of bryony, they will feast fraternally on wine and wheat cakes served on reeds or fresh leaves.
This is not a form of communism but an egalitarian republic of labor, vegetarian and pacifist, adjusting its production to its needs and its birthrate to its resources. An apolitical society of industrious well-being [la sante travailleuse], the myth of which will come to life again in the age of anarchism and neo-Malthusianism.
Health, we grant. But what about justice? The regulation of equal and unequal? Socrates and his interlocutor are searching for it, and we have sensed its field of play in this society in the slight inequality to itself of strictly divided labor-i.e., in the abundance of needs, the fluctuation of the number of workers, the regulation of time that is equally lacking to all but could not be lacking to some.
It is at this point that Glaucon intervenes. He is Socrates's interlocutor and Plato's brother, and in his view this republic of workers is fit only for pigs. He wants its banquets to have different forms of pomp and new ornaments: couches and tables, fancy seasonings and dainty tidbits, fragrances and courtesans ...
Raising the bar is a regulative function of Plato's dialogues, which need to portray someone rejecting the maxims of good sense, the counsels of prudence, the regimens for the hygienic life proposed by Socrates. This role is usually filled by people of quality: the ambitious Callicles or members of Plato's own family-his cousin Critias the tyrant, and his two brothers Adimantus and Glaucon.
To please Glaucon, Socrates will bid a nostalgic farewell to the healthy city and we are ushered into the city of humors and arts of refined living. Glaucon's intervention makes visible the subterranean logic of the preceding moment. Justice exists only through the disordering of health and, as such, was already indirectly at work in the interplay of lacks, excesses, and fluctuations that were upsetting slightly the perfect equilibrium of the healthy city. Justice is the returning of healthy and useful workers to their specific place.
The new city, the one where injustice and justice are possible and thinkable, begins with the seasonings and decorum of the banquet. Should we say that we also have here the origin of politics with the table manners of the ethnologist, the distinction of the sociologist? Perhaps, but the banquet is confusion as much as distinction. At the banquet of the poet Agathon, for example, the intoxication of Alcibiades the pleasure seeker encounters the enthusiasm of the philosopher Socrates. In other instances, the simulacra of discourse conspire with the reality of needs, and democratic aspirations with aristocratic pomp, until they all become, at the very heart of the modern age, one of the symbols of political subversion.
Imitators, Hunters, and Artisans
The order established by the banquet is the order of mixture. If the city began with the clearcut distribution of useful workers, politics begins with the motley crowd of the unuseful who, coming together into a mass of "workers," cater to a new range of needs-from painters and musicians to tutors and chambermaids; from actors and rhapsodists to hairdressers and cooks; from the makers of luxury articles to swineherds and butchers. But in this mixed crowd of parasites don't we need to acknowledge that some workers really are as useful as those in the original group, so long as they, too, agree to do only one thing at a time? After all, the first workers themselves were obliged to mingle the superfluous with the necessary for the dishes, tables, and trimmings of the banquet.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Editor’s Preface viiEditor’s Introduction: Mimesis and the Division of Labor ix
A Personal Itinerary xxv
I. Plato's Lie
1. The Order of the City 3
2. The Order of Discourse 30
II. Marx's Labor
3. The Shoemaker and the Knight 57
4. The Production of the Proletarian 70
5. The Revolution Conjured Away 90
6. The Risk of Art 105
III. The Philosopher and the Sociologist
7. The Marxist Horizon 127
8. The Philosopher’s Wall 137
9. The Sociologist King 165
For Those Who Want More 203
Afterword to the English-Language Edition (2002) 219
Notes 229