from "hatred of democracy", by jacques ranciere, 2006:
The equation democracy = limitlessness = society, on which the denunciation of the 'crimes' of democracy is based, presupposes, then, a threefold operation: it is imperative, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to make this form of society identical to the reign of the egalitarian individual by grouping under the latter all sorts of disparate properties, everything from mass consumption to the claims of special minority rights, not to forget union battles; and finally, to charge 'mass individualist society', henceforth identical to democracy, with pursuing the limitless growth that is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy. (20)
(...) The so-called republican thesis took exactly the opposite tack: bringing School closer to society meant making it more homogeneous to social inequality. So that School could work to achieve equality only to the extent that, within the sheltering walls that separate it from the rest of society, it could devote itself to its proper task: to supply everyone equally, irrespective of origins or social destination, with the universality of knowledge, using for its egalitarian aims the necessarily inegalitarian form of relation obtaaining between the one who knows and the one who learns. (24-25)
(...) The enemy that the republican School confronted, then, was no longer the unequal society from which it sought to rescue pupils, it was the pupil him- or herself, who had become the representative par excellence of democratic humanity - the immature being, the young consumer drunk with equality, and whose charter is the Rights of Man. School, it would soon be said, was badly afflicted by one, and only one, evil, which was embodied in the very beings that had to be taught: equality. And what was undermined along with the authority of the professor was not the universality of knowledges but inequality itself, understood as the manifestation of a 'transcendence'. (26)
(...) The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal, simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalized reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the 'subtleties' and 'complexities' of his thought to the 'impenetrable wall' of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence. He becomes the disillusioned spectator of the great catastrophe of civilization, the synonyms of which are consumerism, equality, democracy, and immaturity. Before him stands 'the adolescent-punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion', that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy drunk with consumption, attesting to the end of culture, if not the becoming culture of everything, to the 'hypermarket of lifestyles' and 'turning the world into a "club-Med"', and to the 'plunging of all of existence into the sphere of consumption'. (26-27)
(...) The fatal 'democratic' equivalence of everything is indeed first and foremost the product of a method that has only one explanation for every phenomenon, whether it be a social movement, a religious or ethnic conflict, changing trends, or advertising or other campaigns. This is how the young girl who, in the name of her father's religion, refuses to remove her headscarf at school, the schoolchild who opposes the rationality of the Koran to that of science, and the schoolchild who physically attacks teachers or Jewish students, will all find their attitudes attributed to the reign of the democratic individual, unaffiliated and altogether cut off from transcendence. And the figure of the dmocratic consumer drunk on equality will,according to the mood and the needs of the cause, be identified with the wage earner, with the unemployed occupying the Unemployment Office, or with the illegal immigrant detained in airport detention centres. There is no need to be surprised if the representatives of this consuming passion that excite the greates fury in our ideologues are generally those whose capacity to consume is the most limited. Indeed, the denunciation of 'democratic individualism' works, at little cost, to make coincide two theses: the classic thesis of property-owners (the poor always want more), and the thesis of refined elites - there are too many individuals, too many people claiming the privileges of individuality. This is how the dominant intellectual discourse meets up with those 'censitaire' and knowing elites of the nineteenth century: individuality is a good thing for the elites; it becomes a disaster for civilization if everybody has access to it. (27-28)
(...) Under the name democracy, what is being implicated and denounced is politics itself. Now, politics was not born with modern unbelief. Before the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure, there were the Ancients, and first of all those Greeks, who severed links with the divine shepherd and set down, under the double name of philosophy and politics, the public record of this farewell. The 'murder of the shepherd', Benny Levy informs us, is there for all of us to see in Plato's texts. It is in the 'Statesman', for example, where he evokes the age when the divine shepherd himself directly governed the huma n flock. And it is in the fourth book of the 'Laws', where he evokes the golden reign of the god Cronus, who knew that no man could govern others without becoming bloated on injustices and excesses, and who resolved the problem by giving the human tribes leaders chosen from the superior race of daimones. But Plato, that reluctant contemporary of the men who claimed that power belonged to the people, not being able to oppose to these men anything except a 'care of the self' incapable of bridging the distance between the many and the whole, effectively countersigned the farewell, relegating the reign of Cronus and the divine shepherd to the era of fables. But he did this at the cost of compensating fo the absence of this fable by means of another fable, that of a 'republic' founded on the 'beautiful lie' according to which God, in order to assure a good order in the community, had put gold in the sould of the governors, silver in those of the warriors, and iron in those of the artisans. (34)
(...) Let's grant it to the representative of God: it is quite true that politics is defined in contradistinction to the model of the shepherd feeding his flock. One can object to this separation, by staking a claim, on behalf of the divine shepherd or the human shepherds who interpret his voice, to the government of his people. The price to pay for this is that democracy is effectively only ever the 'empire of nothing', the latest figure of political separation calling for us to turn back, from the pit of despair, toward the forgotten shepherd. (34) [so despondent aristocrats frame democratic passions around this looking-backwards precisely in order to confirm their own pretensions and longings]
(...) Plato is the first one to invent that mode of sociological reading we declare to be proper to the modern age, the interpretation that locates underneath the appearances of political democracy an inverse reality: the reality of a state of society where it is the private, egotistical man who governs. For him, democratic law, then, is nothing but people's pleasure for its own sake, the expression of the liberty of individuals whose sole law is that of varying mood and pleasure, without any regard for collective order. The term democracy, then, does not simply mean a bad form of government and political life. It strictly means a style of life that is opposed to any well-ordered government of the community. (36)
(...) In history, we've known two great entitlements to govern: one that is attached to human or divine kinship, that is, the superiority of birth; and another that is attached to the organization of productive and reproductive activities, that is, the power of wealth. Societies are usually governed by a combination of these two powers to which, in varying degrees, force and science lend their support. But if the elders must govern not only the young but the learned and the ignorant as well, if the learned must govern not only the ignorant but also the rich and the poor, if they must compel the obedience of the custodians of power and be understood by the ignorant, something extra is needed, a supplementary title, one common to those who possesss all these titles but also to those who do not possess them. Now, the only remaining title is the anarchice title, the title specific to those who have no more title for governing than they have for being governed. (46)
(...) This is the paradox that Plato encounters in the government of chance and that, in his furious and amusing repudiation of democracy, he must nevertheless take into account when portraying governors as men without properties that only a happy coincidence has called upon to occupy this place. It is this paradox that Hobbes, Rousseau and all the modern thinkers of the contract and sovereignty in their turn encounter through the questions of consent and legitimacy. Equality is not a fiction. All superiors experience this as the most commonplace of realities. There is no master who does not sit back and risk letting his slave run away, no man who is not capable of killing another, no force that is imposed without having to justify itself, and hence without having to recognize the irreducibility of equality needed for inequality to function. ... it is a reality that is constatntly and everywhere attested to. There is no service that is carried out, no knowledge that is imparted, no authoirty that is established without the master having, however little, to speak 'equal to equal' with the one he commands or instructs. Inegalitarian society can only function thanks to a multitude of egalitarian relations. (47-48)
(...) The term democracy, then, does not strictly designate either a form of society or a form of government. ...Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The 'power of the people' is therefore necessarily also heterotopic to inegalitarian soceity and to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society from itself. It is therefore also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society. (52)
(...) Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people makes its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so in the name of the people that representation is obliged to recognize but that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government. ... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron. (53)
(...) This duality [of man and citizen] has been denouced by critics from Burke to Agamben, via Marx and Hannah Arendt, in the name of a single logic: if two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles are required for politics instead of only one, it must be because of some deceit or vice. One of the two principles must be illusory, if not both. For both Burke and Arendt, the rights of man are either empty or tautological. They are the rights of bare man; but bare man, the man who belongs to no constituted national community, has no rights. The rights of man, then, are the empty rights of those who have no rights. Or they are the rights of man who belong to a national community. They are, then simply the rights of the citizens of that nation, the rights of those who have rights, and hence a pure tautology. Marx, conversely, saw the rights of citizens as constituting an ideal sphere whose reality consisted in the rights of man, not bare man, but the male property-owner who enforces the law of his interest, the law of wealth, under the mask of the equal rights of all. (58)
(...) The democractic process is the process of a perpetual bringing into play, of invention of forms of subjectivation, and of cases of verification that counteract the perpetual privatization of public life. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments' claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life. If there is a 'limitlessness' specific to democracy, the that's exactly where it lies: not in the exponential multiplicatoin of needs or of desires emanating from individuals, but in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social. (62)
(...) Republicanism and sociolgy are, in this sense, two names for the same project: to restore beyond the democratic rupture a political order that is homogenoeous to the mode of life of a society. This is really what Plato proposes: a community whose laws are not dead formulae, but the very respiration of society - the advice of the wise and the movement that the bodies of citizens internalize from birth, expressed through the dancing choruses of the city. This is what sociological science suggested be undertaken in the aftermath of the French Revolution: remedy the "Protestant', individualist tearing of the ancient social fabric, which was organized on the basis of the privilege of birth; oppose to democratic dispersion the reconstitution of a social body that is evenly distributed in its functions and natural hierarchies, and united by common beliefs. (64)
(...) That individualism is so out of favour with people who otherwise declare their proufound disgust for collectivism and totalitarianism is an easily solved enigma. It is not the collectivity in general that is being defended by the denouncer of 'democratic individualism'. It is a certain collectiviy, the well-ordered collectivity of bodies, milieus and 'atmospheres' that adapts knowledges to rank under the wise direction of an elite. And it is not individualism as such that is being rejected but the idea that anyone at all can share in its prerogatives. The denunciation of 'democratic individualism' is simply that hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rule over the blind herd. (68)
(...) Usually the mere existence of a representative system is regarded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone. (72)
(...) Eliminating national limits for the limitless expansion of capital; bringing the limitless expansion of capital within the limits of the nation: at the intersection of these two tasks the finally discovered figure of the royal science takes shape. It will always be impossible to find the just measure of equality and inequality; impossible, on this basis, to avoid democratic supplementation, namely, the dividing of the people. Governments and experts, on the other hand, consider it possible to find the right balance between the limited and the limitless. This goes by the name of modernization. Modernization is not the simple task of gearing governments to the harsh realities of the world. It also implies marrying the principle of wealth and the principle of socience in order to give oligarchy a renewed legitimacy. (78)
(...) No doubt it imports very little to consensual logic if the popular decision designates an oligarch from the right or if it designates one from the left. But there is a risk in leaving the solutions that depend upon the exclusive science of experts up to this decision. Our governments' authority thus gets caught in two opposed systems of legitimation: on the one hand, it is legitimated by its ability to choose the best solutions for societal problems. And yet, the best solutions can be identified by the fact that they do not have to be chosen because they result from objective knowledge of things, which is a matter for expert knowledge and not for popular choice. (78)
(...) We also know that the oligarchs, their experts and ideologues managed to find the explanation for this fortune [the 'no' vote to the EC], in fact the same one they find for every disruption to the consensus: if science did not impress its legitimacy upon the people, it is because the people is ignorant. If progress does not progress, it is because of the backward. (80)
(...) And it is hoped that a single principle will come to be ascribed to this thus-constituted ensemble: the ignorance of the backward, the attachment to the past, be it the past of social advantages, of revolutionary ideals, or of the religion of ancestors. Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividng of the people; to govern without politics. (80)
(...) That capital growth and investor interests have laws involving complicated mathematical equations is freely granted. That these laws enter into contradiction with the limits posed by national systems of social legislation is just as obvious. But that these laws are ineluctable historical laws that it is vain to oppose, and that they promise a prosperity for future generations that justifies sacrificing these systems of protection, is no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. ... The 'ignorance' that people are being reproached for is simply its lack of faith. (81)
(...) Today's faith seems to be the prerogative of governors and their experts. This is because it lends a hand to their deeper compulsion: the compulsion to get rid of the people and of politics. Proclaiming themsleves to be simply administrating the local consequences of global historical necessity, our governments take great care to banish the democratic suppplement. Through the invention of supra-State institutions which are not States, which are not accountable to any people, they realize the immanent ends of their very practice: depoliticize political matters, reserve them for places that are non-places, places that do not leave any space for the democratic invention of polemic. (81-82)
(...) The result of this is the reinforcement of a State that becomes directly responsible for the health and life of individuals. The same State that enters into battle against the institutions of the Welfare State is mobilized to have the feeding tube of a woman in a permanent state of vegetation reconnected. The elimination of the so-called Welfare State is not the withdrawal of the State. It is a redistribution, between a capitalist logic of insurance and direct state-management, of the institutions and funcitons that intervened between the two. (83)
(...) We can easily see here th emajor argument through which May '68 was reinterpreted, the argument constantly repeated by historians and sociologists, and lengthily illustrated by bestselling novelists: the movement of '68 was only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation and new ways of living. And as neither youth nor the desire for liberty know what they want or what they are doing, these youth ended up bringing about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but the truth of what they sought: both a rejuvenation of capitalism and the destruction of all the familial, educational and other structures that stood in the way of the unlimited reign of the market that was penetrating every deeper into the hearts and minds of individuals. (88-89)
(...) Everything and its contrary become the inevitable manifestation of the democratic individual that is dragging humanity to its ruin, a ruin that hte imprecators deplore but that they would deplore even more were it not there to deplore. Of this evil individual one says both that he drags the civilization of the Englightenment to its grave and that he pursues its deadly works, that he is communitarian and without community, that he has lost the sense of family values and that the sense of their transgression, the sense of the sacred and that of sacrilege. Thereby one repaints old edifying themes in the sulphurous colours of hell and blasphemy - man cannot do without God, liberty is not licence, peace enfeebles the character, the desire for justice leads to terror. (89-90)
(...) Those who dream of restoring a government of elites in the shadows of a rediscovered transcendence are perfectly happy with the current state of things in 'democracices'. And as they take the 'petty people', who contest this state of things, as their principal target, their imprecations ultimately unite with the admonitions of the progressives to come in support of the managerial oligarchs grappling with the rebellious moods of these petty people who, just like the assses and horses obstructing the streets in Plato's democratic city, obstruct the path of progress. (91-92)
(...) In a sense, then, the new hatred of democracy is only one of the forms of confusion affecting this term. It doubles the consensual confusion in making the word 'democracy' an ideological operator that depoliticizes the questions of public life by turning them into 'societal phenomena', all the while denying the forms of domination that structures society. It masks the domination of State oligarchies by identifying democracy with a form of society, and it masks that of the economic oligarchies by assimilating their empire to the mere appetities of 'democratic individuals'. Hence, it can, in all seriousness, attribute all the phenomena connected with heightening inequality to the fateful and irreversible triumph of the 'equality of conditions', and so provide the oligarchic enterprise with its ideological point of honour: it is imperative to struggle against democracy, because democracy is tantamount to totalitariansim. (93)
(...) Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself. (94)
(...) The 'government of anybody and everybody' is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restriction on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action. (95)
(...) Democracy ... is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy. (97)