Rancière and the "Limit" of Realism
Andrew Gibson
This essay stems from my recent and growing interest in certain developments in French thought in what we might think of as the period at the end of grand theory, 1985-2000. My particular concern is with three thinkers most if not all of whose more important work has appeared in that period, Alain Badiou, Claud Lefort and Jacques Rancière. They are widely different thinkers whose work is nonetheless bound together by certain common themes. All are conscious of working in the wake of postwar French theory and of taking at least some of their bearings from the great French theorists: Badiou from Deleuze and Lacan, for instance, Rancière from Derrida and Lyotard. But the more crucial connection is a shared consciousness of working in a particular political and cultural climate distinct from the conditions from which grand theory emerged. All three address what they take to be a crisis for politics itself: the appearance in Europe of a so-called `consensual' politics intimately related to the smooth promotion of the interests of the free market. This crisis has a number of different features and produces what Badiou calls our abjection contemporaine. It provokes the question Rancière insistently raises as to whether, in Platonic terms, we do not live in an `ochlocracy', under the rule of the ochlos rather than the demos.(1) For Badiou, Lefort and Rancière, ours is an era distinctively marked by the collusion of social democracy with neo-liberalism. As such, it ushers in a distinctive set of conditions for thought. It makes new demands of theory, including aesthetic theory, a category which would include literary theory and criticism. Of the three philosophers in question, it is Rancière who is most concerned with the relationship between politics and aesthetics per se. Indeed, he writes of the importance of what he calls `a particular aesthetic of politics' (OSP, p. 51). A specific conception of realism is central to his work. It is for that reason that I have chosen to consider his work here. I shall consider his account of realism in detail, moving on later to give some preliminary indication of its connections with his political thought.
In an essay in La chair des mots entitled `Le corps de la lettre: Bible, épopée, roman',(2) Rancière distinguishes between what he takes to be two conceptions of the relationship between literature and materiality: the figurative and the figural. He identifies the first of these with Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, the second with Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy. For Auerbach, writes Rancière, as, in a very different way, for the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel, the European tradition of novelistic realism is founded on a principle of incarnation. For Lukács, the novel -- as opposed to epic -- is the form of art that emerges when the totality of life is no longer immediately given or immanent in the real, when the relation of meaning to the world is one of transcendence, when the Word must be made flesh. Auerbach inverts Lukács's Hegelian, melancholic account of the historical movement in question. For Auerbach, it it precisely in this movement that mimesis becomes possible. Aristotelean tradition had asserted that certain genres and styles of presentation were appropriate to certain subjects and not others. But in novelistic representation, meaning is not particular to a particular kinf of subject. The word becomes universal flesh. Any subject whatsoever can be represented, and can be represented alongside any other subject. The idea can always be made carnally present. However, Kermode proposes a theory of the novel that is the antithesis of Auerbach's. For Kermode, the idea is never made carnally present at all, insofar as the representation of the material world in the novel is always, in the first instance, an event of writing. Representation is always a question of play, a play in which the illusion of carnal presence is dissipated in the economy of the text, in which the principal relation is always that of writing to itself or the novelist's power over language. Literature plays a double game of revelation and concealment together. This is the very process of the genesis of secrecy, in which, above all, literature demonstrates its own endless capacity to close round the secret of writing itself.
The figurative, then, and the figural: two opposed conceptions of the relation between the novel and the material world. The basic structure of Rancière's antithesis may seem thoroughly familiar: on the one hand, a classical, mimetic aesthetic, on the other hand, a sceptical, language-centred account of representation easily associated with structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism and their intellectual legacy. Significantly, however, Rancière's critique of the mimetic aesthetic is not exactly post-structuralist or postmodern. He steers what is in some respects a course between the polar opposites designated by the names of Auerbach and Kermode. He even shifts the very basis for thought about representation. The crucial point, here, is Rancière's distinctive conception of what he calls `l'"échec" du réalisme', the `"limit" of realism' of my title.(3) He conveys this idea particularly simply and clearly in a passage in Chapter 7 of La parole muette, `La guerre des écritures'. The limit of novelistic realism is the final, categorical unavailability of the world it designates. For all the scrupulous minuteness with which Dostoesvky depicts Raskolnikov's room, we will never enter it. We will never see the buttons on Monsieur Grandet's coat, or Charles Bovary's fabulous casquette. These remote worlds, over the supposed actuality of which criticism has taken infinite pains, are always comprehensively and in principle deprived of any material or sensory concreteness. Mimetic aesthetics places the question of adequation at the centre of representation. If postmodern aesthetics has called mimesis radically into question, it has precisely been with reference to adequation. The assumption that the problem of adequation is centrally important itself remains unchallenged. But for Rancière, the concept of adequation is practically irrelevant. So is the temporality on which it is founded and from which it is inseparable, and which always thinks the act of representation as belated, derivative, secondary, `coming after'. The suggestion that novelistic representations of reality can be more or less adequate to it has no meaning. For the limit of realism is decisive, and can never be surpassed. It decrees that the novel can never rejoin the corporeal world, that the only material dimension it will ever properly know is that of language and the book.
This argument might appear close to Kermode's, in Rancière's own account of the latter. There is no incarnation. The word is not made flesh. Like Kermode, Rancière apparently inverts the premises underlying the ancient tradition of mimetic aesthetics. He equally resembles Kermode in effectively proclaiming an end to mimetic aesthetics as an aesthetics of the Christian epoch. But to identify Rancière with Kermode in his own account of him is to ignore the importance for Rancière of what I would call the moment of surprise; surprise, that is, at the self-evidence of the limit of realism. Though Rancière himself does not dwell on it, the obvious example, here, is Charles Bovary's casquette:
It was one of those hats of the Composite order, in which we find features of the military bear-skin, the Polish chapska, the bowler hat, the beaver and the common nightcap, one of those pathetic things, in fact, whose mute ugliness has a profundity of expression, like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and stiffened with whalebone, it began with three big sausages, then, separated by a red band, there alternated diamonds of velours and rabbit-fur; after that came a sort of bag terminating in a cardboard polygon, embroidered all over with complicated braid, and, hanging down at the end of a long cord that was too thin, a little cluster of gold threads, like a tassel. It looked new; the peak was gleaming.(4)
What is remarkable about the passage in question is its extraordinary lavishness. Flaubert describes the casquette with a sedulous, almost maniacal exhaustiveness and precision. Yet for all the novelist's power, his resources, the ardour and intensity of his labours, he does not in the slightest change the condition of writing. The limit remains uncrossable and inexorable. The sumptuous flourish of realism is also a futile display. Flaubert's text itself will never transcend the mute expressiveness that it attributes to its object. Indeed, the genius of the passage lies partly in the fact that, at the very beginning of his greatest novel, Flaubert gives a precise indication of the condition of representation in the very object represented. In this doubling up, he also indicates the fate of literary flesh, which is never to be other than la chair des mots. In effect, Flaubert indicates a paradox beyond which his novel cannot go and which is decisive for realism. The paradox is precisely that, as a realist, he must write as though realism knew no limit, as though his description were in some sense continuous with the world, rather than categorically distant from it. The shock of the self-evidence of the limit to realism is always possible precisely because that limit can never be wholly acknowledged and accepted, either by the realist novelist or by his or her reader.
Indeed, when Rancière seeks to find terms for literary representation, the paradoxes quickly proliferate. The language of literature is `une parole muette' or `une bavardisme muette' (CM, p. 125). In a passage at the end of Plato's Phaedrus, Thamos tells Thoth that his new invention, writing, is doubly defective. On the one hand, it is mute, like a painting which always signifies the same thing. It is incapable of participating in the living world of the logos, of process, exchange, alteration. Yet, on the other hand, it is also `bavarde'. It chatters on endlessly and senselessly, because it is the child without a parent, the `énoncé orphelin' deprived of the relationship of authority and legitimacy that, in the case of the spoken word, is conferred by the voice (CM, p. 125). Rancière sustains the logic of the Platonic critique. But he also inverts it. He turns what Plato takes to be the dumb garrulity of writing into the very condition of literature, but presents that condition as enabling, as we shall shortly see. However, this is not the only way in which Rancière expresses the irony of the relationship between the novel and the material or carnal. Elsewhere, he suggests that the world of the novel is `un vide peuplé' (CM, p. 126). The world of literature -- the world of reading -- is that of `la sensation insensible' (CM, p. 185). The world of the novel has only a `quasi-corporéité' (CM, p. 111). The novel indicates a seemingly embodied world that, in fact, forever awaits embodiment.
Thus the world of the novel has what Rancière calls a `suspensive' existence (CM, p. 105). It is a liminal world of the `quasi-corps'. Rancière's concept of the `suspensive' may seem close to the concept of the `spectral' emergent in Derrida's work in the 90s. Interestingly, the term `spectrality' appears significantly in the work of both writers in more or less the same period, and Rancière's political concerns in the 90s have partly resembled Derrida's. But Rancière's and Derrida's aesthetics should not be confused. Nor should the concept of the `suspensive' be confused with familiar ideas of the novel as founded in what Marthe Robert once called `conjuration' and `critique'.(5) Neither the novel as genre nor novels themselves are engaged in a movement or struggle between a will to represent, and the reflexive dissipation of representation. For they exist in the `suspensive' mode, from the start, definitively. I come back, here, to the difference Rancière seeks to establish between his own position and the postmodern-sceptical position he associates with Kermode (though Kermode would not appreciate my terms). In `Le corps de la lettre', Rancière explicitly asserts the need to steer away from what he presents as a Borgesian conception of literary reference, according to which the `corps fictionnel' is always subordinated to the infinite self-referral of the book (CM, pp. 110-111). It is important not to be captivated by `ce leurre [delusive lure] du jeu littéraire souverain' (ibid.). In effect, for Rancière, it is crucial that we escape the established, contemporary structure which opposes neo-Aristotelean and postmodern conceptions of representation.
But if literature does not represent the material and corporeal world, if, as Rancière suggests, it is nonetheless somehow `haunted' by that world, then what exactly does he mean by that? The answer lies partly in his conception of the relationship between words and things. For Rancière, literary language is not representational, as it is for mimetic aesthetics. But nor is it an arbitrary and conventional order categorically distinct from the order of things, as it is in Saussurean linguistics and post-Saussurean aesthetics. He argues, rather, that literature reorganizes the relations between words and things (CM, p. 124). One of Rancière's cardinal principles appears to be that it is a mistake or, at least, unhelpful to approach aesthetic questions on the basis of a general theory of language. The more important issue is the difference between literary and other forms of language. Literary language is categorically distinct from language in the world. Rancière writes that it has always and definitively `escaped the destiny' of language in the world to `mime its own movement' (CM, p. 12). But that movement is not simply a question of language turning back on itself. Rancière rather contrasts what he calls the living word of literature and the inert, utilitarian word, or what he calls `la parole efficace' (PM, p. 26). Unlike language in the world, literary language has no particular use. It is rather open to endless different uses. It projects itself beyond all determinate ends, purposes, figures or final embodiments. As the `genre sans genre' (PM, p. 29), the genre with no fixed rules, the genre that continually sets its own status at risk (PM, p. 21), the novel is peculiarly expressive of this. Thus there can never be any adequation in literature. If the literary image is `adequate' to anything, it is `the movement of the forms of life' (PM, p. 62). More specifically, beyond this rather Nietzschean formulation, Rancière argues that literature sets up a movement between thought and life, both the life from which it emerges and the life towards which it travels, whether conceived of as author and reader or rather, as Rancière tends to do, as the lives of past and future communities. It is as such that literature reorganizes the relations between words and things, that it is haunted by, rather than representing, the world.
This, I think, is what Rancière means when he says that literature bears the physiognomy of its world upon its own body (PM, p. 37). When Swann sees the features of a Botticelli portrait in Odette's face, in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, he fails precisely to understand this point. The believer in the national epic makes the same mistake. Art is not in life. There is no question of correspondence between the two. The literary figure who looms largest in Rancière's work is Don Quixote. Quixote wilfully manufactures correspondences between art and life. In doing so, he defects from a communal truth. In the teeth of the community, he insistently declares that correspondence is not ordained, that there are no rules that govern it. If nothing will ever bear out the assumption of correspondence between the chivalric romances and the world, nothing will ever finally and categorically disprove it. Cervantes understands the mirage of incarnation as Swann does not. For Rancière, literature works precisely to separate language from the mirage of incarnation, particularly insofar as the latter is a philosophical and political mirage. I shall explain what he means by looking very briefly at his accounts of three figures, Hobbes, Althusser and Michelet.
In Rancière's view of him, Hobbes sees the political scene as threatened by a disease of reference. Words are coming unstuck from the things they designate. This is particularly clear in the case of words like `despot' and `tyrant', whose sphere of reference seems to Hobbes to be specific and limited, but which others are using in new ways and applying to new objects, notably to Charles I. Hobbes lays the blame on what, for him, are `parasitic voices and writings'.(6) These voices and writings do not offer a faithful representation of the world. They summon up only `a ghost made of words without a body' (ibid.). They conjure `the extravagant scene of a fiction-politics', says Rancière, and, in doing so, they threaten to expose the element of fiction always present in politics (ibid.). For Hobbes, `the theoretical and political evil' is a proliferation of `names that do not resemble any reality', that are now available to all and therefore open to corruption and misuse (NH, p. 21). `The evil that the modern revolution sets to work', writes Rancière, `is that of words to which no determined idea is attached' (ibid.). It is exemplified above all in the rise of literature. Hobbes is afraid of modernity and democracy together. He is afraid of the democratic strife of voices quarrelling over meaning and reference. Above all, however, he is afraid of the modern spirit in and as literature. For literature is that form of writing in which reference cannot be fixed and stabilized, which always insists on the limit of realism.
In effect, then, Hobbes -- like so many philosophers, historians, political and scientific thinkers -- is in thrall to the mirage of incarnation. By contrast, literature preserves the aleatory or hazardous character of reference, and, with it, the status of language as event. It preserves a connection between language and a world that is not self-evident, not immediately given to knowledge. In a fine and poignant essay in La chair des mots, `Althusser, Don Quichotte et la scène du texte', Rancière reflects on his old mentor as haunted by a problem of reference. For Althusser as for Marx, philosophy is in the world, and speaks of it. History is never beyond representation. It can always be encapsulated in a theoretical structure. Althusser cannot entertain the possibility that history might be just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Not that Rancière himself subscribes to a callow existentialism that would describe history as properly senseless. He is rather concerned with Althusser as the prisoner of a referential system which cannot think that it might be fundamentally in error. In fact, Althusser's madness is a fear of literature. It is a fear of Don Quixote, a fear of being a voice in the desert, crying out a solitary truth. Rancière calls this the Quixotic risk. The Quixotic risk is founded on a conviction of the slipperiness of reference. It is the condition of literature. But it is a risk that philosophy and politics repeatedly refuse to take, wedded as they are to `la parole efficace'.
The same is true of historical discourse. If Rancière is drawn to the work of Michelet, it is precisely because Michelet's historiography cannot be reduced to an established paradigm of historical reference. Rancière is well aware of the aspects of Michelet's writing that make his work seem dated: `romantic passions, phantasms and effects of language' (NH, p. 42). But these are insignificant, once we become aware of the epistemological break for which Michelet's work was responsible. Rancière's point, however, is not that Michelet underlines or exposes the literariness of history, its intimate dependence on rhetorical or narrative structures. Indeed, he argues that Michelet's historiographical method itself is ostentatiously and shamelessly narrative. Nor, even more surprisingly, given Rancière's own interest in buried histories, does he read Michelet as a historian who breathes new life into silenced and forgotten voices. Indeed, according to Rancière, Michelet precisely refuses to let the testimonies of the poor speak for themselves, he even partly represses them. But this is the case because, for Michelet, to make the poor speak within his own discourse would be to place them `within the logic of mimesis' and therefore `outside the truth' (NH, p. 46). Michelet rather `defines another manner of treating the speech of the other' as `appropriate for democratic historical knowledge' (NH, p. 45). This involves `staging' the power of the `testimonies' of the oppressed `as narrative' (NH, p. 45). In historical narrative as composed by Michelet, discourse or histoire and narrative or récit become interchangeable, as do literal and figurative levels. This is not to say that, in Michelet's work, historiographical discourse becomes properly self-reflexive. What interests Rancière is the play that Michelet establishes and sustains between the discourses of the past and what Rancière calls `the present of meaning' (NH, p. 51). This play keeps different and conflicting versions of the referent in play. It effectively insists that the question of the meaning of the past and how best to represent it has no final and definitive resolution. The meaning of the story of the victims of history is not to be told once and for all time, in a single, coherent representation. That story is always the site of dispute, always open to supplementation.
Thus Michelet banishes the mirage of incarnation. Unlike Hobbes and Althusser, he does not
assume or assert the correspondence between a given discourse and the world. He understands
and accepts the principle of literature, as they do not. In effect, he is aware of the limit of realism.
This makes him a great, democratic historian. Rancière sees an awareness of the principle of
literature and the limit of realism as at the heart of democracy properly defined as such. This is
precisely `particular aesthetic of politics' that I referred to at the beginning of this essay as
Rancière's (OSP, p. 51). Democratic man `is a poetic being', writes Rancière, with a sly, sideways
glance at Heidegger, `a being capable of embracing a distance between words and things', of
`embracing the unreality of representation' (ibid.). Democratic man is at home with the limit of
realism. For disputes over reference, the disputes that Hobbes so feared, over the purchase and
meaning of words, over the designation of terms, over the faithfulness or appropriateness of
different representations, are integral to true democracy. The condition of literature as Flaubert
sets it before us in his description of Charles Bovary's casquette in one of what Rancière calls
`dereliction' (CM, p. 168). But there is nothing finally melancholic about it. For the ghostly
bodies and dumb voices of literature preserve the condition of democracy, are, in a sense, its very
medium. Literature resists all categorical or communal incarnations of the logos. It also preserves
the true, democratic orientation towards the future. Quixote, Emma Bovary and Hardy's Jude
want the world to correspond to books. They are figures for literature itself. For as I said earlier,
if literature never incarnates or embodies anything, it always anticipates embodiment. No world
is ever realized in any novel. The novel itself forever awaits realization. Its ghostly bodies wait to
take on flesh. Literature is the very paradigm of the idea that has yet to be completed, that has
still to find its material form. For Rancière, our culture is dangerously close to entering into an
age of political nullity. Contemporary proclamations of `the end of politics' or the `end of
ideology' indicate a problem for democracy itself. As politics increasingly becomes an art of
consensus-building and pragmatic management, of present prudence, so we renounce the vital
relation to the future that is crucial to any significant, political culture. So, too, what Rancière
calls the current `pacification of politics' is precisely a radical negation of the very power of
democracy, which is fuelled by the possibility of controversy, of what Rancière calls
`inconsistent, disintegrative and ever-replayed division' (OSP, p. 33). In these two respects -- its
preservation of the conditions, even the spirit of democratic conflict, and its call to the future --
precisely because of the limit of realism, literature remains exemplary for us.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.