On Rancière and Clastres (and Todd May)

In Society against the State, Pierre Clastres writes,

from its beginnings our culture has conceived of political power in terms of hierarchized and authoritarian relations of command and obedience. Every real or possible form of power is consequently reducible to this privileged relation which a priori expresses the essence of power. (16)

I've been working on a paper that compares Rancière and Clastres to understand their respective projects. I've completed a rough draft of the section on Rancière, which responds to what I consider to be an undertheorized point in the literature: Rancière's account of command and obedience. I argue that Rancière's politics, at least as he outlines it in Disagreement, has two features (two features also relevant to his concept of the police): politics involves both the symbolization of equality (the aesthetics of politics) and the enactment of equality, which more specifically means the disruption and subversion of relations of command.

By emphasizing the latter point, how equality disrupts relations of command, I think we not only gain a greater appreciation of Rancière's work, but we also gain an analytic distinction that contributes to understanding debates in Rancière scholarship. At the moment, we're only going to look at an example of the latter point.

As some of you know, I recently reviewed Martin Breaugh et al.'s Thinking Radical Democracy. In that review, I discuss Rachel Magnusson's chapter on Rancière. I think it's a great and incisive essay, and I follow her discussion through a critique of the work of Todd May, who, she claims, interprets Rancière's work in terms too close to liberalism. There certainly are passages in May's work where it seems that he does verge to close to liberal accounts of equality, despite, of course, his distinction between passive and active equality. Magnusson's judgment, however, has continued to bother me. After working out the analytical distinction between symbolization and command, I now know why. Todd May is cast as both too liberal (by Magnusson) and too anarcho-purist (by Samuel Chambers) because May and his critics emphasize different features of Rancière’s politics: May focuses on the enactment—in his words, the “activation”—of equality against command, while Magnusson and Chambers interpret May as giving an account of political symbolization. Indeed, one of the virtues of May's work, in distinction to much of the literature, is to think Rancière's politics against relations of command.

Next up is to deal with Clastres, who attempts to outline a genealogy of political power, and his hypothesis is that the social division, which is the State, between command and obedience precedes all other hierarchical distinctions. Then I will argue that Rancière's concept of the police, is a critique of this vertical model of political power.

Review of Todd May's Friendship in an Age of Economics

My review of Todd May's Friendship in an Age of Economics has been published by Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. You might already know, given that I briefly recounted the story in the acknowledgements of Egalitarian Moments, that it was preparing for a talk given by May that sparked my interest in the work of Rancière. Here's the gist of the review:

May’s discussion of the politics of friendship provides an account of micropolitical resistance unforeseen by Rancière. Although Rancière considers aesthetics as a form of micropolitics, he does not claim that it is the only possible form of micropolitics. And while May does not explicitly situate Friendship in an Age of Economics through Rancière’s work until Chapter 7, his account emphasizes how friendship, especially what he calls deep friendship, is a relationship between equals. (It should also be noted, given May’s anarchism, that his argument could be formulated as a claim that friendship is a rudimentary form of free association.)

In retrospect I'd probably add that Montaigne is underrepresented in and La Boétie is absent from the book, but that comment has more to do with my current interests than May's.

Patrik Ourednik, The Opportune Moment, 1855

It was a late night hyperlink clicking session that led me to Patrik Ourednik. I don't know exactly where it started, but it ended with me acquiring two of his books: The Opportune Moment, 1855 and Case Closed, both translated by Alex Zucker and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here's some brief background on Ourednik, which I've taken from Context (a journal published by Dalkey Archive as well):

Patrik Ouredník was born in Prague‚ but emigrated to France in 1984‚ where he still lives. He is the author of eight books‚ including fiction‚ essays‚ and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels‚ short stories‚ and plays from such writers as François Rabelais‚ Alfred Jarry‚ Raymond Queneau‚ Samuel Beckett‚ and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing‚ including the Czech Literary Fund Award.

I started with The Opportune Moment, 1855, which tells the story of the failure of an utopian commune founded by Italian anarchists in Brazil. It opens with a letter by one of the protagonists (who I will call the epistolary narrator), to his unrequited love, many years after the failure of the new society. At once it becomes clear that Ourednik is writing, in a way, a historical novel and satire. Here are the opening lines (also from the DA website), which convey that 19th century epistolary mood:

Madam, however strong my distaste at the thought of deferring to your whim after so many years, I have not found within myself the courage to resist it, and am left with no choice but to submit, albeit I do so at the expense of my repute. To oblige you means to confess to my love for you, that transient conflagration, that involuntary clouding of the senses, which renders less persuasive all that I have professed and proclaimed; and as much as you know it, in your selfishness you ask of me a sincerity which I could not show anyone else. For if in life I have resisted your God and his depraved demands, if I have resisted unfreedom and shallowness, if I have faced ridicule and human baseness always with calm and determination—I have lost my struggle with love; and what is more, my love has been embodied by you, a woman unworthy of true emotion. Still today, when I find in you nothing which would be worth attention, when I marvel at the fact that I ever could have loved you, still today a word from your mouth knocks me defenseless to my knees, returning me to the days of immaturity and youthful fumbling, to days past and past perfect, to the juvenile schoolboy who carried out directions and instructions he did not understand. But the schoolboy in the end revolted and made up his mind to submit only to that which appeared sensible and good to him, whereas the aging man takes pen in hand and hastens to satisfy your vanity. 

The narrator then recalls the desires and reasons to attempt to create a new society in rural Brazil, his conflicted feelings over his paramour, and the shortcomings of the commune and his youthful enthusiasms. This particular participant is the founder that searched out its location and returned to Europe to propagandize for its creation, who nevertheless fails, due to his delay at sea, to arrive before the settlement self-destructs. All that is left, aside from the deserted settlement, is a journal that is given him by the Brazilian policeman. 

The journal takes the reader back to 1855, and is told by an Italian anarchist named Bruno (who is not the same as the epistolary narrator, who, as far as I can tell, is referred to by Bruno as "Older Brother"). The journal is split into two parts, the first describes Bruno's trip across the Atlantic, the second of the decline of Fraternitas settlement. During the trip across the Atlantic, Bruno captures the hopes and anticipations of the voyagers, their squabbles, and, unwittingly, their exploitation at sea by the ship's captain (for example, when the captain chooses to land temporarily at Cape Verde rather than the Canary Islands, one of the voyagers "didn't see why we hadn't filled up on fresh water when we were in the Canary Islands, where it was free"). In the squabbles, many of the limitations of their enthusiasm are revealed: the group argues over whether non-Europeans should be admitted to the group, they seem oblivious to the problems of being settlers in relation to indigenous peoples, etc. 

After this section, there is a six month gap in the journal, and it resumes as the Fraternitas settlement collapses, and narrator becomes completely unreliable (that's all I can say without spoiling anything).

With novels such as The Opportune Moment, 1855, I find it impossible to ignore considering the political subtext. A story of a failed utopian project suggests, of course, that  Ourednik views all political change with cynical eyes, meaning that all attempts at change end in defeat (but, then, why translate the book? We've got plenty of cynics and conservatives in the English language). 

Or, it could accent the importance of the hopes opened by such a project despite their flaws. If the epistolary narrator is any indicator, Ourednik opts for the latter possibility. In his letter, the narrator rejects the smug liberalism of his former lover, choosing to resign himself to the absurdity of life rather than to the absurdity of bourgeois world.

Pierre Clastres, "Archeology of Violence"

(Semiotext(e), 2010)

In 1977, at the time of his death by road accident, Clastres was compiling materials for his third book. Only 43, he had by then inaugurated a groundbreaking political anthropology in the wake of his fieldwork in South America. Having studied under Claude Levi-Strauss and, later, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Clastres went on to severely if respectfully critique the structuralism of his early master and influence the authors of Capitalism and Schizophrenia considerably. He is now an essential reference for ethnologists as well as more radical French theory kids. He is also somewhat erroneously considered an exemplary "anarchist" anthropologist. Not in any obvious way concerned to put forth specific political programs (though his sympathies may certainly be detected), Clastres devoted his career to rigorously describing and theorizing what he termed "societies against the State".

Semiotext(e) has reissued Clastres's posthumous volume, Archeology of Violence, originally published in France in 1980. The essays collected expand upon his central argument, which defines "primitive" societies by their refusal of the State. Taking such societies seriously, for Clastres, means recognizing that they are not embryonic or proto-societies, but rather full-blown political totalities which have constituted themselves in a very conscious and deliberate way so as to prevent the rise of inequality, (non-sexual) division of labour and, ultimately, since these are its very substance, the State. In brief, since the State is a permanent possibility in human society, primitive societies constitute themselves as elaborate machines for warding it off. Accordingly, Clastres roundly rejects Marxist anthropology and other historicizing / economizing discourses (cf. his polemical essay "Marxists and their Anthropology"). It is the political, rather than the economic or the biological, which constitutes the horizon of primitive social life. According to Clastres, so-called "primitives" are actually very shrewd politicians. Even where one detects exoticizing tendencies in his turns of speech, Clastres is genuinely trying to take the people he is studying seriously.

While the general line of his argument is already trotted out in his earlier works Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians and Society Against the State, the main contribution of Archeology of Violence is to have examined "primitive" war as a tactic for keeping the State at bay. The almost universal bellicosity of tribal populations in the ethnographic record is thought by Clastres to reflect a centrifugal / atomizing tendency which at once asserts the group as a unified totality, and ensures maximum political dispersion between groups. Of particular interest is the final essay, in which Clastres examines the role of the warrior class in such societies. Since they serve the greater social interest of warding off the State, but also risk inaugurating the State via the quasi-monopoly of violence they engender, warriors become trapped in a social logic whereby their glory can only be secured by ever grander and more individualistic military exploits - thus rendering the warrior a being doomed to die. "Primitive" society is evidently sufficiently complex and canny to recognize and regulate tendencies within tendencies, machines within machines. Very Deuleuzo-Guattarian.

This brings me to my last point. Since Clastres's writing is wonderfully clear, and since he reiterates his positions in the book a great many times, the long introduction by de Castro really puts the cart before the horse. True, Clastres was influenced by and influenced Deleuze and Guattari. This is a very crucial and fascinating aspect of his work. Starting things off with D&G speak risks clouding things, however. Interested readers would do well to read the introduction last, since it does offer some great insights but ultimately gets bogged down in segmentarity, lines of flight and other such concepts.

Spanish Anarchism and the Post-Soviet Malaise

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917-1920) and the initial success of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are often fetishized by Leftists. At anti-war demonstrations one can see anarchists and Marxists chanting old slogans, pining about the good ol' days and revolutionary missed opportunities. The ambiance is that of a Renaissance Fair for the Cold War era. What the Bolshevik Revolution and Spanish anarchists did was demonstrate that society can be structured in various ways. Capitalism and liberal democracy are not sent as a cure-all from a Judeo-Christian God. They are also not a "natural" outgrowth of progressive evolution initiated by the human species. Slavoj Zizek summed it up best when he noted that twenty-first century thinkers can conceive of a massive environmental catastrophe before they can think outside the notion of capitalist democracy.

In this youtube is a clip from a documentary on Spanish Anarchism. It makes clear that there is a world of possibles. Instead of trying to relive the past, this history should motivate a confidence in the future. Each time and place has its own unique set of circumstances. In Zizek's 2002 Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin From 1917 he states:

The return to Lenin aims...[not] at nostalgically re-enacting the "good old revolutionary times"..."Lenin" stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot (prohibition on thinking) in which we live--it simply means that we are allowed to think again (11).

I will add, the Spanish Anarchists of 1936 have some creative ideas in which to share.

A modicum of clear thought vs. Glenn Beck

It is widely known among thoughtful folk that Fox News [sic] Channel personality Glenn Beck is a right-wing clown who makes his living by exploiting the fear and ignorance of a certain bracket of the American population. He invokes Tom Paine as his ideological forefather, thereby casting himself in the role of American patriot, voice of common sense, and champion of the little guy. Besides the fact that there is much in Tom Paine that is nigh incompatible with Beck's delightfully eclectic political views, Beck's much-touted "common sense", when applied to topical issues, proves to be nothing but a a pitiful hash of hyperboles and conspiracy theories.

If we peel back the verbiage, we see that Beck has essentially one play in his book: government policy or social movement or cultural trend x has some vague, tenuous, often analogical, metaphorical, or etymological relation to Nazism. Which, it should be stated when dealing with Beck, is the same thing as socialism, democratic or otherwise (Nazism = National Socialism. Socialism!!! See?? See??). The merest whiff of government intervention in any sphere has Beck shrilly invoking the gas chambers (it should of course be mentioned that he pooh-poohs the suggestion that recent racist legislation in Arizona has anything remotely in common with Nazi legislation! We see where his interests lie - precisely NOT with the little guy.) A sample of Beck's "common sense" in action: ACORN are Brown Shirts, social justice as preached by churches is disguised Nazi/Commie ideology, Obama is a racist. Here is Lewis Black destroying Beck for his "Nazi Tourette's", saying it better than I ever could.

On May 3, Beck took another play from the Beck playbook, and drew anarchist publishing collective AK Press into the ring. Their recent book We are an Image of the Future: The Greek Revolts of 2008 IS A BOOK ABOUT ANARCHISTS BY ANARCHISTS. Beck dismissed this: "They are not anarchists, but they will use anarchy to their favour". Beck has cracked the conspiracy: the self-proclaimed anarchists are really communists, which means they're in league with Nazis and moderate social democrats (all of whom are Nazis!). The AK Press collective delivered their scathing response to Beck here.

Of particular interest is their claim that Beck, in his distaste for big government and his many vaguely Paine-derived libertarian premises, is actually not that far off from anarchism in his basic outlook. This is fascinating, since it suggests that if Beck was consistent, and a clear thinker, he would be a revolutionary militant in solidarity with the little guy - not a corporate media personality clumsily defending Arizona racial laws and passing it off as freedom.

Alas, I think AK Press's exercise can only have a rhetorical effect. This is because I can't help but wonder if Beck is even serious. Much like Canadian "common sense" media personality Lowell Green, I think at the bottom of Beck's provocative political persona lurks nothing but a cynical entrepreneur. Beck is either truly as sloppy a political thinker as he portrays - or else he's pulling one over on his fanbase, which is despicable.

Cindy Milstein, "Anarchism and its Aspirations"

(AK Press / Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2010)

I first met Cindy in Washington DC, at the since-defunct National Conference on Organized Resistance in 2008. I've since run into her a few times at the anarchist book fair in Montreal. Each time she was tabling for Black Sheep Books, the infoshop in her hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Cindy is an intellectual by temperment and by training, but she's also affable, down to earth and not afraid to roll up her sleeves to do thankless, unglamourous work. She was a participant in the late Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology, and now sits on the board of the US-based Institute for Anarchist Studies. Cindy is something of a rising star of North American anarchism, and her 2010 overview of anarchist praxis is already being hailed as a classic in some circles. 

Anarchism and its Aspirations is a concise, easily readable look at anarchism which portrays the latter as an ideology of action, in action. Cindy's take on anarchism emphasizes the interlocking themes of utopia, revolutionary ethics and pre-figurative practice. She argues that anarchism is utopian to the extent that it tries to create a better world; ethically centred, to the extent that its practice must harmonize with its egalitarian, utopian aims; and finally, prefigurative, in the sense that anarchism does not wait for "the revolution" to come, but rather attempts to build alternative, ethically sound institutions in the here and now (paraphrasing the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchism attempts to build a new society in the shell of the old). The interlocking nature of its main themes helps to disarm criticisms that because it is utopian, anarchism is an unrealistic, irresponsible political position - to quote Lenin, an "infantile disorder". Rather, anarchism as Cindy portrays it is an eminently realistic position: it does not entertain illusions about revolutionary vanguards, capitalism, or the state. Anarchism is, rather, a tough slog towards a better world which entails constant self-critique and the perpetual development of its utopian assumptions against a background of real developments and concrete engagement.

I should warn prospective readers that Cindy is not saying anything essentially new in her book; Gustav Landauer aready said as much 90 years ago. What makes her contribution valuable is that she has situated contemporary anarchism in a proud historical continuum that puts it at the forefront of anti-capitalist struggle; she has also condensed a number of complex ideas into an easily understandable argument that dodges the anachronistic, frankly antiquated pitfalls of the bulk of anarchist literature. I am willing to entertain the idea that her book is a contender for the best contemporary anarchist primer out there.

No doubt certain insurrectionary/green factions will find Cindy's statement a bit toothless; arguably, however, her anarchism is tougher-minded, more serious and more appealing than that of the more "spectacular" anarchist factions that would find her position objectionable. The global anticapitalist movement, as well as the wider, heterogeneous "movement of movements" needs people like Cindy on its side - for her integrity, her realistic but hopeful appraisal of the contemporary conjuncture, and her willingness to turn intellectual tools to good use in the critique of social institutions and the advancement of viable alternatives.

An Interview with Todd May: Ranciere, Deleuze and Anarchism

In 2006, Todd May came to the University of Ottawa for a graduate student conference organized by the journal De Philosophia. He delivered the keynote address, “Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière,” and and was kind enough to spend some of his time afterward giving an interview conducted through email. It was originally published in De Philosophia, Volume 19, n. 2, pp. 1-4. May's most recent books are The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière and Death.

Devin Zane Shaw: In 1994, you published The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, a book which has taken on a life of its own. Anarchist circles took to the book because of the connection you draw between 19^th century anarchism and the concerns of French post-structuralism, despite their avowed political differences (for instance, Foucault rejects anarchism in the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended). However, the book does not stop there; it also proposes an ethics drawn from post-structuralism emphasizing innovative practices instead of the various ethics proposed in other philosophical circles. In retrospect, this book appears to have launched your trajectory of inquiry into creativity and innovation. Has the reception of this book influenced your subsequent line of inquiry?

Todd May: Certainly. Since the book's publication, I have gotten a number of invitations to speak in anarchist or anarchist-inspired venues. Most of these venues are intellectually exciting, in part because anarchism doesn't have the rich theoretical tradition that Marxism does, which leaves it more open intellectually. Perhaps foremost among the places I have been able to speak and converse is the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition in Plainfield, Vermont. In any case, the discussions at these events have been unfailingly fascinating. I've had my ideas challenged, extended, and twisted in unexpected ways. My work now on the thought of Jacques Rancière is a result of these discussions. I'm trying to use his work to help develop areas of radical democratic thought that were not addressed in the earlier book. In particular, I want to be able to frame a positive conception of egalitarian politics that is informed by the healthy skepticism of thinkers like Foucault.

Devin Zane Shaw: Before moving to your recent work on Rancière, we would like to raise a few related questions about the well-known representatives of French thought, such as Foucault. One criticism often addressed to such thinkers as Foucault or Deleuze, is that they lack a normative or positive conception of political action. For instance, it was noted in a recent review (in De Philosophia v. 19, n.1, by Stephen B. Hawkins) of your Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction that Deleuze's emphasis on experimentation, despite its exhilarating possibilities, could also lead toward a resignation “to the endless production of monstrosity.” I take it that the shift toward the thought of Rancière aims to remedy these problems regarding how to evaluate political actions?

Todd May: Exactly, although we need to be careful here in keeping the proper distinctions alive among different thinkers. Deleuze has a normative view. In fact, my book argues that his view is largely normative. It not only commends experimentation with the possibilities the virtual offers, but also and more deeply seeks to design an ontology that responds to his larger normative orientation. The problem cited by the reviewer, and I believe it has political bearing, is that Deleuze does not distinguish among those experiments or give any criteria for distinguishing the better and the worse. By contrast, Foucault's writing, while normatively inflected, does not offer an overt normative view. However, critique is all over the place in his writings, particularly the genealogical ones. Foucault was always reticent to speak in openly normative terms. I think this is because he worried about becoming another Sartre, addressing the world from on high. (My book on the moral theory of post-structuralism argues that this reticence is misplaced.) However, if one looks into his normative orientation, I think one will find that it can be taken in a direction of the kind Rancière articulates. Foucault's politics, in short, is radically egalitarian. What Rancière has accomplished is to think that egalitarianism through more rigorously.

Mark Raymond Brown: In the conclusion of French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Gary Gutting observes that the concern with individual freedom as a concrete lived reality has, more than anything else, maintained the distinctiveness of French philosophy throughout the twentieth century. This is certainly a debatable claim, but for the sake of argument I'd like to pose the following questions to you: as diverse as the thought of Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze may be, the one thing that united them was their political activity, as on several occasions they found themselves involved in political protests. On each occasion they were protesting against the state. Yet, with these thinkers, aside from implicit or explicit criticisms of the state, one does not find any concrete political outline for a social organization that would foster individual freedom. Is such a proposal possible, or even necessary? Or can the idea of individual freedom be used only as a tool to critique existing social policies? Related to these queries is another: is there any positive relation between twentieth century French philosophy, as concerned with individual freedom, and democracy?

Todd May: I'm hesitant to introduce the idea of individual freedom as a goal of political activism for several reasons. First, in Deleuze's case, the concept of the individual as a centerpiece of politics is put in question. Deleuze's ontology has among its central purposes to make it a point of indifference whether to address organization at the level of the individual, pre-individual, or supra-individual. Foucault is less concerned with the individual per se than with the subject. One can read him as seeking to return from the subject to individual freedom (Pierre Hadot does), but I'm not sure that's an accurate interpretation. Foucault does speak of freedom, but the contexts in which he does so seem to focus as much on a collective creation as on individual freedom.

The question of democracy is a distinct one altogether. It makes a central appearance in Rancière's thought, although not so much in that of Foucault and Deleuze. I believe the latter two thinkers probably seek to avoid it because of the amount of baggage that concept brings with it, while Rancière instead takes as his project a redefinition. I mentioned above that I believe Foucault can be thought in terms of a Rancièrean democracy, although I would hesitate to say as much for Deleuze.

Devin Zane Shaw: Here I think it is appropriate to ask: how would you frame a positive conception of egalitarian politics through Rancière's redefinition of democracy? As Rancière frames it, democracy is not a particular regime, but an egalitarian presupposition which underlies any particular regime such as parliamentarianism.

Todd May: Rancière argues that the egalitarian presupposition does underlie all political regimes, but he also say something else that's important for understanding his thought. Political regimes tend both to presuppose and to deny the presupposition of everyone's equality. They presuppose it when they assume that people will be able to understand and carry out their orders; they deny it through the creation and maintenance of hierarchies that give orders in the first place. That helps offer a clue as to the redefinition of democracy. If political regimes--Rancière calls them police orders--are based on hierarchies, then democracy is based on the presupposition of equality, a presupposition that is expressed rather than denied. Taking matters this way, it can be seen that the creation of equality is a matter for the people, for those who find themselves at the wrong end of hierarchies. This does not mean that any particular class of people is the people. Just as a society has different hierarchies--racial, economic, gender--so it can have different democratic movements and different peoples. In Rancière's view, these democratic movements form communities, but they cannot form institutions without betraying their democratic character. I'm not sure he's right about this, but I'm not sure he's wrong either. He seems to think that as a matter of principle democracies cannot form institutions. I tend toward thinking that the question of democratic institutions can only be answered by experimenting with them and seeing what turns up.

Devin Zane Shaw: In your presentation at our conference, “Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière,” you expressed a hesitancy regarding Rancière's use of the concept of the speaking being. Unlike many of the other authors who appear in your work, and who we have already mentioned above, who are reticent regarding the 'speaking being,' Rancière engages this concept-- often associated with the work of Lacan-- to twist it in a new direction. This connection of political actors to language as speaking beings is central to the argument of Disagreement. Elsewhere, Rancière goes so far as to state that “Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his 'natural' purpose by the power of words.” (The Politics of Aesthetics, 39) By downplaying the role of speech (and I mean this in a broad sense, including both speech and writing), don't we lose something integral to Rancière's approach?

Todd May: It depends on what is meant by downplaying. If I were to say that speaking is not important, I would certainly be doing harm to Rancière's thought. My idea is to embed speaking into something wider. People are capable of creating meaningful lives in concert with others. This requires speech, but is not reducible to it. In the quote you offered above, if we replace the term literary with creative, and see the power of words as a centrally important way in which we are diverted, then I think we arrive at the point I'm trying to make. I don't want to reduce language and speaking to something else; I want to avoid a reductionism to language and speaking.

Devin Zane Shaw: Finally, I would like to return to your comment about democratic institutions. You have emphasized the role of experimentation, but I wonder how experimentation and institutional practices can be compatible. Yet, I would like to add, I don't know if radical approaches to politics can continue to insist that democratic practices must remain inimical to institutionalization. To put this in blunter terms, does not the constant emphasis on resistance accept that capitalist-parliamentarianism is the name of the game?

Todd May: I have this concern as well. If we define resistance in such a way as to preclude institutionalization at the outset, which Rancière seems to do, then resistance becomes in a strange way parasitical upon what it is resisting. This does not mean that things can't get better, but the horizon of their improvement is always the dominant political and economic structure. However, I don't think experimentation, on the other hand, is inimical to institutionalization. We can experiment with institution-building, seeking to discover what kinds of institutions under what kinds of conditions maintain the presupposition of equality. One can't say in advance what those institutions would look like; that's the point of a democratic politics. Democratic institutions must emerge from the political activity of those involved in struggle. But I don't see why they should be precluded at the outset. We don't know what they are going to look like and how or even whether they will work. If they do arise, what is important is that we maintain a Foucaultian vigilance about them: watch where they are going, what they are giving rise to, what other practices and institutions they are intersecting with and with what results.