Talk at MUN: Rancière and Clastres

Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at Memorial University in St. John’s, titled "The State and the Police: Considerations on Jacques Rancière and Pierre Clastres." In the talk, I examine the problem of command and coercion through the work of Clastres and Rancière. The argument of this talk has three parts. First, I show that command is a problem conceptualized by Rancière, and then, how the command-obedience relation functions to both reinforce and, when it is politicized, undermine the inequalities of a given police order. Then, I examine Clastres’s critique of the Eurocentric biases of anthropology and ethnography that reduce societies against the state to societies that lack a state. To show how societies refuse coercion and state power, I contend that Clastres proposes debt as both the origin of state power and the reason for the discontinuity and heterogeneity between societies against the state and societies with a state. I conclude with a series of critical remarks aimed toward evaluating Clastres’s identification of coercion with state power and Rancière’s categorization of command as policing. 

The talk is at Science 2101, 4:30 to 5:45.

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.

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.