THE SUBJECTIVATION AND POLITICAL EMANCIPATION PROCESSES IN JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Abstract: This article aims to reflect on the concept of subjectivation in Jacques Rancière, highlighting how he thinks about the production of disidentified political subjects, who appear in the polemic scene through non-hierarchical relationships and articulations. We argue that the disruptive power of politics in Jacques Rancière is not in the affirmation of the self, but in the rearticulation between elements, which generates disidentifications and gives rise to the emergence of interval identities. The process of subjectivation configures a sensitive polemic scene in which ways of being, seeing and saying are invented, contesting the way in which the sharing of the world is made and distributed hierarchically, unequally, violating the dignity and recognition of the value of every form of life. Subjectivation promotes varied arrangements and operations, which destabilize and dismantle rationalities that maintain legibility, audibility and visuality. It makes subjects appear in the midst of conflicts and negotiations for justice.

Keywords:
Political subjectivation; Scenes; Dissensus; Disidentification; Jacques Rancière

Resumo:

O objetivo deste artigo é realizar uma reflexão do conceito de subjetivação em Jacques Rancière, salientando a maneira como ele pensa a produção de sujeitos políticos desidentificados, que aparecem na cena polêmica por meio de relações e articulações desierarquizadas. Argumentamos que a potência disruptiva da política em Jacques Rancière não está na afirmação de si, mas na rearticulação entre elementos, que gera desidentificações e dá margem ao surgimento de identidades intervalares. O processo intersubjetivo de subjetivação configura e (re)cria uma cena polêmica sensível na qual se inventam modos de ser, ver e dizer, contestando a maneira como a partilha do mundo é feita e distribuída hierarquicamente, desigualmente, violando a dignidade e o reconhecimento do valor de cada forma de vida. A subjetivação promove arranjos e operações variadas, que desestabilizam e desmontam racionalidades que mantêm legibilidades, audibilidades e visualidades. Ela faz aparecer sujeitos em meio aos conflitos e às negociações por justiça.

Palavras chave:
Subjetivação política; Cena; Dissenso; Desidentificações; Jacques Rancière

Resumen:

Este artículo tiene como propósito reflexionar sobre el concepto de subjetivación en Jacques Rancière, destacando la forma en que él piensa la producción de sujetos políticos desidentificados, que aparecen en la escena polémica a través de relaciones y articulaciones no jerárquicas. Argumentamos que el poder disruptivo en Jacques Rancière no está en la afirmación del yo, sino en la rearticulación entre elementos, lo que genera desidentificaciones y permite el surgimiento de identidades intervalares. El proceso de subjetivación configura un sensible escenario polémico en el que se inventan modos de ser, de ver y de decir, impugnando el modo en que se hace y distribuye el compartir del mundo de manera jerárquica, desigual, violentando la dignidad y el reconocimiento del valor de cada forma de vida. La subjetivación promueve arreglos y operaciones variadas, que desestabilizan racionalidades que mantienen la legibilidad, la audibilidad y la visualidad. Hace aparecer sujetos en medio de conflictos y negociaciones por la justicia.

Palabras clave:
Subjetivacion politica; Escenas; Dissensus; Desidentificaciones; Jacques Rancière

Introduction

The political thinking of Jacques Rancière (1988, 1995, 2004, 2010a, 2010b, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b, 2019a, 2019b) highlights the way how people appear or not in a space of critical interlocution, drawing attention to the fact that appearing is not becoming visible but rather implying reconfiguring relations between the visible, the enunciable and the thinkable that operate in the space where things are named, discourses are produced and actions are performed. Appearing redefines the visibility frames and devices that allow or not to recognize subjects as legitimate parts of democratic processes.

Jacques Rancière does not value a type of “division” or insurmountable distance that differentiates groups and classes, but the affirmation that the scene that involves the interlocution of subjects and the exposure of their worlds must always be reconfigured, because the common must be constructed differently. The purpose of the action in Rancière is not to insert “a part of those without part” in the existing community, that is, to include the excluded, but to constantly redefine the instance of common life through a process that requires a distribution of the sensible that is not consensual.

On this aspect, the character of “a part of those without part” represents less of a group or class of people and more of a designation of a failure, a damage in the way of considering people differently and hierarchically in political processes. As Jodi Dean highlights, “it makes more sense to think on the part of those without part as this gap: a pause in the existing order of appearance between a given order and other possible space configurations between and inside worlds” (2011, p. 86). Thus, the “part of those without part” can preferably be seen as a metaphor that indicates a gap in the existent order of appearance between a giver order and other possible configurations of the space between and in the worlds in which people are inscribed.

Thus, this author’s political philosophy is not reduced to a game between inclusion and exclusion, nor affirms that the “damage performance” aims at the inclusion of the excluded, “the part of those without part”, in a community that does not consider them. The dissent points precisely to the fact that the exclusion of “a part of those without part” is not the result of a simple relationship between a previously established outside and an inside, but “a way of sharing that makes the sharing itself invisible, since the excluded are rendered inaudible” (Ruby, 2009, p. 61).

The consensual distribution of the sensible carried out by police order associates ethics with the radicality of the law, “which leaves no alternative, as it equates everything to the simple constraint of an order/state of affairs” (Rancière, 2010a, p. 185). The ways of distribution of the sensible defined by the police order act as a set of data, more or less accepted and conscious that it forms and limits the capacities of perception and thought. However, when we have a political distribution of the sensible, it is possible to notice that these data can be appropriate in a plurality of different articulations between its elements, a multiplicity of possibilities that can be combined in different ways by individuals, communities or events that break the ordinary time logic, and exhibit other possible forms of experience and other possible forms of giving meaning to these experiences (Rancière, 2011a).

The conceptual network that Rancière establishes around the concepts of politics, police, consensus, dissent and distribution of the sensible deserves our more detailed attention. Politics acts as a subversion or reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible, redistributing spaces and times, subjects and objects, reorienting the common experience (Rancière, 2000c, p. 8).

Such sharing is defined as a relation between occupations and capacities, between the fact of being in a specific time and space, of carrying out activities related to these and of having the ways of seeing, speaking and acting that are supposedly adapted to these activities. A distribution of the sensible is a matrix that defines an entire organization of the visible, the thinkable, guiding the distribution of words, time, space and parts of a community (Rancière, 2020b).

At time same time, Rancière states that there are “two forms of dispute on the distribution of the sensible” (2010b, p. 37), “two ways of counting the parts of a community” (2010b, p. 36):

the first counts real parts only - actual groups defined by differences in birth and by different functions, places and interests that make the social body exclude any supplement. The second counts a part of those without part. I call the first one the police and the second, politics. (Rancière, 2010b, p. 36)

The differentiation between the two forms of distributing the sensitive is made by Rancière in order to make more evident the way in which the police and politics cut differently time, space, the visible and the invisible, creating consensual or dissenting frameworks to guide our experience in the world. On the one hand, “the police is a distribution of the sensible whose principle is the absence of the void and the supplement.” (Rancière, 2010b, p. 36). The police act on the sensible, limiting our ability to apprehend and read what is manifested around us, controlling the displacements of bodies and the possibilities of recreating forms of life.

society here is characterized by groups tied to specific ways of doing things, to spaces in which these occupations are exercised and to ways of being that correspond to these occupations and spaces. In this combination of functions, spaces and ways of being, there is no place for gaps or voids. (Rancière, 2010b, p. 36)

In contrast, the policy consists of “disturbing this arrangement by bringing in a supplement of parts that have no part, identified with the whole of the community. Above all, politics is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (2010b, pp. 36-37). Thus, “in the political sharing of the perceptible” (2011a, p. 8) politics takes place in the police space, reconfiguring and reenacting social issues and problems. The constant tension between these two forms of distribution of the sensible is thus explained by Rancière:

Politics concerns what we see and can see, who we see and don’t see as common subjects, sharing a common world and talking about common objects. Politics is, above all, a question of the visible, the audible, and so on - about what I have called the distribution of the sensible. I tried to oppose politics and polis as two distributions of the sensible, a distribution of the sensible where there is no extra account, where there are only groups, identities, places, functions, etc., and where what must be seen is supposedly visible. I place politics as this distribution of the perceptible, where there is this debate about what is given, what is visible, what is perceptible, audible, etc. - this way of putting two worlds in one world. (2003, p. 6, emphasis added)

The distribution of the sensible made by politics reconfigures the spaces and frames of the scene in which an argument can be heard as an argument. The objects pointed out in this argument can be apprehended as visible common objects and the speakers themselves can be considered as valid interlocutors. Thus, “politics has this dialogic and contentious structure in which the ‘we’ institutes a contentious scene that redistributes accounts and people” (Rancière, 2009b, p. 609), expanding its enunciative capacities. But Rancière reminds us that politics is a “contentious configuration of the common world” (2003, p. 2) and that a contentious scene¹ or a scene of dissent is possible because “its form is that of a clash between two distributions of the sensible” (2010b, p. 39).

There are a multitude of forms and scenes of dissent. Each situation can be split from within, reconfigured into a different regime of perception and meaning, modifying the landscape of what can be perceived and thought, at the same time modifying the field of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities. (Rancière , 2020b, p. 113)

It is interesting how politics fractures the police from within, modifying a landscape, shifting the edges between them, altering the dispositions and distributions of the various elements that shape our experiences. In fact, politics produces a redistribution of the sensible: it is a form of distribution of the sensible that produces folds and intervals in the map of common experience, altering the cartography and topography of the perceptible and the thinkable.

In this sense, for Rancière, the issue of distributing the sensible involves a spatial and temporal dimension that must be thought of in terms of distribution and redistribution: “distribution of places, limits, of what is inside or outside, what is central or peripheral, visible or invisible” (2011a, p. 6). From this point of view, the spatial dimensions of politics and its way of distributing the sensible are thus defined by him.

There are displacements that modify the map of what is thinkable, what is nameable and perceptible, and therefore what is possible. If advances are made, they must be thought of in terms of topography coverage and not in terms of the application of knowledge. Politics is defined as a certain map of what is given to everyone’s intelligence, of common problems; a certain map of the distribution of competencies and incompetencies in relation to these problems. What I try to do in the domain of thought is to contribute to the possibility of other maps of what is thinkable, perceptible and, consequently, doable. (Rancière, 2009b, p. 577)

Thus, topography is related to the very definition of the concept of distribution of the sensible, that is, the game of relations between the visible, the sayable, the thinkable and the doable within which the gazes operate, where things are named, the speeches are produced, actions are undertaken. In other words, a consensual distribution expresses “the way in which the abstract and arbitrary forms of symbolization of the hierarchy are concretized as given perceptions, in which social destination is anticipated by the evidence of a perceptual universe, a way of being, saying and seeing” (Rancière, 2011a, p. 7). But this game of relations makes room for a plurality of different articulations between its elements, a multiplicity of possibilities that are combined in different ways. Therefore, the dissenting perspective defines how these articulations are modified, breaking the ordinary temporal logic, unfolding in other possible forms of experience.

By mentioning how workers are supposed to remain in defined spaces, using the time of work to produce and the night time to sleep, Rancière (1988) shows how the police order divides the sensible as from the absence of interval and supplementary times and spaces. When spaces and times are reframed by the political distribution of the sensible, unprecedented relations are established between meanings and bodies, between bodies and their modes of identification, places and destinations. The political distribution of the sensible “undoes the boundaries that define territories and competencies” (Rancière, 2009b, p. 576). It changes the “between”, the interval “between identities and the roles they can play, between places that are destined for them and those that they occupy in a transgressive way” (Rancière, 2009b, p. 315). The verbal and spatial interval where this distribution operates is a “interstitial topography” (2009b, p. 319), an intervallic topography of a game that modifies the positions and coordinates where bodies appear, the relations between bodies and the estimates of their capacities, words and images: “this game undoes a given order of relations between the visible and the meanings related to it and constitutes other sensible plots that can contribute to the action of political subjects” (Rancière, 2009b, p. 515).

The political distribution of the sensible highlights the quality of the subjects as speaking beings, who take the floor to generate interventions in the order of the sensible that divides the common world between regimes of visibility and invisibility. The division creates points of resistance by inaugurating dissenting scenes in which individuals are constituted as political subjects. From this point of view, aesthetics would be, firstly, “the liberation from the norms of representation and, secondly, the constitution of a kind of community of the sensible that includes those who are not included, revealing a way of existence of the sensible deduced from the division between parts” (Rancière, 1995, p. 88).

Politics is an activity of reconfiguration of what is given in the sensible, so Rancière states that “we have to focus first on the specificity of the ‘aesthetics of politics’, on the specificity of political invention” (2011a, p. 13). The way in which Rancière conceives the notion of aesthetics in his work encompasses both a specific regime of art (as opposed to the representative regime), and a “battle over sensible/perceivable material, over visibility concerning the things that a community considers should be observed, and the appropriate individuals to observe, judge and decide upon them” (Rancière, 2000c, p. 11-12). On this aspect, and taking up the spatial issue previously mentioned, the interfaces between an “aesthetics of politics” and a “politics of aesthetics” are defined by the author as follows:

I use this polarity between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics to say that we can build a kind of space, a territory, in which the sensible forms that constitute politics and the forms of transformation of the sensible that constitute art can meet, but without being able to define the relation between the two from a systematic globality. (Rancière, 2016, p. 55)

The politics of aesthetics “does not refer to the relation between art and politics in the strict sense, but to the sense of the configuration of a specific sphere - the sphere of aesthetics - in the political distribution of the sensible” (2011a, p. 8). The politics of aesthetics reframes the world of common experience, creating new ways of building objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation. Here, it would be necessary to highlight how the “work of the images” (Rancière, 2019a) is intertwined with a conception of politics that destabilizes established forms of visibility and configures other possible poetics to apprehend events.

The aesthetics of politics transforms our perception of the unequal distribution of spaces, words and temporalities between subjects. It concerns a rupture with a kind of sensible order that intends to be natural and that defines who can or cannot take part in collective activities, anchoring bodies to imposed places and identities. The aesthetics of politics promotes a fracture in a system of constituted identities, invents new ways of experimenting with other forms of enunciation and existence. The aesthetic nature of politics is conflictive, as it reveals “not a world of competitive interests or values, but a world of worlds that clash” (2011a, p. 7).

And it is because it is capable of disconcerting the senses, and of subjecting this discomfiture, that the political distribution of the sensible can reconfigure the themes, the experiments and the attitudes that are inscribed in the common spaces of existence. For Jacques Rancière, this means “that politics is, above all, a battle over the sensible/perceivable material that a community considers to be observed as important, and the appropriate individuals to observe it, judge it and decide on it” (2000b, pp. 11-12). This implies a redefinition of what should be made visible and who can trigger these visibility and readability operations.

Such changes trigger a process of political distribution of the sensitive that requires the invention of the polemical scene of “appearance” and interlocution in which the actions, the word and the body of the speaking subject are inscribed, and in which this subject is constituted in a performative, poetic and argumentative way from the connection and disconnection between the multiple names and modes of “self-presentation” that define it (Quintana, 2019). It is in the scene that political subjectivation is drawn from treating damage, dissent and disidentification.

It is important to emphasize that we intend here to articulate the process of subjectivation and the process of political emancipation, showing how they are intertwined, without necessarily being confused. Rancière (2016) highlights that political subjectivation is the process through which three elements happen intertwined: first, an already given and imposed identity is questioned, transformed or refused. Thus, subjectivation is neither the recognition of an identity nor the gesture of assuming another identity: it requires detachment from the imposed identity and subsequent work on new subject positions.

Second, subjectivation brings subjects into a scene, created by themselves, in which politics interrupts the normalization of a consensual order. In this space, they make a demand for fundamental equality through argumentative demonstrations, which means that they too, those who do not count, need to be counted. Subjects do not exist before politics, but they come into existence through politics, by creating a polemical common place for the treatment of damage and for the demonstration of equality.

Third, subjectivation emphasizes the intersection and flow between identities, names, positions and identifications, showing that contingency and the work of articulation are constant and form alliances with different subjects and groups. Thus, the political subject constructs a way of being in opposition to an attributed identity, combining ways of life that supposedly belong to separate identities. “Political subjectivation is the constitution of a collective capable of speaking in the first person and of identifying its affirmation with the reconfiguration of a universe of possibilities” (2011b, p. 250).

The process of emancipation is more linked to the way in which these three dimensions of subjectivation will be oriented towards a verification of equality that also questions the sharing of temporalities, spatialities and their implications for corporeality and their political appearance. Thus, “emancipation does not imply a transformation in terms of knowledge, but in terms of the position of bodies” (Rancière, 2009b, p. 575).

The aesthetic dimension of emancipation considers the appearance of subjects on the conflict scene as “a way of inscribing in a sensible universe… the fact of being given a certain body, defined by capacities and incapacities, and by belonging to a certain perceptual universe” (Rancière, 2009b, p. 575). In this aspect, one of the main dimensions of emancipation is defined by Rancière as a rupture with corporeality that affirms the correspondence and adequacy “between a certain type of occupation and a certain type of intellectual and sensorial equipment” (2009b, p. 575). Added to the appearance, he also points out that “the core of the issue of emancipation is a concern to break/break with the sharing of time that sustains social subjection (reconfiguration of a state of affairs)” (Rancière, 2011a, p. 7).

Subjectivation, disidentification and experience

Jacques Rancière emphasizes that political subjectivation results from the “production, through a series of acts, of an instance and a capacity for enunciation that were not identifiable in a given field of experience, whose identification is linked to the reconfiguration of the field of experience” ( Rancière, 1995, p. 59). The notion of “field of experience” is here associated with the police distribution of the sensible, in which, for each one, some place, capacity, function, temporality and corporeity is already defined a priori and is subject to adjustments, control and limited reassignment. On the other hand, the deviant experience of political subjectivation involves the appearance as a dynamic that triggers “effective changes in a field of experience, enabling the construction of an alternative world in relation to the one in which positions are already distributed” (Rancière, 2020a, p. 833).

Acts of political subjectivation redefine “what is visible, what can be said about what is made visible and what subjects are capable of doing so” (Jacques Rancière, 2010a, p. 65). The relationship established by Rancière between political subjectivation and experience marks his intention to show how the reconfiguration of the coordinates of the positioning of subjects within hierarchies that limit opportunities for enunciation and listening requires less the replacement of the “field of experience” by the “deviant experience” and more the explanation of how one dialogues with the other, in constant tension:

The important thing for me is to think about subjectivation in a dialogical way, not to think of it as the form of an emergence, an experience that derives from its own appropriation or direct formulation, but an experience that is formulated in a kind of dialogue or relationship between various types of possible formulations corresponding to various possible experience regimes. (Rancière, 2018a, p. 28)

Thus, subjectivation is not to be confused with a revolt against subjection, but it encompasses, for example, the act of “taking possession of a space that is signaled as not belonging to a given subject” (Rancière, 2020a, p. 835). In the same way that politics does not exist to replace the police, the experience of subjectivation is not what will “neutralize” the experience of subjection. “The police order tends to fix identities, so that the social order appears as given, hiding or normalizing the damage it produces and organizing the heterogeneity of the demos. The division of the parts will then appear as natural, as the sensitive perception of the hierarchy will not be polemical” (Machado, 2013, p. 268).

Rancière also emphasizes that subjectivation does not feed on an opposition between institutionalization and spontaneity, between a solidity that imprisons and an explosive freedom. It is not a matter of blaming institutional rigidity, but of creating a “people” that develops new knowledge: the author’s bet is on questioning the reproduction of hierarchy within institutions based on changes that can be made in the “explanatory machine” that defines the lives and knowledge that count and those that are not considered.

Political subjectivation changes the coordinates of experience when subjects appear in a scene in which they elaborate the terms of their emancipation by taking control of the times, spaces, words and modes of presence that were previously confiscated from them (Marques & Prado, 2021). The dialogism between different texts, statements, discourses, images and objects configures the scene that makes the invisibility of inequalities visible, offering excessive images of hierarchies that refuse to lend their words to those who should not appear, who should not have time to create, nor other spaces to transit.

The language of egalitarian singularity is an idiomatic language that takes up words, that modifies their use, that mixes genres and varies the relations between the proper and the figurative. So we can say that, fundamentally, an egalitarian language is like a borrowed language. (Rancière, 2019c, p. 79)

The way a political subject appears and speaks in public reveals how their word “is formed with words from the other’s language, borrowed words that twist and lose their normal, legitimate meaning” (Rancière, 2019c, p.79). In general, appearing is an experience of rupture with a prefigured order of experience that programs our perception to respond in a consensual way to the calls of alterity. This gesture is insurgent and egalitarian, as it challenges the hierarchy that connects looking and listening to devices of control and predictability.

In short, appearing involves another way of thinking and carrying out a distribution and organization of bodies and capacities, modifying a field of experience and building an alternative scene in relation to the one in which positions, expectations and temporalities were already marked and distributed. “This process demands the sensitive perception that a given experience does not necessarily imply a given identity, but is found between identities that were split by a previous subjectivation process” (Machado, 2013, p. 270).

An emancipated subject is a person capable of talking about the activity they perform, capable of conceiving this activity as a form of language. But it is necessary to understand what language means: not a system of signs, but a power of addressing that aims to weave a certain form of community: a community of beings who share the same sensible world, but who, remaining distant from each other, create figures to communicate across distance without eliminating it. An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators. (Rancière, 2018c, p. 114)

One of the central dimensions of subjectivation for Rancière is in the conception of the act of interlocution and its conditions and discourses, which weave lines of force and subject places that impose a name, belonging and occupation on them. In the process of subjectivation, the subject, especially one who belongs to a group that is constantly separated from institutional political processes, is

capable of elaborating a way of seeing their social condition normally prohibited and this acquisition puts them on the path to emancipation. They escape from the way of being that domination prepared to them, building the relation between the material space in which they work and the symbolic space which is denied to them as a worker. (Rancière, 2018a, p. 20)

Political subjectivation produces a shift in the way what we perceive is organized, how it gains a disposition and legibility. The proposal that is evident here is so that putting on the scene a worker, a subject who actively elaborates their emancipation, involves an approach in which he “will no longer be a figure of desolation or exploitation, but the figure of someone who faced a history and has a word, a memory, a force of elocution, a synthesis of their experience” (Rancière, 2018a, p. 63).

Therefore, Rancière (2004) defines three facets of the subjectivation process: (a) the argumentative demonstration of damage and its treatment; (b) the performative dramatization in the dissent scene; and (c) de-identification with an identity assigned by the police order. This is exactly the point that interests us: processes of subjectivation are born from ruptures that displace subjects from the positions in which they would previously be embedded, instituting dissent.

Treating damage, appearing on the scene

The action of expressing damage can be configured, firstly, as the moment in which the ethical formation of the subject as an interlocutor begins. Then, as an opportunity to invent the polemical communicative scene in which subjects try to inscribe themselves, and as an opportunity to enrich the language they use, to invert roles and even to silence those who usually speak, to let those who initially would have nothing to say. It is necessary to remember that the disagreement, as defined by Rancière (1995), is not structured on a demand for equality or recognition expressed by “the part of those who have no part”, but it translates as a political action that questions the very existence of the subject as such.

The demand that is articulated to the exposure and performance of damage in the scene of dissent cannot be met, since the subjects mobilized by political damage are not entities to whom this damage occurred by accident, but subjects whose very existence is already the damage’s way of manifestation (Davis, 2010). “The concept of damage (tort) is not linked to any dramaturgy of victimization. It belongs to the original structure of all politics. The damage is simply the mode of subjectivation in which the verification of equality acquires a political figure” (Rancière, 1995, p. 63). The damage cannot be repaired, under penalty of demanding the very extinction of the police: it can only be treated by modes of political subjectivation that reconfigure the field of experience. “There is no possibility of repairing the damage, but there is a polemical commonplace for the treatment of the damage and for the demonstration of equality.” (Rancière, 2004, p. 121).

The political damage is not solved by objectifying the conflict and by the commitment between the involved parts. But it can be treated by the subjectivation devices that make it remain as a modifying relation between the parts, as the very modification of the terrain on which the game is established. (Rancière, 1995, p. 64)

Political subjectivation requires the modification of the terrain and the dialogic relations that shape the game in which a place is defined for those who may or may not occupy a part in the established order. Such a process is associated with the conflict between an identity attributed by the consensual order and an impossible identification, or a dis-identification with what would be “proper” or specific to the “part of those without part”. For Rancière (2004), what constitutes the political space is closely linked to a conflict of enunciation that arises when, on the scene, “a part of those without part” do not take the floor from the place assigned to them sociologically, but inscribe themselves on the scene through discourse, argumentation and the poetic resources of the deviant experience, moving away from the space and status assigned to them by the police order.

The existence of the with-no-part is linked to a disidentification, to the questioning of the naturalness with which subjects are assigned a place to the opening of a space of subject in which anyone can be counted, because it is the space of an account of the uncounted, of a relation between a part and an absence of a part. (Rancière, 1995, p. 60)

The “part of those without part” does not designate the objectivity of an empirical group excluded from the political domain. It is not another way of referring to the identity politics through the positioning of a marginalized other (Rancière, 2011b). They are not subjects of an identity politics, but of “impossible identifications”. The “part of those without part” bear names that do not belong to specific subjects or groups: the subjectivities formed through dissent cannot be inhabited by the people or groups that perform the damage. However, they provide the means to escape police identities that limit individuals. Thus, the identifications generated by these subjectivities create subjects that are together because they are between identities, between names.

A subject is a “being between”: between several names, statutes or identities. Between humanity and inhumanity, citizenship and its negation; between the status of man, tool and a speaking and thinking being. Political subjectivation consists of actions aimed at proving the presupposed equality - or at treating damage by people who are together precisely because they are “between”. It is a crossing of identities that rests on a crossing of names: names that connect the name of a group or a class to the name of those who are not considered, that link a being to a “non-being” or to a “being in becoming”. (Rancière, 2004, p. 119)

Therefore, it is possible to say that the treatment of damage generates disidentifications: ruptures with a discursive order that offers each person their place in the order of things, a place linked to a social identity. It is important to state here that Rancière (1995, 2004) defines social identity as the inscription of a subject in an order that associates their place with no resource to an appropriate way of doing and saying. This inscription is not neutral, since the saying and doing that it defines are indexed to a value that endows the inscription with a social power and meaning. For him, social identity that is used as basis to moral claims only produces unequal effects and, therefore, the political subject is defined in the distance from all social identity. The “names” received by this subject are diverted from its social significance in order to become places, processes through which a demand for equality is exerted.

The logic of political subjectivation is never the simple affirmation of an identity, it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity imposed by another, fixed by police logic. The police want exact names that tell people where they are and what work they have to do. Politics, on the other hand, speaks of ‘improper’ names that point to a flaw and manifest damage. (Rancière, 2004, p. 121)

Political subjectivation produces polemical scenes in which there is no longer an exact correspondence between names and individuals, social identities and political identities. It also concerns a collective, non-individualized political figure, problematizing the process of universalization of particular actors, in particular situations of struggle, in the form of the constitution of a plural, collective subject, not reducible to the demand of a community of pre-identified subjects (through categories of class, race, sex, or socio-professional categories). It is a type of subjectivation that involves the enunciation game and the way individuals appear in the dissenting public scene.

In order to enter political exchange it is necessary to invent the scene in which spoken words become audible, objects become visible and individuals can be recognized. This activity of invention allows for a redescription and reconfiguration of the common world of experience. It is in this sense that we can speak of the poetics of politics. (Rancière, 2000a, p. 116)

The scene is the stage for a process of disidentification of subjects who find themselves in the interweaving of names, identities and cultures. At the same time, disidentification refers to the invention of the interlocution scene in which the speaking subject’s word is inscribed, and in which this subject constitutes himself/herself “able to pronounce himself/herself in the first person and to identify his/her affirmation with the reconfiguration of a universe of possibilities” (Rancière, 2011b, p. 250). The scene is both the performative appearance of corporeities that wish to question imposed subject positions, and a methodological operation that critically articulates a heterogeneity of elements (Rancière, 2021). When Rancière narrates the way he assembles a scene, he emphasizes that he indicates the aspects and singularities about which the encounter with a set of materials made him think. What he offers to the interlocutor is his partial, tentative, incomplete view, but it is his look at a given event in relation to others. In doing so, one cannot assume a prescriptive, explanatory stance, as if trying to impose something. It is about offering a proposition of meaning to be discussed, reconfigured, revised, as a moving constellation.

In short, the scene of dissent gives visibility to the treatment of damage by people who are together because they are “between”, because they are at a crossroads of identities and names that link the name of a group to the name of those who are outside an account (Marques & Prado, 2018). The scene of exposure and treatment of this damage reveals a gap or a flaw that allows the demonstration of equality and identity classification. In this sense, disidentification is a notion that tries to organize emancipatory processes from a declassification of the coordinates that reproduce the social order (Deranty, 2003).

I have always tried to say that a being, who is supposed to be fixed in one place, was in reality always participating in several worlds, which constituted a polemical position against this suffocating theory of the disciplines, but it was also a more global theoretical position against all forms of identity theories. What it was about was to say that what defines the possible for individuals and groups is never a relation between their own culture, their own identity and the forms of identification of the power in question, but the fact that an identity is constructed through starting from a large number of identities linked to a large number of places that individuals can occupy, the multiplicity of their belongings, of the possible forms of experience”. (Rancière, 2014, p. 91)

Instead of proposing an emancipatory concept that previously identifies its revolutionary agent through the analysis of social classes, it is about highlighting the polemical forces of disidentification that establish an unpredictable movement within a world marked by inequalities and forms of domination (Fjeld & Tassin, 2015).

In this aspect, the notion of subject can be understood as a claimed identity, which exceeds all the coordinates of the consensual social order: a disidentified identity, which is guided by its excess towards other possible worlds. It is not, therefore, about renouncing the notion of identity, but about thinking of the concept of subject as a provisional place of union, a disidentified name that marks, at the same time, the horizons of these possible worlds and the contours of dissenting political forces. Rancière is interested in the disidentified and mobile subject under which the political forces of rupture and disjunction come together.

Final considerations

The disidentification process allows the treatment of damage by people who are together precisely because they are “between”. It is a crossing of identities that rests on a crossing of names: names that connect the name of a group or a class to the name of those who are not considered, that link a being to a “non-being” or to a “being in becoming” (Rancière, 2000a). Thus, damage can be pointed out as the strongest point of tension between the police logic of distribution of the sensible and the practical process of verifying equality: in the very distribution of what is common to a community, those who are seen as having nothing to offer the collective are denied their political existence, their existence as interlocutors. This fundamental damage causes the “part of those without part” to find themselves in the difficult position of not having a recognized existence in the social hierarchy of the police order: they do not count and were not counted from the beginning as peers, as equals.

There is politics because the logos is never just the word, because it is always indissolubly the counting that is made of that word: the counting by which a sound emission is heard as a word, capable of enunciating the just, while another is only perceived as noise that designates pleasure or pain, consent or revolt. (Rancière, 1995, p. 45)

Therefore, the logic of disidentification is never the affirmation of an identity, it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity imposed and fixed by the police logic. Disidentification promotes an interval operation in which political subjectivation can work: the interval between police and politics, always in motion, favors passages between names, corporeities and experiences. The police want exact names that tell people the place they occupy and what they are supposed to do. Politics, in turn, speaks of “improper” names that point out that subjects can be more than the place they occupy socially: the names they receive and that do not “suit” to the police classification manifest the presence of damage (Rancière, 2009a, 2009b).

Disidentification works from the opening of intervals and not from the construction of articulated responses or subject positions: it seeks an “inappropriate”, “excessive” syntax, created from available elements, but which, regrouped and juxtaposed in another way, produce a singular visibility, forcing subjects to constantly move in between, between places, between times, between names (Maheirie, Miranda, Sawaia, & Iñiguez-Rueda, 2021). Thus, it promotes a liminality between several scenes that act on each other, without seeking explanations or seams between differences. This implies a montage that avoids a causal linear narrative order: the political power of the dialogue and the articulation between names and scenes that assemble subjectivation resides in the unexpected relations and sensible micro-events they engender.

As seen, the disidentification produces a displacement in the way what we perceive is organized, as it gains a disposition and a legibility. From this perspective, disidentification is not an operation to escape from a real oppressor, but a work of story-telling that is established from the opening of an interval in space-time and that is dedicated to questioning the determinism that fixes the destiny of individuals and its meaning. Thus, it consists of producing a complex network, capable of altering the legibility of a vulnerable body, making it no longer perceived as “a figure of desolation or exploitation, but as the figure of someone who has faced a story and has a word, a memory, a force of elocution, a synthesis of his experience” (Rancière, 2018a, p. 63). The space and time drawn in the disidentifying interval suspend the usual way of inscribing subjects in intersubjective relationships and the consensual way of arranging the bonds, the forms of appearance and locating ourselves in relation to them (Marques & Prado, 2018a, 2018b).

Disidentification allows an interval appearing in the sense that the body transits between names, between other images and between other syntaxes. In this transit, the body reinvents its own movements, its unique gestures, its unique mobility between social, political and institutional spaces. The appearing of the body is one of the communicative and inter-relational dimensions of the process of reconfiguration of an individual’s field of perception and political imagination. This displacement of the body modifies the topography of what is considered possible and can be studied, for example, from the way in which insurgencies, uprisings and resistances show minor and everyday transformations of vulnerable bodies, altering the police distribution of the sensible that insists on regulating and controlling the desires, displacements and appearances of dissident and abject bodies.

In this way, Rancière conceives disidentification as part of an interval process of political subjectivation, configuring political subjects that reveal how names (proletarian, worker, woman, immigrant, etc.) are diverted from their social meaning to transform themselves into spaces in which a demand for equality is defined and staged. These names would therefore be provisional and would be linked to a specific speech situation. Disidentified subjects only exist in act: their actions are the manifestation of dissent, the creation of polemical scenes in which they question the supposed naturalness of a way of “counting” that articulates the consensual community, giving visibility to the inequality that articulates the subjects and keeps them in “their designated places” (Rancière, 2018b, p. 213). Disidentifications produce individual and collective transformations: they produce forms of emancipation that are not reduced to individual autonomy, but value the production of relations, scenes of enunciation and articulations between forces and individuals disidentified from their granted designations.

Political subjectivation is not the “recognition of” or the gesture of “assuming an identity”, but the disconnection with that identity, the production of a gap between the identity of the current order and a new political subjectivity. The political subject then acts to remove the bodies from their designated places, freeing them from any reduction to their functionality (Prado, 2019). It should be noted here that this subjectivation process resorts to the experience of bodies in action, their displacements, their sensitive perceptions as well as the invention of collective actions. In this sense, this conceptual network by Jacques Rancière can help us to think not only about politics from the locus of the sensible experience, but also as a field of subjects and not of identity designations.

Political subjectivation acts in this redesign of the coordinates of the subjects’ experience “rearranging temporalities and sharings that will define the possible forms of experience” (Rancière, 2020a, p. 829). As Rancière shows, subjectivation establishes a space of play in which the modes of individuation and linkages between the positions and occupations of bodies contribute to freeing the possibilities of political action by undoing the static-media formatting of reality.

Rancière does not deny that inequality needs to be performed by those who experience it in their lives, who feel it, who perceive it. He himself seeks in the workers’ narratives the thematization of damage, the disidentification with a socially imposed identity and the subversion of a performance of inequality. In the sensible and political experience of subjectivation, the worker implements an action moved by the gesture of “as if”, which displaces the logic that refers them to a given social place. In fact, the “as if” also reveals that the subjects are “between” different worlds and that it is in the interval between them, in the passages between different thresholds, that the creation of polemical scenes of subjectivation arises. “I have always tried to say that a human being who is supposed to be stuck in one place has actually always been sharing several worlds. And this is a polemical scene against the suffocating theory of different types of discipline, but also a more general theoretical position against all forms of identity theories” (Rancière, 2016, p. 64).

The way in which Rancière shows the construction of the processes of subjectivation is instigating, since he re-elaborates events linked to the thematization and explanation of inequalities through a writing that privileges the forms of presentation of situations, the agency of statements, and the forms of construction of relations between cause and effect that erase traditional formats of intelligibility. For him, a theoretical discourse is, at the same time, an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the data on which it leans and articulates. By claiming the poetic character of the scene’s enunciation, Rancière manages to show us how the performance of equality not only breaks down borders and hierarchies between subject positions, but also between levels and forms of discourse.

Moreover, the poetics involved in the construction of the scene brings into play a performance of equality that feeds emancipation. And, according to Rancière, emancipation is not just the subversion of a given distribution of the sensible: it also encompasses the ways of sharing knowledge and experiences originated from this subversion. Just as the workers wrote letters to their friends reflecting on the lack of time or how they took back the time that had been stolen from them, the plebeians share among themselves the poetic arts of elaborating an “as if” that would allow them to be heard by the patricians.

In emancipation, what is undone is the relation between what is performed by the body and what is thought of as an intellectual concern. But an excess of words and utterances is also placed to circulate that indicates to others the paths to be pursued in a new established topography of the sensible. The reframing of common sense, the creation of a polemical place, needs new knowledge, the spreading of the clues that made what was recreated perceptible and legible to other people. This reframing is not instantaneous, it depends on a series of contextualized micro-experiences of distribution of the sensible, on a multiplicity of operations that reframe and make accessible the ways of producing these reframing of temporalities, spatialities and corporeities. In the work The emancipated spectator, Rancière (2012b) makes a very important relationship between the scenes of dissent, subjectivation and emancipation:

There are simply scenes of dissent, which can arise anywhere, at any time. Dissensus is an organization of the sensible in which there is no reality hidden under appearances, nor a single system of presentation and interpretation of data imposing its evidence on everyone. It is because any situation is liable to be split from within, reconfigured under a different regime of perception and meaning. To reconfigure the landscape of the perceptible and the thinkable is to modify the territory of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities. Dissent puts at stake, at the same time, the evidence of what is perceived, thinkable and feasible and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and modifying the coordinates of the common world. This is what a process of political subjectivation consists of: in the action of uncounted capacities that will split the unity of the given and the evidence of the visible to design a new topography of the possible. The collective intelligence of emancipation is not the understanding of a global process of subjugation. It is the collectivization of the capacities invested in these scenes of dissent. It is the implementation of any person’s ability, of the quality of men without quality. (2012b, pp. 48-49)

Rancière explains how, in the scenes of dissent, the police are fractured from within, which allows for a reordering of the coordinates of the experience. Police and politics operate together, in articulation and tension: both distribute the sensible differently, building topographies from the action of subjects. Political subjectivation is this process of re-disposition, which combines disidentifications, argumentative dramatization and the construction of new identifications. Emancipation comes as an unfolding of the work of politics, which is contingent, but never punctual or exempt from historicity and the production of shareable knowledge. Thus, subjectivation and emancipation are part of a broad poetic process of elaboration of knowledge to be appropriated and reappropriated in different situations and contexts, by different subjects and groups that yearn for transformations. For Rancière, such poetics does not promise any definite future. “But it is not planning for the future that defines new horizons. On the contrary: it is from the division that operates at the heart of the present and from the inventions of the method of equality that unpredictable futures can be born” (Rancière, 2020b, p.113).

This work that brings subjectivation and emancipation together feeds democracy, since it is not an evolutionary process, but a work of articulation and appropriation, which makes the words that circulate in a discourse pass to meet with words from other registers. The knowledge derived from these loans alters the subjects’ experiences, overturning the borders that define fixed territories, imposed competences, limitations of access to the dream. Subjectivation and emancipation work towards the affirmation of a collective capacity, investing the operation of rearranging time and the ways in which it houses experiences and redefines experimentation.

The subjectivation in Rancière seeks to problematize the process of construction of a plural, collective, non-identity subject that is not associated with communities linked by class, race, sex, gender or profession. This disidentifying subjectivation is a process of producing relations and articulations. Thus, the displacing power of politics is not in the affirmation of itself, but in the rearticulation between elements, which generates disidentifications and gives rise to the emergence of something effectively contesting. However, this displacement is not centered on the subject only. It seeks to configure and (re)create a sensitive polemical scene in which ways of being, seeing and saying are invented, promoting new subjectivities and new forms of collective enunciation. In the process of political subjectivation, the individual becomes an emancipated subject through the work he performs on his own language and its modes of expression and appearance before the other.

With this conceptual network it is possible to think of a singular contribution of the author to the individual and collective emancipatory processes. Instead of betting on the strengthening and the rigidity of identity, the author offers us practical reflections that allow us to deepen the field of studies of social and political psychology with new conceptual articulations.

Referências

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• 1
  “Certain subjects who do not count create a common contentious scene where they discuss the possible objective status of what is given and impose an examination and discussion on these things that were not visible nor considered previously” (Rancière, 2000a, p. 125).

• Financing: Scholarships PQ/CNPq

• T. N. - Translator’s notes

  All the direct quotes were freely translated from the Portuguese original quotation, as referenced next, by the article’s translator. Moreover, the word “subject” or “subjects” throughout the text, directly translated from the concept “sujeito” in Portuguese, refers to a person not looked upon by an individualistic perspective, but otherwise usually by a social and collective perspective. The word in Portuguese in no way refers to an inferior position, nor a citizen in a country with a king or queen. It concerns the one who has subjectivity. Likewise, “a part of those without part” and “distribution of the sensible” are terms that derive from Rancière’s theory and were translated as commonly done in English.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 Mar 2023
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  07 July 2022
• Reviewed
  02 Sept 2022
• Accepted
  02 Sept 2022