Preface to Rancière’s ‘Proletarian Nights’

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Preface to

'Proletarian Nights'

The art ic le printed below is a translation of th eIntroduction (pp.7-l2) of Jacques R a n c i ~ r e ' s La Nuit

des Proletaires, which was published last year [1].The book deals with some well known events of th el830s and l840s - the utopias of Fourier, Saint-Simon,

Cabet and Enfantin; the 'Free Women'; th e social is tcommunes in th e French provinces; th e journeys toEgypt, and th e doomed ' Icarian' colonies in Texas andIl l inois . These enterprises have been described

before; but the originality of Ranciere's book isthat i t is based on th e poems and autobiographicalessays of a few of the working class Parisians whowere caught up in them - men and women born about1810, who wrote confident social is t vindications in

th e l830s, subsiding into bewildered recollections

in the l880s.The important point about Ranciere's account is

that i t i l lustrates over and over again that th e 'cryof an oppressed people', fo r which social ists andhistorians l isten ou t with anxious attention, has

complexities which have been systematically neglected.

The writings treated by Ranciere express not anenthusiastic working class identity, but a yearning

to escape to a better l i fe , envisaged in mostlyaesthetic terms - th e l i fe of painters, poets,philosophers and musicians; th e l i fe , in fact, ofth e leisured and educated intel lectuals, who in turnthought of themselves as the natural poli t icalrepresentatives of th e oppressed.

R a n c i ~ r e ' s pages reveal, amongst other things, asort of conspiracy of partly delusive self-images -

a thoroughgoing reciprocity of imaginary representat ions, with workers and intellectuals figuring ineach other 's imaginations in endless circularity:

Proletarians needed to grasp the secret ofothers in order to define the meaning of theirown existence . . . . They did not lack an understanding of exploitation; what they requiredwas an understanding of themselves as beings

destined for something other than exploitation:an insight which they could attain only through

the secret of others - of middle classintellectuals.(pp.3l-32)

I t was, as R a n c i ~ r e writes,

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a question of identity, of image, of th e

relation of Self and Other, both posing andconcealing th e problem of either maintaining

or crossing th e gulf between those whosebusiness was thought and those who workedwith their hands.

(p.22)

There was not a complete correspondence, however,between the values of the social is t intellectuals and

th e aspirations of th e socialist workers. Forinstance, while Saint-Simonian intellectuals concentrated on the economic division between wealthproducing toi lers and parasitic idlers, the 'declarations of fai th ' written by Saint-Simonian workers hada different preoccupation - th e social distinctionbetween those offering wages and those seeking them(p.167) .

For R a n c i ~ r e , the ambivalence of this poli t icalidentity raises a further problem: given that these

social ist workers yearned fo r a non-proletarianexistence, are they to be dismissed as 'unrepresenta··t ive ' of their class? Who says what is ' representat ive '? When social ists piously seek, 'as °they often

do, for 'authentic workers' affirming a polit ics of

proletarian self- identi ty , where does their idea of'authenticity' come from? How do they know when they

have uncovered this 'mute truth of the people', this'workers' other cul ture ' , supposedly concealed bythese 'somewhat bourgeois proletarians' (p.23)?

The obvious answer is that 'authentic workers' canbe identified in terms of the concepts of ' social is tscience'; but La Nuit des P r o l ~ t a i r e s is , implicitly,a polemic against the pretensions of any such

'science'. For Ranciere, born in 1940, was aCommunist student at th e Ecole Normale Sup6rieure

in Paris in the 1960s. Within th e student movement,he campaigned against those who valorised th e spon

taneous ideology of students at th e expense both of

theory and of th e working class; and he adoptedAlthusser's concept of Marxist polit ics as ' thedefence of Science against Ideology' [2]. R a n c i ~ r eparticipated in Althusser's famous seminar onCapital, and an essay of his was included in th ef i rs t edition of Lire le Capital [3].

But shortly afterwards Ranciere renounced hisAlthusserian commitment to ' social is t science' . Heunderwent (a s he wrote later)

an experience which many intellectuals of mygeneration had in 1968: our AlthusserianMarxism was a philosophy of order, and every

proposition in i t distanced i t from themovement of revolt which was then shaking

the whole bourgeois order.

(La Lecon, p. 9)In 1969 Ranciere had become a Maoist, and composedwhat remains one of th e most perceptive criticismsof Althusser's use of th e science-ideology distinction. Ranciere pointed ou t that one effect ofAlthusser's concept of ' ideology in general ' was to

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make i t impossible to consider the class basis ofideologies, particularly in th e Soviet Union.Another was that i t substituted a comfy metaphysical

distinction (between truth and falsehood) for apolit ical choice - between 'bourgeois ideologies'and ' the proletarian ideology of Marxism-Leninism'[4].

R a n c i ~ r e ' s renunciation of Althusserianism wasore fully revealed in his La Lecon d'Althusser

(1974), a devastating crit icism of Althusser'sviolent attack on the 'humanism' of John Lewis.In the f i rs t place, according to R a n c i ~ r e ,Althusser's rejection of the taken-for-granted

otion of the individual human subject was hardly aovelty: such ' l iquidations of the subject ' had been

a philosophers' commonplace fo r two hundred years

(p.43). In any case, why pick on Lewis, when th ereal target seemed to be nearer home, and moreformidable: Jean-Paul Sartre (p.46)? And then, whatwas the theoretical value of Althusser 's ' theoreticalanti-humanism' when all i t could say about th e'process without a subject ' was that i t had nosubject (p.44)? Moreover, what was i ts practicalpurpose, especially in view of th e fact that, whileAlthusser was working remorselessly to remove theconcept of 'man' from the university, workers outside

were organising an occupation based on th e slogan'economics fo r man, no t man for economics' (p.157)?

In 1969, Ranciere had crit icised Althusser for' the proletarian ideology of Marxism

Leninism'. But by 1974, the confident singular had'Perhaps', wrote R a n c i ~ r e , ' there is

Marxist conceptual scheme, awaiting purificaion from ideological contaminations or bourgeois

incursions . . . . Not one logic of Capital bu t several,discursive strategies addressed to various

problems' (p.154). R a n c i ~ r e ' s new openness

o the multifariousness of discourses of resistanceled to th e formation around him of a group known as

h e 'Centre for Research into Ideologies of Revolt' .Centre was nominally associated with Michel

Foucault's chair at the College de France, and was

deeply involved in Jean-Paul Sartre 's abortive plansfor a series of television programmes on Francebetween the wars. In 1975, the Centre began topublish a quarterly journal, Les Revoltes Logiques,

devoted - in th e words of the statement in i ts f i rs t

issue - to the construction of 'a n alternativehistorical memory' based on th e records of 'thoughtthat comes from below'. The fundamental point wasto demonstrate and document th e fact that 'classstruggles do not cease to exist just because they dono t correspond to what is taught in the academy' [5].

La Nuit de Proletaires is a fine fulfilment of theseaspirations. It is much to be hoped that somepublisher will undertake an English edition.

Jonathan

Footnotes

Paris , Libra ir ie A r t h ~ m e Fayard, 1981, 45lpp. ISBN 2 213 00985 6.

Jacques R a n c i ~ r e , La Le'3on d'Althusser, Paris , Gallimard, 1974, p.87.'Le Concept de Critique e t la Critique de 1 'Economie Polit ique de s

"Manuscri s" de 1844 au "Capital" in L. Al thusser, J . R a n c i ~ r e and

P. Macherey, Lire le Capital I, Paris , Maspero, 1966, pp.93-2l0. This

essay was dropped from th e second (1968) edi t ion, bu t repr inted separatelyin 1973; i t was no t used in the English version (Reading Capital, New Left

Books, 1970). An English t ransla t ion appeared in TheoreticaZ Practice 1,

2 and 6, 1971-72.

4 R a n c i ~ r e ' s 'Sur la T h ~ o r i e de l' d ~ o l o g i e ' was written in July 1969, f i r s t

published in Spanish in 1970, and in French in 1973, before being included

in La Ley,on d'AZthusser. It was t ransla ted into English as 'On th e Theory

of Ideology', published in RadicaZ Philosophy 7, Spring 1974, pp.2-l4 .5 Les R1)voltes Logiques 13 (published by Solin, 1 Rue de s FosstC\s St-Jacques,

Paris 7) appeared in Winter 1981.

Proletarian Nights

Jacques Ranciere

There is nothing metaphorical in this t i t le

Proletarian Nights. The point is no t to revivememories of th e sufferings of factory slaves, ofthe squalor of workers' hovels or the misery ofbodies sapped by unbridled exploitation. Al l thatwill only be present via th e views and th e words,th e dreams and th e nightmares of th e characters ofthis book.

Who are they? A few dozen, a few hundred workers

who were twenty years ol d around 1830 and who thenresolved, each fo r himself, to tolerate the intolerable no longer. It was no t so much th e poverty, th elow wages, th e comfortless dwellings, or th e everpresent threat of hunger. More fundamentally, i t wasanguish at th e daily thef t of their time as they

worked wood or stone, sewed clothing or sti tchedshoes; and all for nothing but th e indefinite mainten

ance of the forces both of servitude and of dominat ion. I t was the humiliating absurdity of having tobeg day after day for work which fr i t tered theirlives away. And i t was th e weight of others too; theones in work, with th e petty vanity of fairground

muscle-men or th e obsequiousness of conscientiousworkers; those outside waiting for a place you would

be glad to hand over; and finally those who drove by,casting a disdainful glance from their open carriagesover all that blighted humanity.

To have done with all that, to know why i t ha.ds t i l l no t been brought to an end, to change theirl ives . . . . Overturning the world begins at an hour

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when ordinary workers ought to be enjoying th e peacefu l slumber of those whose trade calls fo r no thoughtwhatever. For example, at precisely eight o'clock onthat night of October 1839, a meeting is called at th ehouse of Martin Rose, the ta i lor , to found a workingman's newspaper. Vincard, th e maker of measures, whowrites songs for the singing club at the local bar,has invited Gauny, th e carpenter, who gives expression

to his more taciturn temperament in vengeful couplets.Ponty, another poet, who clears cesspools, will certainly not be there: Bohemian that he is , he has

chosen to work at night. But th e carpenter will beable to te l l him th e outcome in one of those let tershe copies out around midnight, after several drafts,let ters describing their blundered childhoods andtheir wasted lives, plebeian passions and those otherexistences beyond death - which may be beginning atthat very moment. He writes those let ters out, in aneffort to delay to th e very las t minute that sleep

hich will restore th e powers of the servile machine.The main subject of this book is those nights

rested from th e normal sequence of work and sleep.They were imperceptible, one might almost say inoffensive breaks in the ordinary course of things,where already the impossible was being prepared,

dreamt and seen: the suspension of that ancienthierarchy which subordinates those dedicated tolabour to those endowed with th e privilege of thought.They were nights of study and intoxication, and daysof labour prolonged to hear th e word of th e apostlesor th e lectures given by teachers of th e people, tolearn, to dream, to talk or to write. They areSunday mornings begun early so as to leave fo r thecountry together and take th e dawn by surprise.Some will do well ou t of these fol l ies. They willfinish up as entrepreneurs or senators for l i fe -and no t necessarily t rai tors for al l tha.t. Others

will die of them: by suicide because their aspirations ar e impossible; by th e lethargy which followscrushed revolutions; by that phthisis which strikes

exiles in th e northern fogs; by the plagues of Egypt,where they went seeking th e Woman-Messiah; or by th emalaria of Texas where they went to build Icaria.Most will spend th e rest of their l ives in thatanonymity which occasionally throws up in the nameof a worker poet, a strike-leader, the organiser ofan ephemeral association, or the editor of a paper

that is here today and gone tomorrow.The historian will ask what they represent. What

are they by comparison with th e anonymous mass offactory workers or even th e act ivists in th e labourmovement? What do their l ines of poetry or even th e

prose in their 'workers' papers' amount to comparedwith th e multitude of day-to-day practices, of acts

of oppression and resistance, or of complaints andstruggles at th e workplace and on th e streets? Thisis a question of method, which tr ies to link cunningwith 'straightforwardness' by identifying th estatistical requirements of science with poli t icalprinciples which proclaim that only the masses makehistory and enjoin those that speak in their name to

represent them faithfully.But perhaps th e masses who are invoked have al

ready given their answer. Why do th e strikingParisian ta i lors of 1833 and 1840 want their leaderto be A n d r ~ Troncin, who divides his time betweenstudent c a f ~ s and th e study of th e great thinkers?Why will painters in 1848 ask th e bizarre c a f ~ -owner Confais to draft them a constitution, when he

normally bores them s t i f f with his talk of Fourieresque harmonies and phrenological experiments? Whydid hatters engaged in struggle seek ou t a one-time

seminarist called Philippe Monnier, whose sis ter has

gone to play the Free Woman in Egypt and whosebrother-in-law died in pursuit of his American

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utopia? Certainly those men, whose sermons on th edignity of working people and on evangelical devotion

the masses normally avoid, do not represent the ir

daily labours or their daily anger.But i t is precisely because those men are other.

That is why they go to them the day they have

something they want to represent, something theywant to show to the bourgeoisie (bosses, politicians,judges). I t is no t simply that those men can talkbetter . It is that what had to be represented before

the bourgeoisie was something deeper than salar ies ,

working hours or the thousand i r r i tat ions of wagelabour. What has to be represented is what those madnights and their spokesmen already make clear: thatproletarians have to be treated as if they have aright to more than one l i fe. If th e protests of th eworkplace are to have a voice, i f worker emancipation

is to possess a human face, i f workers are to existas subjects of a collective discourse which givesmeaning to their multifarious assemblies and combats,those representatives must already have made themselves other in a double, hopeless rejection, refusing both to Zive l ike workers and to taZk l ike th ebourgeoisie.

This is the history of isolated utterances, and of

an impossible act of self-identification at th e veryroot of those great discourses in which th e voice ofthe proletar iat as a whole can be heard. It is astory of semblances and simulacra which lovers of th emasses have tirelessly tried to cover up - either byfixing a snap-shot in sepia of th e young workingclass Movement on th e eve of i ts nuptials with proletarian Theory, or by splashing onto those shadows thecolours of everyday l ife and of th e popular mind.Solemn admiration fo r the unknown soldiers of th eproletarian army has come to be mixed with tenderhearted curiosity about their anonymous lives and anostalgic passion for th e practised movements of th ecraftsman or the vigour of popular songs and festivals. These different forms of homage unite to show

that people like that are the more to be admired themore they adhere s t r ic t ly to their collective identi ty, and that they become suspect, indeed, the

moment they want to l ive as anything other than

legions and legionaries, when they demand that individual wanderlust which is th e monopoly of 'pettybourgeois' egoism or the illusion of th e ' ideologist ' .

The history of these proletarian nights is

explicitly intended to prompt an examination of thatjealous concern for the purity of the masses, theplebeians or the proletariat. Why ha.s th e philosophy

of intelligentsia or activists a.lways needed to blamesome evil third party (petty bourgeoisie, ideologistor master thinker) for the shadows and obscurities

that get in th e way of th e harmonious relationshipbetween their own self-consciousness and the se1fidentity of their 'popular' objects of study? Wasnot this evil third party contrived to spir i t awayanother more fearsome threat: that of seeing th ethinkers of th e night invade the terr i tory ofPhilosophy. It is as i f we were pretending to takeseriously the old fantasy which underlies Plato'sdenunciation of the sophists, th e fear of philosophybeing devastated by th e 'many whose natures areimperfect and whose souls are cramped and maimed bytheir meannesses, as their bodies are by their tradesand crafts ' [1]. Unless th e issue of dignity l ies inanother quarter. Unless, that is , we need to exaggerate th e positivity of the masses as active subject so

as to throw into re l ief a confrontation with the ideologist which enables intellectuals to accord to theirphilosophy a dignity independent of their occupationalstatus alone.

These questions ar e not meant to put anyone in the

dock. But they explain why I make no apologies for



sacrificing the majesty of the masses and the positivi ty of their practices to the discourses and theillusions of a few dozen 'non-representative' individals. In th e labyrinth of their real and imaginary

travels, I simply wanted to follow the thread of twoguiding questions: What paradoxical route led these

deserters, who wanted to tear themselves free fromth e constraints of proletarian existence, to come toforge th e image and the discourse of working classidentity? And what new forms of false constructionaffect that paradox when the discourse of workersinfatuated with th e night of the intellectuals meetsthe discourse of intellectuals infatuated with th eglorious working days of th e masses? That is a ques

tion we should ask ourselves. But i t is a questionimmediately experienced within the contradictory relations between the proletar iat of the night and th eprophets of th e new world - Saint-Simonians, Icariansor whatever. For, i f i t is indeed the word of'bourgeois' apostles which creates or deepens a crack

in their daily round of work through which someworkers are drawn into the twists and turns of anotherl ife, th e problems begin when the preachers want tochange those twists and turns into th e true, straightroad that leads to th e dawn of New Labour. They want

to cast their disciples in their identity as goodsoldiers of th e great militant army and as prototypesof th e worker of th e future. Surely, the SaintSimonian workers, blissfully l istening to these wordsof love, lose even more of that tough workers' identity that th e calling of New Industry requires. And,looking a t the matter from the other direction,surely th e Icarian proletar iat will be able to rediscover that identity only by discrediting th efatherly teachings of their leader.

Perhaps these are so many missed opportunities,

dead-ends of a utopian education, where edifyingTheory will no t long delude i t se l f that i t can se e

th e path to self-emancipation beaten out fo r anyproletariat that is instructed in Science. The

tortuous arguments of L'Ateliep, th e f i rs t great newspaper 'made by th e workers themselves', suggest inadvance what th e agents detailed to spy on theworkers' associations which emerged from this twist-

ing path were to discover with surprise: that oncehe is master of th e instruments and the products ofhis labour, the worker cannot manage to convince himsel f that he is working ' in his own interest ' .

Nonetheless, we should not be too quick to rejoiceat recognising the vanity of the path to emancipation

in this paradox. We may discover tha.t obstinatein i t ia l question with even greater force: What precisely is i t that th e worker can pursue in his own

intepest? What exactly is at work in the strangeattempt to rebuild th e world around a centre that the

inhabitants only want to escape? And is not somethingelse to be gained on these roads that lead nowhere,in these efforts to sustain a fundamental rejectionof th e order of things, beyond all th e constraints ofworking-class existence? No one will find much tostrengthen the grounds of his disillusionment or hisbitterness in the paths of these workers who, back inJuly 1830, swore that nothing would be th e same again,or in th e contradictions of their relations with theintel lectuals who aligned themselves with th e masses.

The moral of this tale is quite the reverse of th eone people like to draw from th e wisdom of the masses.

I t is to some extent th e lesson of the impossible,

that of th e rejection of th e established order even

in th e face of the extinction of Utopia. If, fo ronce, we le t th e thoughts of those who ar e not'destined' to think unfold before us, we may come torecognise that th e relationship between th e order ofthe world and th e desires of those subjected to i t

presents more complexity than is grasped by th e discourses of th e intelligentsia. Perhaps we she.ll gaina certain modesty in deploying grand words andexpressing grand sentiments. Who knows?

In any case, those who venture into this labyrinth

must be honestly forewarned that no answers will be

supplied.

Translated by Noel Parker*

I* Plato, The Republia, trans. Jowett, VI.49S.With acknowledgement for help and suggestions fromPete Dews, Jonathan Ree, Mike Shortland,Carolyn Sumberg.

Lukas, Heidegger and Fascism

Mark Tebbitt

It has long been acknowledged that there is anecessity to develop a rational Marxist response to20th-century existentialism. The post-War debates on

this subject have almost inevitably tended to focus onth e development of Sartre 's philosophy, on his dialogues with official Marxism in France, and above al l

on his dialogue with himself, evolving his own person

al interpretation of existential Marxism [1]. Theproblems arising from these debates have revolved

around th e question of the extent to which these twoapparently irreconcilable views of the world can begenuinely and frui t ful ly synthesised. There have been

a great number of variations on this theme in postWar France, many of them attempting to broaden th ebasis of Marxist philosophy [2]. When we turn backto consider the significance of Heideggerfs philosophy, however, the problems we are facing areentirely different and much more uncomfortable.

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Preface to Rancière’s ‘Proletarian Nights’