Michael Dillon

Department of Politics and International Relations

University of Lancaster

This essay is an extensive account of Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of the political. It draws primarily upon Dis-agreement, which has recently been translated and published by Minnesota University Press. The essay is not however exclusively confined to that text. But there, more than anywhere else in English, Rancière develops a coherent and sustained theorisation of politics. While drawing on his Marxist background the essay is more concerned with the extent to which Rancière’s theorisation of the political is heavily indebted also to what the essay refers to as the philosophy of deconstruction. The essay does not try to make-out that Rancière is a ‘deconstructionist’, whatever that might mean. But, its account of Rancière’s theorisation of the political draws heavily on my own engagement with the theorising of politics to which the philosophy of deconstruction gives rise. It will help set the scene then for a wider discussion of how the question of the political begins to get posed in response to the work that deconstruction does.

Introduction.

What is politics if it is not equated, as it almost uniformly is, with the objectification and subjectification characteristic of the political arithmetic of some specific regime of governance or the logic of some specific order of distributive justice? Specifically, what is politics if it is not equated, as it almost uniformly now is, with the modes of objectification and subjectification characteristic of late modern capitalist regimes of national and global liberal governance which currently claim to exhaust the meaning of the democratic? A response to these questions is developed here in terms of an account of politics that is quite explicitly differentiated from these modes of objectification and subjectification. This response is drawn from the work of Jacques Rancière. Rancière’s understanding of the political, as Peggy Kamuf noted recently, "brings a much needed set of new terms that can challenge the claims of triumphant liberalism." (Kamuf, 1999).

Politics begins when one stops balancing the profit and losses of individual and private relations and starts addressing the order of what is common to them. That entails a shift from the 'vulgar economy' of exchange to the socially significant economy of the share in the process of the specific share-out, or mode of relationality, instituted by an historical social order. For it is in that context that the specific mode of exchange takes place. Since a relation establishes something that is common to the parties instituted by the relation, and indeed forms them as the parties that they are, when we talk of a political relation we also mean a political community. It is the character of that mode of relationality – the relationality that is political - which Rancière explores and develops.

Albeit Rancière’s intellectual debts are to Marxism, and in particular to the Marxism of Louis Althusser, his most recent work reflects the broader philosophical movement associated with the deconstruction of metaphysics. Indeed it powerfully develops that movement’s understanding of the political and is one of the few explicit theorisations of the political to which it has helped to give rise. This is not to argue that Rancière is a deconstructionist, whatever that might be; since according to Derrida you don’t so much ‘do’ deconstruction, deconstruction happens. There are indeed points of departure and disagreement with Derrida that deserve reflection on their own account. But Rancière too begins with the anteriority of radical relationality where that thinking also begins. He is faithful also to what distinguishes this understanding of the anteriority of radical relationality from the superficial similarity it has with contemporary complexity theory and open systems theory (Dillon, 2000). What Rancière shares with the philosophy of deconstruction is an understanding of the anteriority of radical relationality that is radical not simply because of its insistence that all existence takes place as relationality but as relation with the radically non-relational. Unpacking the terms anteriority and radical will help elucidate this key formulation.

First, we are not dealing with accounts of existence that begin with the idea of pre-formed bodies relationally engaged in contracting inter-subjective exchanges with one another. We are instead dealing with accounts of existence which is conceived originally as a mode of being-in-relation productive and disruptive of what I call bodies-in-formation. What is anterior here, then, is relationality. This emphasises that we are dealing with philosophies of a certain kind of origination: origination for example through difference and repetition (Deleuze), through dissemination and repetition (Derrida), through relation with the transcendent as Other (Levinas), and through 'sending' (Heidegger). Again, it is important to note that such differences are significant, perhaps especially with regard to the ways in which the political will be thought, even if I have the space here to devote myself only to Rancière. Relationality is however also radical because it is an aporetic relation with the radically non-relational. Within the radically relational there is an intractability at work - integral nonetheless to the relationality - that resists relation. The relationality at issue is therefore this peculiar kind of relationality: a relationality that is radical not simply because it is taken to be anterior but, definitively, because it is a relation with the radically non-relational or intractable.

There is no relational purchase to be had on the intractable. It resists relation. How is it therefore possible to be in radical relation with the radically non-relational? Yet, according to this tradition of thought, we always already are. That is why this "relationship without relation" as Derrida also refers to it (1995: 72-73) is an (im)possibility or ‘aporia’ (Derrida, 1993). That we always already are in radical relation with the radically non-relational - to the extent that we are and to the extent that we may say 'we' - fuels the extensive interest that Derrida has for example in the religious and in faith (1998) as much as it does the Levinasian sense of 'God'. But that small 'we' is the territory also of the question of the political. Hence the close proximity always of the religious and the political even, probably most, in the secular insistence of certain political theories, doctrines and systems. That is why reflection on this aporia is not confined to religious discourse (Connolly, 1999). The intrusion of the radically non-relational will always subvert the authority of any discourse and any order, particularly those soteriological orders to which the religions of the book are wedded (Derrida, 1995). That is why the radically non-relational as the utterly intractable that resist being drawn into and subsumed by relation, albeit it persists throughout relationality however the relationality is conceived, effects a disruptive movement that prevents the full realisation or final closure of relationality. It precipitates the continuous misfire that effects new meaning and new life.

"The alterity of the absolutely other," Levinas therefore explains, "is not an original quiddity of some sort…. The Other is not a particular case, a species of alterity, but the original exception to the order." (Levinas, 1998: 12-13). For Levinas the rupture of the radical relation with the radically non-relational is a profoundly exceptional relation that expresses itself in ethical terms. Recalling the way in which Levinas figures the radical relation with the radically non-relational emphasises again, however, that different thinkers figure this relation differently. With the Heidegger of Being and Time (1962), for example, the non-relational is figured as death. For Levinas, as we have just noted, the non-relational is the Other. For Derrida, the non-relational is Alterity, although he gives it many other names and explores its deconstructive force in many other contexts through the operation for example of the trace, of differànce and 'hauntology'. For Lacan the non-relational is the Real. Despite the charge that all he sees is power, Foucault too noted that:

Each of these starting points also gives rise to different projects and that is why, amongst many other reasons, there is no single school of thought to be sensibly encapsulated here by such labels as post-structural or post-modern. There are many different ways, in short, of thinking "the Other-in-the-Same [L’Autre-dans-le-Même] without thinking the Other [l’Autre] as another Same [Même’]." (Levinas, 1998: 80). Heidegger’s project, initially at least, was a fundamental ontology capable of sustaining a project of authenticity. Later he found radical relationality in relation to the radically non-relational to be the special preserve of the poetic. Levinas’ project was an infinite ethicality that was, conversely, hostile to claiming a privileged place for the poetic: "Cutting across the rhetoric of all our enthusiasms, in the responsibility for the other, there occurs meaning from which no eloquence could distract – nor even any poetry." (Levinas, 1998: 13). In this however he was resisted by Blanchot who noted how much Levinas distrusted poetry and marked it conversely as one of those things amongst others that had to be overcome if there was to be ‘ethics’ as first philosophy. For Blanchot, only in virtue of the radical exteriority opened up by the ‘experience of Language’ does such a thing as an ethical relation become possible. (Blanchot, 1993). Derrida’s project displays similarities and difference with both these projects, as well as a common debt to Heidegger, since his pre-occupation is also that of an inescapable and infinite responsibility ramified especially in terms of justice and of undecidability. Lacan’s project, however, was a revised psychoanalysis disclosing the structure of desire. Rancière figures the radically non-relational as "a magnitude that escapes ordinary measurement." (1999: 15).

Almost all the thinkers to whom I have referred recognise the significance of the thinking to which they are devoted for the reformulation of the political and for the possibility of political criticism. Unusually with Rancière, however, we have a project of thought that is entirely devoted to an explicit theorisation of the political as a relationality that is directly formed by this radical relation with the radically non-relational. This political thought eschews the notion of a political community based upon the unity of a principle, the uniformity of a group or the arithmetic summing of individuals transacting inter-subjective exchanges. It is concerned also with understanding political relationality as one that is not simply comprised of historical conflicts or disagreements in a pluralist way. Pluralism deals in a plurality of single figures which, because they are assumed or forced to add-up, are thereby made to yield an arithmetic calculus of self-interested behaviour. That is why it is a form of political arithmetic. For Rancière 'plurality' is strictly speaking a heterology, a paradoxical magnitude of a being-in-relation that quite simply never adds-up. Any (ac)count of relationality - the political arithmetic of pluralism for example - will always be a mis-count because the sum of relationality does not add-up. It is not comprised of stable figures since the very magnitude of which they are a part, and whose paradoxical character they reflect, is itself simultaneously both more and less than one. It is the very division then over how any particular order of historical relations does not add-up (and it will never add -up but more about this later) which Rancière says,

The polemicality that follows is not then mere argumentativeness or the hyperbole of egoistic conflict. It defines the very agonistic character of the political relation as such. In developing this thesis, particularly in the latest of his books to be translated (Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, 1999), Rancière draws upon the tradition of classical political thought to formulate a set of organising concepts that develop his own novel understanding of the political. The rest of this paper seeks to explicate these.

For Rancière, like many contemporary continental thinkers, "the initial logos is tainted with a primary contradiction." (Rancière, 1999: 16). That primary contradiction establishes a fundamental incommensurability. That incommensurability is, however, extended by Rancière from the locus of language where it is usually located to the locus of account. That move is critical for a number of reasons.

First it enables him to insist that disagreement cannot be reduced either to Lyotard's incommensurability of utterance nor to Habermas' ideal speech situation. Disagreement does not guarantee the frustration of all argument as Lyotard says that it does in his account of the differend (Lyotard, 1988). Neither is it something that ultimately yields to the force of the better argument guaranteed by the final court of locutionary appeal as Habermas claims that it does in communicative rationality (Habermas, 1987). In response to Lyotard, Rancière's reply would be there is an incommensurability of the order of orders of discourse, but not an incommensurability of orders of discourse. One has recourse to the common capacity to understand, when one is under command, in order to be commanded. In response to Habermas, Rancière would reply that what we hold in common, this capacity to understand or speak, is not one that is itself subject to a universal command. How the rationality of disagreement works, drawing upon this distinction between the capacity to speak and the account of speaking bodies that some distribution of them commands, will be explored further below.

What is incommensurable for Rancière is initially the paradoxical magnitude of the whole of parts. Parties to a political conflict are ultimately sutured into a political relationship not simply because they fail or refuse to understand each other - however much these may also be involved - but because there can never be a full and definitive summation of the whole of which they are a part. Moreover, because there can never be a final accounting of the whole of which they are a part no rule can be induced or deduced that would settle the fundamental question of each part's due measure as an integral part of the whole. It is this dispute, finding expression historically, that may lead to the establishment of a political relation or community.

The paradox of magnitude reverberates, therefore, throughout Rancière's account of justice and politics. As Rancière addresses politics through the institution of disagreement and division, so he addresses justice through the fact of wrong.

The Incommensurability of Wrong.

The problematic of justice first concerns the matter of inclusion/exclusion, of who is to belong to the community. But it also concerns the question of proportion, what is due to each part of the whole. Such distributive justice must presuppose that a way of figuring out what is due to each part of a whole exists and can be found. More fundamentally than that, however, it has also to presuppose that the whole is itself first amenable to an accurate measure. Without the assumption that the whole ultimately does add up one cannot even begin to think of deriving a rule of proportion from it that would order the parts of it fairly. Rancière's point is simply that the whole of parts does not add up. Even those giving an account of distributive justice, Walzer for example, ultimately concede this point especially when addressing the question of who belongs to the whole (Walzer, 1983; Dillon, 1998).

Since the whole of parts cannot be definitively rendered to account, any sum and any proportional distribution of it will always be a miscount. The whole could only be made to add up at all on the basis that its rule of distribution effectively circumscribes belonging to the whole as it simultaneously orders the distribution of the parts. That is why the enterprise of distributive justice must always get its sums wrong. And so it does, on both counts (Dillon, 1999).

Wrong then is not a function of miscalculation, of the misuse or transgression - deliberate or otherwise - of rule. Neither is it a function of a lack of sophistication in the calculation, or a lack of data in the accounts, either of which could be remedied by refining the mode of calculation or introducing more data. Wrong is a function of the very absence of rule and measure, and of the incommensurability not just of the data but of the datum; that of the whole of parts itself. In these respects Rancière develops a line of argument paralleling ones made elsewhere, for example by Derrida (Derrida, 1971, 1981a; 1981b; Dillon, 1996). That is why Rancière refers to the "incommensurability of wrong". What is 'wrong' is that the whole of parts does not add up. This point is related to an intimately allied one about rule in the sense of a regime or order of power.

The whole of parts does not add up. There is no rule that can render a final account of the whole of parts. Whatever rule exists in order to order any particular arrangement of parts must therefore be historical and radically contingent. All such rule will seek legitimation on the grounds that it does derive from the rule that is said to have the ultimate measure of the whole of parts. All communities of rule will claim this in one way or another. But that is no good reason to believe them, not even if we like the sound of the rule. Anyone who wants to cure politics of its ills, Rancière notes in an observation that may apply to its friends as much as to its enemies, "has only one available solution: the lie that invents some kind of social nature in order to provide the community with an arkhe." (Rancière, 1999: 16).

Such rules do however objectify when they are employed as devices to institute what Rancière calls a division of the perceptible. They help to bring about an objective arrangement of power. What they will do in the process is also institute the incommensurability of wrong as some specific historical whole in which some parties to it will be miscounted, radically discounted or even counted out altogether from the very beginning of the accounting process. Such rule objectifies but dos not objectify politically. Theirs is not the realm of political objectification. It is that of governance or police (Foucault, 1988; Caygill, 1989; Dillon, 1993). For Rancière such rule does not amount to political rule. This is not the condition of a political relation or community. Disagreement is. How that disagreement arises and what it consists in requires a further brief account of the implications that follow from the incommensurability of wrong.

The incommensurability of wrong does not show up as such. It could not. There is no vantage-point from which it can be assessed as a whole even in its absence. There is as Rancière says always one more, always further to go (Rancière, 1999: 19). That is the point of its incommensurability. If incommensurability did show up as such it would not be incommensurability. Rancière’s working of this point powerfully recalls Heidegger's account of the working of the ontological difference (Heidegger, 1987). Incidentally, the point applies with equal disruptive force to the argument of those who locate incommensurability at the level of locution and argument and to those like Levinas who locate it at the level of the existential face to face encounter of self and other (Levinas, 1991a; 1991b). Such appeals to incommensurability are another way of abolishing politics. Incommensurability as such, whether in counting or arguing, is beyond the account of recognition. Politics is not therefore a matter of recognition in the manner elaborated for example by Charles Taylor (Taylor, 1989). Should incommensurability be said to show up as such you can be sure that it is not incommensurability. This does not mean that incommensurability does not make a showing. It does. But it shows itself in and as an historical disagreement. What happens is that it shows up - Derrida might actually call this a trace (Derrida, 1971) - in the historical manifestation of a wrong that some party to a whole suffers and contests. When that happens we are on the way to what Rancière calls a political relation.

The Institution of Politics.

Politics does not derive from some arkhe or determination of being. Politics is therefore not an epiphenomenon of philosophy. It cannot be read off from the principles of being that philosophy seeks and champions. It is not a regional ontology of a metropolitan metaphysics. Neither however is it an epiphenomenon of sociology. The political is not the social. The social is the distribution of relations of power, their functions and their components. But politics does not derive from the need to satisfy functional needs, the division of the social into its component functional parts, or from the interplay of class and group interests that then result. "It is not common usefulness that founds the political community any more than confrontation or the forming of interests." (Rancière, 1999: 19). Equally, for Rancière, political objectification is not what is usually lumped together as politics in political science. What is usually addressed there in fact stems more often than not from other mechanisms, and what might broadly be considered as strategic accounts of the ordering of order, concerned with "holding on to the exercise of majesty, the curacy of divinity, the command of armies and the management of interests." (Rancière, 1999: 17).

Politics begins for Rancière with this major and ultimately irreparable wrong. That wrong is not some flaw calling for reparation. It does disrupt the order of profit and losses, the rule of exchange in society. However, it also "ruins in advance the project of the city ordered according to the proportion of the cosmos and based on the arkhe of the community." (Rancière, 1999: 19). That the wrong is irreparable in this way does not, however, frustrate politics. Neither does it frustrate the righting of historical wrong. On the contrary it is a condition for both. As we will also note, the institution of politics always takes place in contention with an order of governance. Once more, however, that does not mean that there is no way of distinguishing between bad and less bad governance. There is, as Rancière says, "a worse and better police - the better one, incidentally, not being the one that adheres to the supposedly natural order of society or the science of legislators, but the one that all the breaking and entering perpetrated by egalitarian logic has most often jolted out of its 'natural' logic." (Rancière, 1999: 30-31). We will return to these points below. At this stage, it is important to be clear about the character of this wrong and its ramifications before doing so.

The character of political objectification instituted as disagreement in response to wrong can be elaborated further if we also note in an Arendtian way that a mode of objectification is also a mode of appearance (Arendt, 1958). A mode of objectification is how something or some person is enabled to appear. This explains why Rancière rejects the distinction, upon which Aristotle bases his account of political objectification, between animals that have a voice and those that have logos (Aristotle, 1962; Rancière, 1999). "Before the debts that place people who are of no account in a mode of dependence on the oligarchs," Rancière notes:

What Aristotle takes as a base distinction enabling him to specify that man is a political animal, Rancière conversely takes as an example of the kind of base disagreement that institutes politics.

How one appears, as phonic or logic animal, is a mode of objectification. Such a mode of objectification, as we have already noted, is precisely what constitutes the disagreement that inaugurates a political relation for Rancière. How one is to appear, what one is to be taken to be, in other words the mode of objectification as such, is the stake of the very dispute that introduces politics and forms the parties to it. For Rancière, therefore, politics does not exist, "because men, through some privilege of speech, place their interests in common." (Rancière, 1999: 27). On the contrary it exists because "those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation." (Rancière, 1999: 27). What provokes the confrontation is the eruption of the freedom of equality.

Egalitarian Contingency as the Principle of Political Objectification.

What Rancière refers to initially - and in effect ontologically - as paradoxical magnitude, he also elaborates as a certain kind of equality. Paradoxical magnitude consists simply, he says, in "the equality of anyone at all with anyone else." (Rancière, 1999: 15). This singular egalitarian contingency, as he also calls it, amounts in the final analysis to "the absence of arkhe, the sheer contingency of any social order." (Rancière, 1999: 15). The equal sharing in a whole of parts that does not add up. Equality is therefore not a possession or a right that can be successfully enumerated. As the formal property that defines one's share in the an-arkhe on which all hierarchy rests, it is simply an indefinable and inexhaustible fact. As fact it does however manifests itself as some determinable situation. There it no longer remains an ontological or existential proposition but a specific historical condition that can institute a certain order, that which is called political.

There is order in society because some people command and others obey. But in order to obey you must understand that you must obey. To do that "you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you." (Rancière, 1999: 16). In the final analysis Rancière notes "inequality is only possible through equality." (Rancière, 1999: 16). That equality "gnaws" at any established order.

One's egalitarian share of contingency exposes one to the possibility of politics, to disputing the order of one's objectification by the modes of objectification through which one's presence is largely determined with the relations of power that institute those modes of objectification. This does not always happen. It may only ever rarely happen. But it is a potential always waiting to happen, since "politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society." (Rancière, 1999: 16).

As we have already indicated, politics according to Rancière, "is that activity which turns on equality as its principle." (Rancière, 1999: p.ix). But this equality poses an aporia or quandary. Equality does not introduce a simple decision rule or law. "Equality is not a given," Rancière explains, "that politics then presses into service, an essence embodied in the law or a goal politics sets itself the task of attaining." (Rancière, 1999: 33). It is an "assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it." (Rancière, 1999: 33). Orders of governance must assume the understanding of speaking beings in order for the distribution of bodies by governance to operate. This presumption of the equality of speaking beings disrupts the order of governance once it is brought into play by a party that is wronged by the account that governance gives of it. Once it is therefore so discerned operating within relations of inequality and acted upon by a party to such a relationship, the invocation of egalitarian contingency initiates a politicisation of the relationship. Egalitarian contingency is therefore distinguished precisely by the fact that it cannot operate as a rule or foundational principle since it introduces a fundamental dissension into a relationship as the object of that relationship, the thing that constitutes it and so also the parties to it.

Such a dispute calls into account the fundamental miscount of rule. In an affirmation of the freedom of its equality the party to the dispute that inaugurates the dispute does so because it has been miscounted. In doing so it employs the charge that the people does not add up to present its claim to be representative of the people and therefore to count. It deploys the claim to dispute the very mode of objectification by means of which it has been counted down or out. Inaugurating a political relationship, it does not ask for a recount by the established accountants of power. Neither does it ask for recognition in a recount by the same accountants. That would simply be to submit to the rule the very status of which, as the mode of objectification that discounts them, is the very object of their dissent. It is because the people do not add up that any specific account of them will be a miscount leaving some radically discounted.

An historical manifestation of wrong provokes the miscounted to claim their right to be included equally among the account of speaking bodies, 'people'. "Politics exists," Rancière elaborates, "when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part." (Rancière, 1999: 11). Equally here, however, means on the grounds of equality that the accountants of power are not at liberty to grant or deny but that their unequal measures in fact presuppose. The part of those who have no part claim to stand for that 'universality' in their own countless-nesss. Their very countless-ness is an historical trace of the incommensurability of the paradoxical magnitude of 'people' as such. Just as the whole of parts is always more and less than one, so "the people are always more and less than the people." (Rancière, 1999: 10). The people are unequal to themselves in the same way that the whole is unequal to the parts and the parts are unequal to the whole.

The miscounted thus assert the universality of a people within whose compass they fall - a countless, Jean-Luc Nancy would say ‘invaluable’ (1997), more and less than one - by putting it to the test time and again in their disagreement with the account that power has given of it. They do this he, says "by uniting in the name of whatever social group the pure empty quality of equality between anyone and everyone." (Rancière, 1999: 35). In doing so their claim discloses that they are incorporated within but do not exhaust the magnitude of the countless, since the countless must always encompass the one more yet to count. The outcome is that they superimpose "over the police order that structures the community another community that only exists through and for the conflict." That community is "based on the conflict over the very existence of something in common between those who have a part and those who do not." (Rancière, 1999: 35). There are powerful recalls here of Nancy’s understanding of freedom and of the inoperative community (Nancy, 1993a; 1993b; and Connor, 1991).

The test is one in which the indeterminable compass of paradoxical magnitude is disclosed once more as the account that power gives of it is forced to yield to yet another account. Assertion of the claim necessarily therefore changes the account of 'people' itself, what counts as 'the people' and how. Even more to the point, a community is instituted in which this takes place: "the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is this part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience." (Rancière, 1999: 35). In short, political subjectification takes place. Political objectification is simultaneously also therefore a mode of political subjectification. Specifically, political subjectification produces a multiple that was not given in the order of governance: for example, 'workers'; or 'women'. These are not created ex nihilio. They are identities defined in the 'natural' order of the allocation of functions and places by governance, politically translated "into instances of experiences as a dispute." (Rancière, 1999: 36).

Subjectification in the order of political objectification is therefore not the rendering of individuals, bodies and groups (ac)countable so that the calculations of governance, police and policy making can function more accurately and more precisely. Such a process is intimately associated with what many thinkers from Marx and Weber through to Heidegger and his epigones have identified as the rationalisation, instrumentalisation, commodfication and technologisation that is so distinctive of the orders of governance and police of late modern times (Heidegger, 1969). Political subjectification occurs when an existing subjectification (woman or worker) becomes the measuring of the gap between an acknowledged part (being woman or worker) and having no part or a discounted part by virtue of that very designation. It arises when political objectification exposes such accounts as a miscount, discount or counting out. Subject to a regime of order and governance the political subject becomes a subject of wrong, remembering always that wrong here is not a theatre of victimisation (Foster, 1996). It belongs to the structure of all politics. Wrong is simply "the mode of subjectification in which the assertion of equality takes its political shape." (Rancière, 1999: 39). Political parties, by which Rancière means parties in a political relationship, do not exist prior to such a "declaration of wrong." (Rancière, 1999: 39).

Wrong cannot be eliminated. But it does get processed. Parrying Hobbes on the one hand and Levinas and Derrida on the other he adds: "It is not the same as inexpiable war or irredeemable debt." (Rancière, 1999: 39) That processing takes place through precisely this process of political objectification that introduces forms of political subjectification that give it substance, "as an alterable relationship between parties, indeed as a shift in the playing field. (Rancière, 1999: 39). It decomposes and recomposes "the ways of doing, of being and of saying." (Rancière, 1999: 40).

Processing the incommensurability of wrong goes beyond inter-subjective dialogue and the game theoretic rationality of negotiating interests. It goes through subjectification whose very production of subjects is the mode of manifestation of wrong. The persistence of both wrong and egalitarian contingency is infinite. There is no end to the possibility of politics. There is always the challenge to take on the political. And that challenge takes place in polemical scenes that are constituted by utterance, proofs and argument directed at re-describing and redefining the field of memory and experience that gives each their lot. "The speech that causes politics to exist is the same that gauges the very gap between speech and the account of it." (Rancière, 1999: 26). Such 'speech', or polemicisation (Arditi and Valentine, 1999), is subject to what Rancière calls "the law of mixing." What that means is that it is heterogeneous. It is not confined to one mode of argument. It is not restricted to one definition of reason or rationality. "The place for such an argument," Rancière pithily observes in an essay "Politics, Identification and Subjectivisation," "is an interval." (Rancière, 1992: 62). Hence the locus of a 'political subject', to use Rancière's expression, "is an interval or gap: being together in the sense that we are in between - between names, identities, cultures, and so on." (Rancière, 1992: 62). That interval has to find its scene. That scene is the encounter between politics and governance.

Whoever is nameless may speak but no account will be taken of what they say. To name this phenomenon is therefore important. It does not merely lend a voice to those that did not have one, or to those whose voice has been discounted as babble rather than reason. It helps create what he calls the structural vacuum of politics that institutes the political relation. It does so because it names that egalitarian contingency of speaking to which those who have no current name can appeal in finding the political voice that will subjectify and therefore empower them politically That is why he says elsewhere:

Hence, for Rancière, "the people" names the form of subjectification, and therefore also of objectification, for the paradoxical magnitude of the incommensurability "of this immemorial and perennial wrong." (Rancière, 1999: 22). It names "the impossible equality of the multiple and the whole produced by appropriation of freedom as being peculiar to the people." (Rancière, 1999: 10, emphasis added).

The 'empty' notion of freedom and equality entailed in this account of egalitarian contingency may be criticised for lacking definitive substance. The charge may be laid that it prevents and frustrates 'politics' because it does not give a substantive account of what the telos of politics is, or what its foundation must be. The presumption of such arguments is that there can be no effective politics without a 'given' end in view, either as the outcome towards which politics is mobilised or the foundation from which it derives. Rancière offers a powerful counter to such criticism. The counter also entails an important reformulation of Lefort's point about the empty place of power (Lefort, 1986; 1988).

Rancière's argument is strictly the reverse. For there to be politics, "the apolitical structural vacuum of equality between anyone and everyone," the freedom of egalitarian contingency, "must produce the structural vacuum of a political property like the freedom of the demos of Athens." (Rancière, 1999: 34). What that means is this. For there to be politics the substantial principle of objectification of an order of governance must have been called into dispute and so constitute an object of disagreement thereby creating a relation of parties to that disagreement. If that were all there was to a political relationship, however, it would not be a fully political relation in Rancière's terms.

It could simply amount, for example, to the assertion of an alternative principle of governmental objectification. The substitution of our sovereignty, our class, our foundational principle or technique and so on for theirs. Such a claim would commit the same fallacy as all similar appeals. In making the claim that the whole of parts of their whole of parts does not add up it may simply be advancing the counter claim that the whole of parts of our whole of parts does. Theirs, whoever they might be, certainly does not. But, for Rancière, neither will ours. The whole of parts does not add up, period. This will become manifest in an historical order of power. Contested there it will politicise the order of power. That politicisation translates the order of power into a political relation or community when the absence of an accurate account is in a sense institutionalised as always being absent. That way a structural vacuum is created in which miscounts can be called to account. In effect he says this happens for example with the invention of the demos and the invention of the people. In another text he summarises this important point as follows:

For there to be politics this dispute must therefore also institute what he calls "the structural vacuum of a political property like the freedom of the demos of Athens." The key feature of that property, and here his argument recalls that of Lefort, is precisely that it cannot be filled or exhausted. "This liberty of the people is an empty property, an improper property through which those who are nothing purport that their group is identical to the whole of the community." (Rancière, 1999: 123). That is what he means when he says that it is a structural vacuum. Because it cannot be filled politics cannot be exhausted. There is a name for this property. In fact he gives it several names. The first is the classic one of the demos, another is that of the people and a third is that of the proletarii. The democratic is the political objectification of a community in division, instituted by a disagreement about the mode of objectification introduced by the invocation of egalitarian equality.

Contriving that structural vacuum of freedom, and keeping it open, is a continuous historical achievement of politics as contention. That contention or disagreement has to be examined further. It will be examined next. The most common of names for the structural vacuum, the democratic, has also to be reconsidered. That comes after the treatment of disagreement. The logic that politics derives from paradoxical magnitude, egalitarian contingency and the structural vacuum of the democratic is what Rancière calls the 'law of mixing'. It is, in short, a heterogeneous logic. In modern times, however, all this comes into play historically through the ways in which the logic of politics encounters and disrupts the logic of governance. The encounter between politics and governance is what especially characterises late modern times where the orders of governance are said to be political but are in fact orders of ordering.

The Rationality of Disagreement.

In one sense Rancière's project is a traditional, even classical, one in that like Aristotle he is addressing the logos proper to politics. In another it is quite radical in that the logos proper to politics is impropriety, an impropriety that stems from the paradoxical magnitude of the arithmos of logos. It is ultimately a political rather than a philosophical project since the wrong takes place - when it takes place at all, because it has to become manifest historically - in the form of specific disagreements.

Disagreement then revolves around a particular manifestation of the fact that the whole of parts does not add up in the specific arrangement of a whole of parts historically. 'People' may be defined as those who have logos and be distinguished from those, whatever they are, that do not. And those with logos may then be said, as Aristotle does say, to have politics. Such a distinction, like all others of the same sort, does not, however, settle the matter of politics at all. On the contrary, it inaugurates a dispute that is political because the whole of the parts of those who can show up, in which those with logos alone are said to have a part here, never in fact adds up either.

This is no abstract dispute. "Politics arises from a count of community 'parts' which is always a false count, a double count, or a miscount." (Rancière, 1999: 6). The dispute is then always a material and historical dispute. It is one in which a party to the dispute contests the way, or ways, in which it has been miscounted, discounted or counted out in the very distribution of those who are said to be among 'the people' who share in the whole of parts. Most often this manifests itself in the dispute between 'haves' and the 'have-nots', the historical conflict between rich and poor. "There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor." (Rancière, 1999: 11).

One of the reasons why our contemporary global condition renders the political problematic so difficult is precisely because global connectivity has created a global relation between rich and poor that proves difficult to politicise in the usual ways because it cuts across so many other political boundaries and disputes. One other reason is that the wrong even of the disparity between rich and poor is not simply the disparity of wealth but the way the speaking bodies of rich and poor are objectified in ways that miscount, discount or count out the poor. The lot of those who have very little, or no lot at all, is a function of this distribution. Remedy of it ultimately requires a political rather than a merely economic response.

The trouble with wrong, the trouble of wrong, as Rancière notes well, runs even deeper then than disparities of wealth. If it did not it could, and perhaps already would, have been overcome by some national and global mechanisms of redistribution and reparation. The advent of wrong is not therefore confined to the division between rich and poor however much this division does exemplify the historical manifestation of wrong. The discussion of a wrong he says is, "not an exchange - not even a violent one - between constituent partners." (Rancière, 1999: 27). We might then ask what is the object of disagreement that objectifies power relations politically. The answer he gives is simple; "It concerns the speech situation itself and its performers." (Rancière, 1999: 27). He elaborates in a way that is worth quoting at length:

Disagreement then is a quarrel over the issue of speech itself, those who are to count as speaking and the distribution of speaking beings. There is an egalitarian contingency of speaking beings even in an inequitable order of power. That is so because even those who are counted out as speaking beings have to understand that they are counted out, and how they are counted out, in order for them to take their place in the very distribution of power. "The inequality of social ranks works only because of the very equality of speaking beings, This deduction is upsetting, in the proper sense of the term." (Rancière, 1999: 49). This does not, however, guarantee, as some philosophers have argued, that there is a sense to which all can refer in order to resolve dispute. That is the dispute: contention over the mode of objectification that institutes the very historical division of the perceptible. Equally, however, this does not mean that no recourse is implied in the speech situation to a third party, and that the speech situation therefore merely remains a stand-off between two incommunicable partners. On the contrary, there is such recourse. The recourse is to the incommensurability of speaking bodies as such. This recourse is to what Rancière calls the 'community of capacity' of speaking beings, as opposed to the (non)community of a specific historical order of account of speaking beings. More about this below when we detail further the rationality of agreement that is the logic of politics.

However much lying and cheating are also involved in speaking. However much simulation and dissimulation, especially those of modern means of communication and representation, are deeply implicated as well. Disagreement is not simply a function of misconstruction either. If it was, then calls for transparency and greater verisimilitude would have dispensed with it by now, or provided us with models of right reasoning that could eventually be extended to cover all events and eventualities. It is no accident that they have not. Human evil is not simply responsible for this either. Mankind's fallen nature has been targeted long enough for the message to have effected at least some amelioration of wrong, not least among those who subscribe to the message (Connolly, 1993). There seems little evidence that it has. Where verisimilitude is concerned, we are confronted now through electronic powers of representation with yet another distribution of speaking or at least signifying bodies. Its sophistication is one that poses a novel political challenge to egalitarian contingency. "The identification of the real with its reproduction and simulation is the 'dismissal of the case' for the heterogeneity of appearance, and with it, the dismissal of the case for the political constitution of nonidentary subjects that upset the homogeneity of the perceptible by showing separate worlds together, by organising worlds of litigious community." (Rancière, 1999: 104; Bogard, 1997).

Neither is disagreement misunderstanding. It is not caused by the imprecision of words and would not be cured, as political thinkers, like Locke especially would have it, by a grand purification of language. It would not therefore be amenable merely to the extension of common language or the rule of the ideal speech situation. The reason is that the problem does not lie initially in the domain of utterance but in the domain of 'wrong', albeit it takes place in dissension. For that wrong "is the introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking bodies." (Rancière, 1999: 19). The incommensurable is the infinity of egalitarian contingency. The difficulty actually also lies in the way that the ideal speech situation models rational discourse. We return to this point below as well.

Disagreement then is not a matter of the fallibility of utterance or incompetence in the use of language. It is not to do with words alone, although it takes place in the context of dissent, but with account of speaking beings. Neither is it concerned with the heterogeneity of regimes of sentences and the presence or absence of a rule for assessing different types of heterogeneous discourse. Disagreement occurs, instead, "whenever contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation." (Rancière, 1999: xi). It is therefore concerned less with arguing than with what can be argued, less with who is speaking and what is being said than with the initial distribution of speaking capacities. In sum:

In this respect it is about the very conditions of intelligibility in the light of which 'people' make their objective appearance. That is why the disagreement is ultimately always about the mode of objectification.

Disagreement is the locus of the political relation for Rancière then in this way. Not as concern over a particular mode of objectification, but as concern over the ways in which a particular mode of objectification poses a dispute about how things are to make their appearance as such. It is a dispute about the object that will institute the mode of objectification. It is that disagreement which binds people together and forms them as parties to a relation for which Rancière exclusively reserves the term political. A community is instituted by that very antagonism. Politics then is that activity that has the rationality of disagreement as its very own rationality (Rancière, 1999: xii).

Disagreement is therefore fundamentally a function of the historical conjunction of two unconnected things. Rancière describes them as follows. First, there is "the order of the inegalitarian distribution of social bodies in a partition of the perceptible." This is the order of power of any specific historical relation of power, one that will of course amount to a specific objective distribution of speaking beings. The second he describes as, "the order of the equal capacity of speaking beings in general." (Rancière, 1999: 42). This is egalitarian contingency, paradoxical magnitude, or what he describes in respect of the speech situation as the 'community of capacity'. This conjunction is posed by some as one that is ultimately comprised of incommunicability. For them there is no universal law of intelligibility to which reference can be made in order to resolve disputes between two contending accounts of the world. Conversely, for others, there has to be some such law of intelligibility. Some of these find it already implied in any and every utterance. The more conflict and irrationality is to be avoided, the more utterance has to be governed by reference to the ideal of intelligibility and communicability implied in all utterance.

For Rancière, both of these positions fundamentally misconceive the speech situation. The issue is not that of incommunicability but of incommensurability. Incommunicability presumes that if there is ultimately no identity of understanding - that is, no subscription to the same criteria of validity - unreason will triumph. Incommensurability presumes, conversely, that there is simply no accurate sum of the totality of meaning. This captures the disorder of the logos in both of the terms to which Rancière refers, speech and the account of speech. Incommunicability poses the speech situation in such a way as there is either rational agreement or there is irrationality. Ultimately, so also does the ideal speech situation. We have to replay Rancière's argument about the incommensurability of the logos in respect of the sum of meaning and in respect of the account of speech in order to understand how he understand the speech situation differently. That way we will also disclose how he understands the logic proper to politics and the character of political discourse that comprises a political community.

Rancière has a highly developed sense of the duality of existence and of the challenge we are under to live that duality. For him, then, there are two intimately related senses of language and of understanding, and two sense of community. There is a chain of argument here that we have to rehearse in order to understand his point about the rationality of disagreement as the logic of politics. As we do so remember that for him this duality cannot be summed into a univocal or unequivocal magnitude. If one wants to give an account of it in Rancière's terms, the magnitude is paradoxical. Paradoxical magnitude is another way of referring to the incommensurability of the logos of speaking beings. There is no final sum of the totality of the meaning of speaking. In terms we used earlier, incommensurability means that the logos neither means nor sums determinably.

There is a dual sense of language in the way that we have already explained. For Rancière there is speech and there is the account of speech. There is a dual sense of community, too, in that there is what he calls the 'community of capacity' and the '(non)community of account' that is given of speaking beings in any specific distribution of an historical order of power. The 'community of capacity' is another way of referring to egalitarian contingency. Speaking beings share in the capacity to speak. We have already shown that any order of speaking nonetheless implies and relies upon this capacity. Any order of speaking presumes the 'community of capacity' of speaking beings. What account is given of that capacity is, however, a matter of historical order. When such an account is re-called to the incommensurable account of the 'community of capacity' politics is set in train. For the purpose of this elucidation of disagreement, however, something else has to be remarked. Just as, in any order of distribution of speaking bodies, an assumption is at work that there is an equality of capacity of speaking (egalitarian contingency) so also in the dialogue between interlocutors that 'community of capacity' is operating as a third party.

It is therefore possible to make recourse to the 'community of capacity' as the third party. What happens when we do so is that the relationship of speakers, their order of speaking, begins to be politicised. Egalitarian contingency intrudes into it and upsets the set-up (Weber, 1989). Irrationality does not, however, result as the champions of incommunicability might argue or as the exponents of the ideal situation might fear. Something else does. Reference in dispute to the incommensurability of the egalitarian contingency of speaking beings does two other things instead. First, it measures out the gap historically - that is to say by reference to specific speaking figures and by reference to specific figures of speech - between an order or distribution of discourse and the incommensurability of the capacity for speaking. "The floating count of the people stages the distance of a regime from its norm." (Rancière, 1999: 76). The incommensurables of an account of speech and the egalitarian community of capacity for speech will then be "well gauged in regard to each other, and this gauge re-figures the relationship of parts and of parties, of objects likely to give rise to dispute, of subjects able to articulate it." (Rancière, 1999: 42). Second, reference in dispute to the incommensurability of the capacity for speaking that is 'the community of capacity' has the effect also of multiplying the people sharing in the account of speaking. In consequence, "new inscriptions of equality within liberty and a fresh sphere of visibility for further demonstrations" are produced. (Rancière, 1999: 42). In short, through the very contest of accounts of speech the incommensurability becomes exposed, re-evaluated and re-formed because the order of account is re-called to account by reference to the 'community of capacity' and the egalitarian contingency of speaking beings which comprises it. Re-call of the 'community of 'capacity' disrupts the order of the (non)community of account.

In short, there is an incommensurability of the order of the logos but not of orders of discourse, power and governance. Such orders are in fact measured out in their miscount historically when the egalitarian contingency of the 'community of capacity' is recalled by a wronged party contesting the distribution of speaking beings that has discounted, miscounted or counted it out altogether. Which is not to say that this is a final accounting of course either. There are two ways of construing the gap that is thus disclosed between the capacity to speak and the account given of it in a specific distribution of that capacity. Rancière summarises them this way. There is, first, the response that effectively complains that there is an order of power operating and that there is in effect no recourse from it other than to counter it with another order of power. This is the response that says there is only an incommensurability of orders of discourse. "We understand that you are lying when you posit the language of your commands as a common language. We understand, in short, that all universals in language and communication are merely a lure, that they are only idioms of power and that we too must forge our own [emphasis added]." (Rancière, 1999: 46). An alternative response uses the retort that the 'community of capacity' of speaking beings that comprises egalitarian contingency exists, since it is nonetheless implied in and functional to every order of account even if denied there. It deploys that retort to indict as non-community an historical order of (mis)count. "We understand that you wish to signify to us that there are two languages and that we cannot understand you. We perceive that you are doing this in order to divide the world into those who command and those who obey. We say on the contrary that there is a single language common to us and that consequently we understand you even if you do don't want us to. In a word we understand that you are lying by denying that there is a common language." (Rancière, 1999: 46). Incommensurability is not the absence of common language. Incommensurability is the irreducible and unbridgeable division within the very commonality of language - capacity (to speak) and account of speech (an order of utterance) - that prevents language being reduced either to a single logic or to the mere play of power. This dual incommensurability of the logos is its singularity.

One further way of explaining what happens here is to say that reference to the 'community of capacity' in effect re-submits utterances to their conditions of validation. To do that is to "place in dispute the mode by which each party participates in the logos." (Rancière, 1999: 45). Doing that "can never be some simple clarification of what speaking means." (Rancière, 1999: 45). It measures out and names the gap, in a specific historical instance of dispute, between an order of account of speaking beings and the capacity of egalitarian contingency. Resort to the incommensurability of order measures a gap between a specific order and what it miscounts in a material historical division or dispute. The position of the enunciator is made explicit in doing so because the utterance is extracted from the initial speech situation in which it functioned felicitously. It is relocated in a situation, that of its conditions of production and validation, in which it no longer functions felicitously. There it becomes instead the object of scrutiny "reduced to the status of an utterance in a common language." (Rancière, 2998: 46-47). The common language here refers to the common capacity for speech or what Rancière also refers to as the egalitarian contingency of the language of problems. Its claims to validity are therefore re-called and put to the test. It is submitted to another account than the account that it would itself give, and be accounted by. Submission to this commonality is not submission to a rule or calculus that will be the final arbiter of meaning and sense or the ultimate distribution of the order of speaking beings. The 'community of capacity' is an operator not a determinate calculus. Returning an utterance to its conditions of validation thus objectifies the gap that already exists within the logos as the incommensurability of the logos. In other words, to the egalitarian contingency enabled by the fact that neither the totality of meaning nor the summation of speaking beings adds up.

The 'community of capacity' therefore functions as a disruptive third party to the speech situation of two parties in dialogue that is ordinarily taken to model utterance. The speech situation is always already triangulated. It is comprised of the party of the first part and the party of the second part, and the community of capacity' of egalitarian contingency in which both share as speaking beings. In addition to Derrida, Blanchot and Nancy also have a highly developed sense of this divided community of language as well (Blanchot, 1988; 1995; Nancy, 1991; 1993a; 1993b). In submitting the distribution of speech between the party of the first and second parts

to the 'community of capacity', a measure of the miscount of the account of speech is objectified. This third party, that of the 'community of capacity', is always already installed in the discourse of the original two parties. This is simply the equality that we have already said is presupposed in any distribution of speech establishing an order of power and command. In sum the 'community of capacity' is what the interlocutors already share-in however unequal their historical share of it is made out to be in any material distribution of it. In short, Rancière's point is that the translation of this distribution by a party wronged by it will make "the very stakes of the illocutionary situation" explicit (Rancière, 1999: 47). That is what we mean when we say it will take the measure of it. This is also a political manoeuvre in the process of politicising the relationship of those to the distribution. But, this common capacity of the 'community of capacity' can never be monopolised by any speaking body. It is not reducible to the specific speech community even of the party that is wronged in an account of the order of speaking. "It would be missing the logic of the play of persons implied here if one were to reduce this third person enunciated by a first person either to the natural…process of the aisthesis of a collective body that finds its voice, or to some kind of deceptive identification with an impossible or missing body. The play of the third person is essential to the logic of political discussion, which is never a simple dialogue" (Rancière, 1999: 48). It is always both less and more than such a dialogue. It is less because of the monologue of power and command. "Understand this." It is more because invocation of the 'community of capacity' multiplies speaking bodies. That, in effect, is the advent of political discourse articulating a dispute. This quarrel has nothing to do with the measure of transparency and everything to do with the measure of capacity. All the demonstration, validation and proving entailed in polemicisation is concerned with checking out the order of speaking beings against the 'community of capacity' and, in finding it wanting, multiplying the number of speaking beings that are taken into account. Sharing a language is sharing a form of life Enunciation is therefore not simply the exchange of meaning it is an encounter between worlds. Polemicisation not only proves a point about the miscount of an order of speaking beings it serves to disclose new worlds of them (Arditi and Valentine, 1999).

The Democratic.

In the naming of the structural vacuum that the invocation of egalitarian contingency institutes thereby disrupting the order of governance, we also get an important insight into the way Rancière's account of political objectification re-describes the demos of the democratic. The incommensurability of wrong and the paradox of magnitude do not remain as abstractions. They are manifest as political terms. Specifically they are politically subjectified in three names to which Rancière resorts and which in effect all name the same thing. These names are 'demos', 'people' and proletarii. All three name - politically subjectify and therefore also objectify - the paradox of magnitude and the perennial incommensurability of wrong historically. As historical names they specify the structural vacuum that emerges when orders of governance, police and policy making are interrupted, stopped in their tracks, by the intrusion of that egalitarian contingency which is provoked by miscounting into making a governing mode of objectification the object of disagreement. The relation thus formed instituting a political relationship. For politics happens, according to Rancière, when an order of distribution is disrupted by the intrusion of the freedom of that equality of contingency upon which any and every such social regime ultimately rests. The demos or the democratic is for Rancière the original of these terms.

The freedom of egalitarian contingency is a formal property since it is a property that belongs to everyone in general and is confined to no one in particular (Rancière, 1999: 8). It is the freedom to identify as the same as those who do have property, place and position. The property that the freedom of equality brings is the impropriety of those who do not count or are radically discounted identifying themselves with the lot of the whole of parts irrespective of the specific historical account taken of it. To rank equally is the impropriety of freedom. This is an impossible equation that cannot be understood within the divisions of arithmetical equality "requiring the compensation of profits or losses, or of geometric equality, which is supposed to link a quality to a rank." (Rancière, 1999: 10). Neither can the account of arithmetic or the proportions of geometry withstand its claim when it is mobilised by a party of the part that has no part without a counter mobilisation of violent suppression.

What the freedom of equality therefore brings to relations of power is the relation of contention Since every order is an order of distribution, once this freedom is introduced into it the wrong of that order becomes manifest and its violence may well become evident also. That is what we meant above when pointing out that the gap between the incommensurability of the 'community of capacity' and a specific historical order of speaking bodies gets measured out in a dispute, and that therefore the incommensurability is neither the same as incommunicability nor is it politically ineffective. A political relation or community occurs, then, when any order is disrupted by this moment of freedom and constituted as a division because some party to that order finds itself bearing the wrong of its distribution that does not add up and that violates equality. The mere advent of a wrong is, however, not sufficient. The name democracy refers us to the peculiar mode of institution of such a community.

Specifically, then, democracy is the term Rancière applies to the scandal of politics. The scandal of politics for him is democracy. They are synonymous because the demos of democracy is one of the political names that politically subjectifies the universal that is the paradoxical magnitude of the whole of parts. This universal can never be instituted as a foundation or principle. Egalitarian contingency is "the principle that is not one." (Rancière, 1999: 17). It is therefore what continuously makes an issue of foundations and principles instead, and draws attention to the ways in which their account of the whole of parts gets things wrong.

Politics as the objectification of a dispute about the mode of objectification that institutes a relation in division ultimately therefore does derive from the operation of a ‘universal’. But it is a ‘universal’ that always escapes inauguration. Hence that 'universal' can never be deployed as a secure foundational principle. One might say that it is impure. It is only ever instituted as a material quarrel and never as an unquestionable arkhe. Such is the work of the demos. This is what does institute politics. This, too, is the real scandal of politics. One that governance and philosophy fear, it is a danger towards which they are continuously on the alert since the resistance of any police order to it "is a matter of principle." (Rancière, 1999: 39).

Contemporary democracy is subject to a number of powerful paradoxes. "At the time the institutions of parliamentary representation were being contested, when the notions that these were 'mere forms' held sway," Rancière for example notes in Foucauldian tones, "they were nonetheless the instrument of a vastly superior militant vigilance." (Rancière, 1999: 97). Moreover, "we have seen generations of militant socialists and communists battle fiercely for a constitution, rights, institutions, and institutional mechanisms that they otherwise claimed expressed the power of the bourgeoisie and of capital." (Rancière, 1999: 97). Today, however, the situation is the reverse, "and the victory of so-called formal democracy is accompanied by a noticeable disaffection with regard to its forms." (Rancière, 1999: 97). Conversely the distinguishing mark of current liberal regimes is the enthusiastic espousal of what Rancière calls, "a sort of rampant Marxism according to which politics is the expression of a certain state of the social," (Rancière, 1999: 97), specifically its economic form. Here the development of the forces of global capitalist production is embraced. As the driving force demanding social reconstruction that will allow them further play, that social pliability becomes the measure of the governmental effectiveness of liberal democracy. It is that which, specifying how efficient and effective they are, also dictates the rules of political competition to which their party politics conform. "The declared success of democracy is then accompanied by a reduction of democracy to a certain state of social relationships." (Rancière, 1999: 97-98). These paradoxes are a further reason for directing our attention to how Rancière thinks democracy functions and why it is that he also thinks it is synonymous with the account of political community that he has given. He begins by specifying what democracy is not.

Democracy initially disturbed political philosophy, Rancière recalls in a reflection on Plato, precisely because it was not a set of institutions or one kind of regime amongst others. In our days, democracy is not the parliamentary system or the legitimate state. It is not a particular state of the social either in the sense of the reign of individualism, the masses or pluralistic bargaining between social interests. Neither is it a certain kind of ethos that has to be inculcated through some sort of, say republican, paedeia. Since politics for Rancière means something other than police, policy and governance even that of republican forms, it is not the institution of some such distribution of speaking bodies either. Positively, however, democracy is characterised by the following features:

1. Democracy is a certain mode of objectification.

To repeat a point that is I hope by now well-established, democracy is a certain mode of objectification. Objectification is the introduction into the visible field of experience of something that also modifies the delineation of the visible field of experience. What is specifically objectified by democracy is what follows next: the subject of democracy; the taking place of a certain form of dispute; and the law of mixing that characterises the polemical communities of democracy. All three effect a modification in the field of visible experience. They do so because they are in fact all disruptions of the field of visible experience that is made available and sanctioned by some specific ordering of it. In these ways democracy is politics for Rancière. It is the mode of political objectification. Modes of objectification nonetheless also take place through the mechanism of modes of subjectification. Political objectification thereby requires a name. Democracy is the oldest of them.

2. Democracy is a certain mode of subjectification;

That mode of subjectification that politics takes on is not defined in terms of ethnic properties. Neither is it one identified with "a sociologically determinable part of a population or with the sum of the groups that go to make up this population." (Rancière, 1999: 99). It is not confined to the unity of a social group. The mode of subjectification that politics takes on is that of democracy. "Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics itself, the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of speaking bodies into functions corresponding to their 'nature' and places corresponding to their functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency." (Rancière, 1999: 101). This is the designation to which subjects that do not coincide with the parties of the state or of society appeal. It is not their ethos but a break with their ethos that constitutes political subjects. Such subjects he describes as "floating subjects that deregulate all representations of places and proportions." (Rancière, 1999: 99-100). It is therefore the name of the 'community of capacity' to which the part of those who have no part appeal in superimposing the purchase they thereby gain "on the reckoning of society's parties." (Rancière, 1999: 99). These are those that "deregulate all representations of places and proportions." (Rancière, 1999: 100).

What the purchase of that deregulation institutes is not merely however the effectiveness of the part of those who have no part but the subjectification, as a potent political name, of the countless (incommensurable) as such. "Every politics is democratic in this precise sense: not in the sense of a set of institutions, but in the sense of forms of expression that confront the logic of equality with the logic of the police order." (Rancière, 1999: 101). Democracy's objectification and subjectification concern a certain form of disagreement. Disagreement is not confined to a place even an empty place. Disputes take place (Dillon, 1996). That is why democracy is not confined to a specific sort of regime that designates a place for the processing of disputes.

3. Democracy is the taking place of a mode of dispute.

This dispute is not simply the conflict of interest that arises between social groups. It cannot therefore be modelled as pluralistic bargaining or game theory. Each of these presupposes the anteriority of the parties to the dispute in their unity or uniformity as well as the calculability of their interests. In short, these have to assume both that parties are pre-formed and calculable as well as that parties are calculating entities. What that means is that before the interactions of the parties of pluralistic bargaining and the actors of game theory can be added up, the parties themselves have to be made to add up. Pluralistic bargaining and game theory thus have to have installed precisely what is at issue in a political dispute. It is not that parties count. It is not simply a matter of how parties count. It is the account that is given of them counting that counts. "The political dispute is distinct form all conflicts of interest between constituted parties of the population, for it is a conflict over the very count of those parties." (Rancière, 1999: 100).

Hence, the place of the demos is not confined to any officially sanctioned place. It is the taking place of such a dispute (Dillon, 1996). Rancière clarifies this crucial point by reference to Lefort's suggestion that what characterises the democratic revolutions of modernity is the installation of power as an empty place (Lefort, 1988). Rancière's point also draws upon an extended critique of different versions of politics that need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that for Rancière "there is really no reason to identify such indetermination with a sort of catastrophe in the symbolic linked to the revolutionary disembodiment of the 'double body' of the king." (Rancière, 1999: 100). Democratic disruption and disidentification can be dissociated from this "theatre of sacrifice that originally ties the emergence of democracy to the great spectres of the re-embodiments staged by terrorism and totalitarianism of a body torn asunder." (Rancière, 1999: 100).

4. Democracy is 'the law of mixing' of polemical communities.

The effect of the taking place of this sort of dispute is twofold. It sets up what Rancière calls polemical communities. Polemical because of course they are constituted in division. Since the relation of politics is a relation in and of division invoking the 'community of capacity', and since evoking the 'community of capacity' also leads to the multiplication of speaking beings, polemical communities are therefore also subject to the law of mixing. Multiplication is what incommensurability allows and what invocation of the 'community of capacity' may effect. Polemical communities, in short, are necessarily and radically heterogeneous. Their heterogeneity matches that of the heterogeneous logics of governance in the context of which they erupt. They extend the range and increase the number of speaking beings, of those involved in and empowered by the communicability of being taken into account. More importantly, they extend the range and increase the number of speaking beings because by instituting the demos in their response to how they are wronged they establish that there is no limit to the account of speaking beings; just as Derrida in particular has taught us, for allied reasons, there is no limit to the saying and the said of what they might say.

Conclusion.

The laws of accounting no more identify with themselves to guarantee a definitive summation than the laws of language identify with themselves to guarantee a definitive meaning. Political arithmetic and political geometry miscount just as political discourse misfires. Speaking makes misfire evident and destroys the myth of uniformly felicific locution. Counting makes miscounting evident and so destroys the myth of the equivalence required for the whole of parts to add up. Any project, modern or otherwise, that seeks to establish a purified political discourse productive of reliable political computation – such as Hobbes’ geometry - will founder on Rancière’s paradoxical magnitude as much as it will on Derrida’s differànce. The equality of anyone and everyone, as an equal measure of contingency that does not add up and is manifested in an incommensurable number of ways, is a singularity not an equivalence. That egalitarian contingency disrupts speech and the account of speech. Thus, politics happens. It is an event not a calculus.

Specifically, politics is the taking place of this singular freedom of egalitarian contingency manifesting itself through the provocation of a specific expression of the wrong of an unequal distribution. It happens when some party to a whole takes the part of this whole - this paradoxical magnitude - and claims it as its own part: "the setting up of one part as equal to the whole is the name of a 'property' that is not its own, and of a 'common' that is the community of a dispute." (Rancière, 1999: 18). The democratic names the structural vacuum of a political community.

This claim, Rancière insists, should be understood in all its generality and all its disruptive egalitarian quality. It brings together "in the name of one part of society the sheer name of equality between anyone and everyone by means of which all classes disconnect and politics occurs." (Rancière, 1999: 18). This part of the demos or of the people does not correlate with "real parts of society, categories that correspond to functions." (Rancière. 1998: 18). This part that takes the whole part of the paradoxical magnitude of equal beings disrupts the unity of a social class as much as it does the social order as a whole. In other words it disrupts the parts to a social whole as much as it does the order of the whole. It must do. No whole of parts adds up. That is the point of the point of paradoxical magnitude, of the incommensurability that Rancière detects in every summation. In sum: "The wrong instituted by politics is not primarily class warfare; it is the difference of each class from itself, which then imposes on the very carving up of the social body the law of mixing, the law of anyone at all doing anything at all" (Rancière, 1999: 18-19).

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