3
In contrast, Ranciere rejects the traditional meta politics within which “man and
citizen are the same liberal individual enjoying the universal values of human rights
embodied in the constitutions of our democracies.”
8
Recognizing the history of wrong
involved in the founding violence of the law (e.g. constitution making) and in the
preservation of the law (adjudication), a form of policing or “policy” that functions within
a traditional meta politics, Ranciere evokes the distinction between “a logic of
subjectivization and a logic of identification.”
9
The logic of identification is the typical
political arithmetic within which everyone is a subject before the law or has a political
preference to be counted along with the others. In contrast to “the arithmetic of
shopkeepers and barterers” (or insurance companies, as in Dworkin’s model), Ranciere
speaks of “a magnitude that escapes ordinary measurement,” a “paradoxical magnitude”
that escapes a logic that equates “the equality of anyone at all with anyone else.”
10
The logic
of subjectification derives from a pluralism of disparity. Resisting metaphysical
foundations, Ranciere sees the social order as sheer contingency. There are no political
parties with an existence prior to “the declaration of a wrong.” Thus, to take one of
Ranciere’s examples: “Before the wrong that its name exposes, the proletariat has no
existence as a real part of society.”
11
But what is “society” for Ranciere. How are democratic subjects situated?
Referring only indirectly to the social frame within which democratic encounters emerge,
he writes: “Real democracy would presuppose that the demos be constituted as a subject
present to itself across the whole surface of the social body.”
12
Apart from implying that
the democratic subject must be socially pervasive, Ranciere does not elaborate a structural
Convention