4
model of segments comprising the social body. Instead of mapping a static social space, he
implies that social segments are episodic; insofar as they have political significance, they
arise during encounters. While, since the eighteenth century, canonical political thinkers
have constructed society as a regulative ideal and the legitimating basis or alibi for “the
political,” Ranciere reverses the order of significance.
13
Politics is Ranciere’s regulative
ideal. It is to be judged on the basis of a steadfast commitment to the equality of everyone
and is understood as the proper regulator of social bonds. Critical of all sociological
conceits, Ranciere indicts political theory, sociology, and the administrative agencies of a
hierarchical order, who invent “the social” and then distribute “justice” as a logical
outgrowth of naturalized social arrangements.
14
Conceiving the existing social order as
sheer contingency, he claims that 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 [which designates any politically excluded other, not
merely workers] has no existence as a real part of society.”
15
Here Ranciere is caught in a dilemma of intelligibility. Despite the absence of a
stable referent called “society,” it emerges nevertheless as one of his discursive objects. This
is necessarily the case not only because ordinary grammar is recalcitrant to the instability
that Ranciere wants to convey but also because however contingent and contestable social
segments may be, any approach to democracy must contend with a complex history of
imposed segmentation and boundary making, even if one concedes that much of what is
intelligible as “the social” is epiphenomenal to a history of modes of domination. Thus any
radical democratic politics must necessarily challenge the reigning order of intelligibility,
Convention