Politics is about who wields power or authority or gains from the decisions made by those in power or who wield authority. Even if everybody agreed about everything, or nobody agreed about anything, there would still be politics because who gets what, when, and in what order, matters even if what everybody gets is shat on from a great height.
Is there any field where it is important that 'consensus' mean something more than everybody consenting to a particular course of action? In particular, is it really important that everybody share the same belief?
Perhaps. For Magic to work, maybe everybody has to really believe it will work. But, magic doesn't work. Saying 'well, obvs, someone didn't believe which is why my magic didn't work' doesn't fool anybody.
Sadly, infantile Leftists believe that Magic can work even if nobody believes in it just so long as they have the right belief about lack of belief in which case Marxist Magic will work most defs.
One such, senile soixante-huitard retard, Ranciere writes-
The essence of politics is dissensus.
An essence is something true in all possible worlds. Politics can exist even if there is complete consensus. Imagine a College of Cardinals every one of whom doesn't want to be Pope- indeed, that is the ceremonial assumption- and, moreover, everybody has a reason why every other is fitted for the office of Pope. Nevertheless, there will be politicking and, finally, a Pope will emerge from the conclave. This could have great political consequences across the Globe.
Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions.
Because we have entered Fairy Land where interests or opinions don't confront each other and thus Politics is about unicorns poking holes through the fabric of space and time with their cute little horns.
It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself
Nonsense is a gap in sense. But sensible people don't pay it much mind.
Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen;
No. A political demonstration always gives a reason why people should pay attention to it. This may not be a sensible reason, but it will be a reason. If the demonstrators have no 'skin in the game'- i.e. they are merely virtue signaling or protesting for the sake of protesting, the demonstration is still political- it is a show of strength or a recruiting device- though it may be counter-productive.
it places one world in another - for instance, the world where the factory is a public space in that where it is considered private, the world where workers speak, and speak about the community, in that where their voices are mere cries expressing pain.
The proletariat is tortured in factories. That's why the Capitalists put in all those big machines in their dark Satanic mills. You must be very naive if you thing the 'assembly line' isn't one where workers are strapped down on a conveyor belt such that they can be anally assaulted by huge pulsing dildos of ever increasing size.
This is the reason why politics cannot be identified with the model of communicative action.
Very true! You try explaining to the guys who work at the Peugeot factory that they aren't actually spending their shift making cars. They are actually being repeatedly sodomized by giant dildos so top hatted Capitalists can get their jollies.
This model presupposes partners that are already pre-constituted as such
i.e. folks who are prepared to listen to you rather than punch you in the head or run away screaming 'save me from that boring nutter!'
and discursive forms that entail a speech community,
i.e. a bunch of friends. Guys who will listen to you rather than run away.
the constraint of which is always explicable.
to nutters who have no friends.
Now, the specificity of political dissensus is that its partners are no more constituted than is the object or stage of discussion itself.
Because they don't exist. On the other hand, Leftist academics who don't want their heads punched in by actual proles may want to have a discourse of dissensus constituted by themselves, their student and maybe the neighbor's cat if the student ran away and the cat was sleeping peacefully.
Those who make visible the fact that they belong to a shared world that others do not see -
are doing cosplay. Sadly, Leftist Professors don't actually dress up like Karl Marx- unless they are female, in which case everybody just assumes they are lezzas.
or cannot take advantage of - is the implicit logic of any pragmatics of communication.
Nope. The implicit logic of communication is that both sides are or will be affected by the subject of the communication. If this is found not to be the case- there is no pragmatics because the other party runs away screaming 'keep this boring nutter away from me!'
The worker who puts forward an argument about the public nature of a 'domestic' wage dispute must demonstrate the world in which his argument counts as an argument and must demonstrate it as such for those who do not have the frame of reference enabling them to see it as one.
Anybody who puts forward a public argument must demonstrate it as such for those who don't have the relevant frame of reference. However, if the 'world in which his argument counts as an argument' is the fairyland which only exists up the bum-hole of an Argentinian actuary's cat- not the Siamese one, the old tabby which sleeps in the garden shed- then we aren't really speaking about an argument at all.
Political argumentation is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world in which the argument could count as an argument,
No. It must be about this world and its possible future. It can't be about a possible world where all Cats are Argentinian actuaries but the portal to Paradise is confined exclusively to the bum-hole of the Tabby who sleeps in the garden shed.
one that is addressed by a subject qualified to argue, over an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he 'normally' has no reason either to see or to hear.
Ranciere confuses political argument with the ravings of a maniac which a qualified psychiatrist may be obliged to hear. The shrink's job is to figure out whether this guy was molested as a child by an Argentinian Actuary while a tabby cat looked on or whether the guy is faking the whole thing for a lark.
It is the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds.
that of a lunatic and that of a boring nutter who is simply too boring to be certified- unless he strangles his wife.
Politics, then, has no proper place nor any natural subjects.
Unless it is the sort of politics from which people can make a living.
A demonstration is political
if it makes a political demand or is intended to influence political views or outcomes.
not because it occurs in a particular place and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a dash between two partitions of the sensible.
Every thing could be considered a dash or a gash or a sash or moustache between any number of partitions of the sensible or ostensible or comprehensible.
A political subject is not a group of interests or of ideas, but the operator of a particular dispositif of subjectivation and litigation
which is a group of interests or of ideas unless it is cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
through which politics comes into existence
So, Rancider says politics comes into existence with a political subject. But such subjects have interests and ideas. One could say this is because they are 'operators' of a particular sort. But, the fact remains that a subject with interests or ideas constitutes Politics which is why that subject can be termed a 'political subject'.
A political demonstration is therefore always of the moment and its subjects are always precarious.
Because the thing happens in real time and the thing is done by precarious mortals.
A political difference is always on the shore of its own disappearance:
only in the sense that difference is always on that shore as is disappearance itself and anything else one may care to name.
the people are always close to sinking into the sea of the population or of the race;
as Professors of shite subjects are always close to sinking into outright insanity
the proletariat is always on the verge of being confused with workers defending their interests;
unless they are letting Communist nutters fuck up their life-chances.
the space of a people's public demonstration is always prone to being confused with the merchant's agora and so on.
Very true! During Occupy Wall Street, lots of hipsters kept getting confused and setting up hedge funds.
The notion that politics can be deduced from a specific world of equals or free people, as opposed to a world of lived necessity, takes as its ground precisely the object of its litigation.
unless it takes as its object precisely the ground of its mitigation.
It thus necessarily confronts the blindness of those who 'do not see' that which has no place to be seen.
Only in the sense that confrontation necessitates the blindness of the topos of its own vanishing upon the shore of its mitigating litigation.
Exemplary, in this regard, is a passage from Arendt's On Revolution, in which she comments upon a text by John Adams, who identifies the unhappiness of the poor with the fact of 'not being seen'.
Adams was paraphrasing Adam Smith. But, as Sartre remarked, neither meant actual poor peeps. They meant a rich man who has fallen on bad times- even if all the beggar has known is bad times. The poor are always in company. They see each other magnified by propinquity and thus miss out on better targets for Tardean mimetics.
On the other hand there are plenty of nouveau riche tycoons who feel excluded by reason of their lack of breeding and cultural poverty and who become great art collectors and endowers of museums and so forth.
Such an identification, she remarks, could itself only issue from a man that belonged to a privileged community of equals.
Arendt wasn't American. The fact is Adams own countrymen felt that, like Smith, Adams's remark reflected his own relative poverty and lack of social polish. Neither felt they belonged to a 'community of equals'. Had they been better born, their superior talent would have had ampler scope from the outset.
Conversely, this is something that those comprising the categories in question could 'hardly understand'.
There was nothing to understand. Poor people don't complain that they all haven't won the lottery.
This assertion might seem surprising given its extraordinary deafness to the multiplicity of discourses and demonstrations made by the 'poor' concerning precisely their mode of visibility.
unless genuine deafness is involved and, what's more, death has supervened.
But this deafness has nothing accidental about it.
Indeed! Naughty people jizzed copiously in the ears of the dude in question and then all that jizz set like cement.
If forms a circle
jerk
with the act of qualifying as an original partition founding politics what is in fact the permanent object of litigation that constitutes politics.
as a circle jerk which has nothing to do with actual politics.
It forms a circle with the defining of homo laborans within a division of 'ways of life'.
But only smegheads define that shite
This circle is not specific to such-or-such a theoretician;
but specificity is the such-or-suchness of the self-constitution of its ipseity as theoretician as subject to the grounding of it own partition as the vanishing shore of its own scotomization.
it is the very circle of 'political philosophy' itself.
only in so far as ipseity is its own circularity of philosophy as a the foundation of the grounding of its own partition from the operator of its vanishing upon the shore of some shite or the other. Meanwhile, billions of factory workers, strapped to assembly lines, are being sodomized by giant dildoes due to equality is the dissensus of its own constitutive wanking.
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