Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Rancière in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Rancière’s Sentiments is not an introduction to Rancière’s oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced.
Rancière, as Panagia points out, is a scholar of democracy at odds with most democratic theorists. He does not explicate what procedural safeguards must be in place to protect impartial governance, nor does he postulate what norms are most conducive to democratic practice, nor does he argue for deliberation as the groundwork for fair decision making. In Panagia’s reading, Rancière considers these standard democratic claims antidemocratic. They already delimit who can participate in politics, what the terms of participation must look like, and which norms should govern political practice. Each is a tactic of exclusion that wields power through common sensibilities and criteria for proper judgment. The faculty of judgment plays a particularly antidemocratic function for Panagia. Judgment, as the basis of political participation, and as a common standard by which to critique political decisions, already filters out persons, sensations, and values that do not fit into predetermined processes of political practice. For Panagia’s Rancière, democracy is incommensurate with common standards, indeed with the very act of judging as a grounding practice. Instead, these acts are “the police”: iterations of power that stabilize norms, make political power flow efficiently, and patrol the boundaries for who and what counts. In an ironic twist, this book could have easily been called Critique of Judgment.
Democracy, in Rancière’s Sentiments, involves the partaking in activities in which one does not belong, in which people and histories that do not count are made to count. Rather than making people count by fitting them into preestablished criteria, however, the counting of democracy entails acting without qualifying for participation, and engaging in solidaristic and sensorial practices with others who also do not count. Counting does not require counting people to make a majority—a standard democratic trope—but instead involves making collectives matter, people who become part of political activity without necessarily sharing common values that predicate their action. Democracy, for Rancière and Panagia, is an “emergent collective formation that arises from the active participation of individuals and groups unauthorized to partake in these same activities that constitute their collectivity” (p. 2). This practice is what Rancière terms “dissensus,” which Panagia describes as participation in a common action that does not presuppose an in-common, where being “no part” of a sanctioned act or space is the very condition of political possibility. Rather than a judgment, dissensus is an action without purposiveness as defined by common standards of intent and intelligibility that leave out so many who appear illegible as political actors.
What makes Panagia’s work particularly original is his refusal to silo politics from aesthetics when examining Rancière. Often, political theorists who engage Rancière’s work focus more on his explicitly political arguments, while scholars in the arts focus more on his aesthetic sentiments, and thus separate his aesthetics—partition them, if you will—from works like Dissensus. Panagia, by contrast, insists that these aspects of Rancière’s work are indissociable, that politics is aesthetics, not because it involves valuations of beauty and taste—far from it. It is because both involve sensorial processes that entail “the capacity to arrange relations, and therefore worlds, anew regardless of one’s assigned ways of being and doing” (p. 3) Aesthetics and politics are not about making judgments, but about perceptual processes that determine what things are sensible and perceptible. Both regulate what objects, persons, and ideas are worthy of representation. Consequently, each chapter of the book is organized by a set of political-aesthetic styles central to Rancière’s sensorial practices of democracy.
Chapter 1 engages partager, the rendering sensible of things previously excluded from intelligibility. Chapter 2 examines what Panagia calls “police poetics,” a focus on the poetic sensibilities that disrupt demands of decorum. Chapter 3 examines Rancière’s writing as style indirect libre, impersonal writing that “democratize[s] prose by making it so that no one stature, status, qualification or intelligence is necessary for accessing the work” (p. 80). Chapter 4 examines “democratic realism,” in which indistinction and disinterest as stylistic tropes blur lines of social order to support the commingling of all things in a leisurely, observational style. The democratic work across all styles entails “the vitality of a nonsovereign collective agency beyond the idea of a coordination of wills” (p. 15). They articulate solidarity by undoing structures of representation and perception, challenging organizational and perceptual emplotments of history, people, and ideas. They involve the making contingent of hierarchies and forms of knowledge previously considered the unquestioned groundwork of political action.
In Panagia’s interpretation, Rancière’s work constantly critiques normativity, legibility, sensibility, and legitimacy as always already antidemocratic. Democracy seems irreconcilable with legibility or even with the continuity of any configuration of power. It thus can never take shape through institutions or juridical forms, even if they are shared and steered equally among all people. However, if norms, parties, and determinations of legitimate power are always a practice of the police, what is the ground for governing outside irruptive acts and sensibilities? Collective governance needs organization, power, and sustained practices of equality.
I agree with the claim that every judgment is a partition, and every legitimation entails exclusion of other ways of exercising power, but it is hard to envision how collective governance with staying power could exist without those practices, however contestable and revisable they are. Panagia might suggest that my concern is too trapped in the views that Rancière critiques. But what do we make of unauthorized speech if politics is ultimately about form not content, style not substance, disorientation not reorientation? I also worry about the timeliness of Rancière’s effort to overturn hierarchies not merely of expertise but also of intellect. They certainly often support antidemocratic exclusions of people deemed inexpert or unknowledgeable about public issues. Yet this critique might also inadvertently support a noxious trend of American anti-intellectualism whereby any knowledge of a topic is immediately suspect, and ignorance is the highest form of political capital—a trend that powers both climate denial and the authoritarian presidency of Donald Trump.
Nonetheless, Panagia’s masterful interpretation of Rancière forces all theorists of democracy — all those who care about fundamental questions of equality and participation, of how to collectively determine the conditions that govern our lives—to evaluate anew what we think we know about democratic practice and its sensorial registers. By interpreting democracy as disrupting the very conditions by which understanding comes into being, an understanding no longer agreed upon or presupposed as a value in and of itself, Panagia’s Rancière instigates new ways of imagining and feeling an equal and active political scene. In this sense, its emphasis on the democratic possibility of sentiments, participation, irruptive power, and the politics of style could not come at a better time.
