Rethinking the ordinary and the extraordinary: Reading Rancière’s dissensual politics through Kuhn

Abstract

Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of the political has been particularly influential in investigating political struggles and social movements. By distinguishing between the police order – tasked with maintaining the dominant (hierarchical) system – and politics – aiming at breaking that system – Rancière suggests reading the political as a disruptive event. However, he does not specifically engage with the question of how politics affects and changes the police order. This is what this article aims at exploring. Building upon Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I suggest approaching the police order in the same way Kuhn approaches ‘normal science’ and reading the political in the same way Kuhn reads revolutionary science. I ultimately suggest that Rancière’s theorisation of the political is limited because he does not (sufficiently) account for the interplay between police/politics nor for the emergence of an after-politics, that is, a new (ordinary) police order that emerges out of (extraordinary) political events.

Rupture and Response—Rorty, Cavell, and Rancière on the Role of the Poetic Powers of Democratic Citizens in Overcoming Injustices and Oppression

“…This emphasis may then also point towards a shortcoming in radical democratic thought, namely that the latter has a hard time explaining the transition from disruptive moments of staging new demands to the uptake of these demands in a reworked order that allows for these demands to take effect. As concerns Rancière, he has surprisingly little to say about the process of how rapturous moments can be taken up by a transformed social and political order-that is, he has a lot to say about processes of disidentification with hegemonic orders through disruption and insurgent uprisings, but he has little to say about the process of reconfiguration of such orders, through which the actuality of being heard and seen can become established [56][57][58]. Rorty and Cavell, in turn, do, since they both address their democratic concerns to the Thorvalds in us who occupy privileged positions in the existing social and political order.…”