Distribution of the Sensible (by Robert Porter)

The Future of the Image
Jacques Rancière
Translated by Gregory Elliott
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 107 6
Verso, 2007

Jacques Rancière emerged on the intellectual scene in the early 1960s as part of a group of ‘young Althusserians’ (Balibar, Macherey, Establet being the others) who contributed to Lire le Capital which, along with Althusser’s hugely influential Pour Marx, fundamentally shaped the field of ‘structuralist Marxism’. However, Rancière began to distance himself from Althusser when he published La Lecon d’Althusser in the mid 1970s. Inevitably, perhaps, the Althusserian distinction between science and ideology came under Rancière’s attack, implying as it did a will to master the ‘masses’, a will to scientistically know how and why the masses are caught in the grip of ideological misrecognition, a will to speak on their behalf, to know the truth about them. Rancière’s violent reaction to this tendency in Althusserianism springs from his long-standing commitment to the idea that the emergence of politics, or what he would call modes of ‘political subjectivization’, occurs when people begin to speak on their own behalf, and in speaking on their own behalf, assume the right to occupy public space, a public space whose co-ordinates immediately shift to take account of these new voices.[1]

The rest is here – VARIANT: Cross Currents In Culture (Issue 30, Winter 2007)