Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 2
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Who Emerges in Conversation? An Abolitionist Interruption that Teaches [1] / Cathrine Ryther
AbstractI draw on Maurice Blanchot's distinction between dialogue and conversation in order to argue for reconsidering conversation as a distinct resource for encountering and attending to otherness rather than sameness. Using Blanchot's concepts as a guide, I compare the figures that emerge in a platonic dialogue with those that emerge in a conversation constructed from the work of two contemporary philosophers: Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Rancière. Allowing these philosophers to do most of the talking, I highlight the emergence in conversation of abolitionist figures with symbolic freedom, in contrast to the emergence in dialogue of substantive and symbolically ordered figures.
Keywords: Education, Philosophy, Dialogue, Conversation, Symbolic Freedom
Introduction<1> Both dialogue and conversation are important concepts within educational scholarship (e.g. Freire; Grumet; Pinar passim). Yet the distinction between these concepts is not always clear. While few would conflate Socratic dialogue with idle conversation, there is a tendency in English-language educational theory and philosophy to use dialogue and conversation as synonyms (cf. Zembylas; Burdick, Sandlin & Daspit; Coulter, Fenstermacher & Wiens; Smith; Laverty; Brooks; Lysaker & Furuness). When a distinction is made between the concepts of dialogue and conversation, the tendency is to frame the concepts in an implicit hierarchy. Conversation, in this framing, tends to be posed as more simplistic than dialogue [2]. Nicholas Burbules, for example, describes conversation as one of four ideal-types of dialogue (112-116) [3]. Dialogue is thus the broader concept, a specific type of which is conversation. Susan Gardner poses dialogue as being more rigorously on task than conversation, in which ideas are allowed to run their own course (110). Elizabeth Ellsworth frames conversation as being more simplistic and less theoretically informed than dialogue (49) [4]. Nel Noddings contrasts the mutuality of what she calls true dialogue aimed toward exploration or problem-solving, with the informality of ordinary conversation (287).
<2> In contrast to these ways of defining conversation and dialogue as either synonymous or hierarchical terms, in this article I draw on Maurice Blanchot's definitions in order to attend to the distinct figures that emerge in dialogue and in conversation. I argue that conversation, in contrast to dialogue, is a way of framing interaction that allows figures of otherness to emerge and to interrupt the obviousness of the symbolic context. Rather than leading to a sense of order, attention to conversation opens up possibilities for symbolic freedom. To make this argument, I first outline Blanchot's differentiation between dialogue and conversation. Then I introduce a classic dialogue from Plato's Theaetetus, which discusses the role of the philosopher vis-à-vis the practical man. As I read this section of the Theaetetus, two figures emerge in a naturally, or essentially, ordered relation with each other. These figures which emerge from the dialogue are abstract, and their ordered relation is a symbolic one. In contrast to these dialogical figures, I present an extended constructed conversation in the same setting, drawing on the work of two contemporary philosophers: Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Rancière [5]. In contrast to the platonic dialogue, in the setting of the conversation, the figures which emerge are neither essential nor symbolically ordered. Rather, these figures interrupt the ordering of the symbolic context in an abolitionist way, creating the possibility of (temporary) symbolic freedom.
Conversation beyond Dialogue<3> To reconsider conversation as neither synonymous with nor subordinate to dialogue, but rather as an existentially distinct concept, I turn to the work of Maurice Blanchot. In a group of essays on writing called "Plural Speech," Blanchot draws what I consider to be a fruitful distinction between conversation and dialogue, characterizing the concepts as two movements of experience which, while they must be held together, are quite different (64; cf. Smock 2-4). Dialogue is oriented toward unity, reciprocity, proximity and forward momentum. It involves a relation between two selves, two "I"s whose relation is oriented toward sameness (Blanchot 67, 81). Conversation, by contrast, involves an interrelation with a dissymmetrical other; it is the interruption that introduces the measure of irreducible strangeness between two interlocutors (71, 77). The irreducible strangeness that emerges in conversation represents an infinite interruption which joins interlocutors without bringing them together. As Blanchot puts it, "but why two? Why two instances of speech to say the same thing? --Because the one who says it is always the other" (ix). Rather than making being comprehensible, in other words, conversation involves the very interruption of being (63, 77) [6]. Conceptualized in this way, attending to conversation involves attending to interruptions of unity and sameness and considering what emerges in these interruptions.
<4> As Blanchot points out, the interruptions that characterize conversation are educative (57-8). Specifically, for Blanchot, these interruptions are "the one thing that can teach me what man is" (58). Attending to conversation, then, offers to teach us about what it means to be human while preserving the irreducible strangeness between human beings. To explore conversation in Blanchot's sense, beyond dialogue, might therefore be considered another resource for preserving the interval, the relational mystery, and the disturbance of otherness in educational thought (cf. Smock; Irigaray; Levinas) [7]. Preserving the otherness of the other matters because, as Sharon Todd discusses, learning from the other is quite different than learning about the other (LFO; see also Biesta). Specifically, learning from the other involves ruptures and disjunctions as well as connections (Todd, LFO 10) [8]. In the examples of a dialogue and a conversation that follow, the distinction between learning about and learning from is a fruitful way to consider how what it means to be human comes to be learned. Because dialogue is oriented toward unity and sameness it is possible to learn about the figures that emerge in dialogue, as their position in the symbolic is ordered and stable. The figures that emerge in conversation, on the other hand, emerge in an orientation toward interruption, an interruption which, I argue, disrupts the stable order of the symbolic and opens up the possibility for symbolic freedom. Because the order and stability of the symbolic context is interrupted, the figures that emerge in conversation are not figures to be learned about but to be learned from. Learning what it means to be human, in this sense, is not about learning a kind of content but about attending to the disruption that irreducible strangeness introduces. Before turning to these figures that can be learned from, however, I consider what can be learned about the figures that emerge in dialogue, using a particular example from Plato's Theaetetus.
Attending to Dialogue<5> In the Theaetetus, Plato addresses the question, "what is knowledge?" through a dialogue between Socrates, Theaetetus, and Theodorus (Burnyeat 2). While the thrust of the dialogue deals with this main question, without reaching a positive conclusion, approximately halfway through the speakers take a moment to consider the character of the philosopher (Levett 251; Burnyeat 35; Popper 322). This self-defined "digression," provides an illustrative example for considering what kinds of figures emerge from attending to dialogue (Plato, T 305 [177b]). In this digression in the dialogue, Socrates offers an anecdote about Thales, the founder of Greek natural philosophy, to elucidate the philosopher's way of existing in the world (Burnyeat 301). This is the story he tells:
they say Thales was studying the stars, Theodorus, and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him because, she said, he was wild to know about what was up in the sky but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet [9]. (Plato, T 301-2 [174a])
<6> The point of this amusing anecdote is to draw a distinction between the character of the philosopher and that of practical man [10]. In continuing his analysis of what sets the philosopher apart, Socrates refers back to the anecdote, generalizing outward in greater circles from the specific interaction between Thales and the Thracian servant-girl to all philosophers and all practical men [11]. In this process, these figures of the philosopher and practical man emerge with greater clarity. The practical man's wisdom is a false wisdom of rhetorical skill that knows nothing of truth—which is the philosopher's domain (Cornford, PTK 89; Plato, T 304-5 [176d]). In the first of these outward generalizations, the amusement the philosopher's practical inanity inflicts is extended to "all the common herd:"
whenever he is obliged in the law-court or elsewhere, to discuss the things that lie at his feet and before his eyes, he causes entertainment not only to Thracian servant-girls but to all the common herd, by tumbling into wells and every sort of difficulty through his lack of experience. His clumsiness is awful and gets him a reputation for fatuousness. (Plato, T 302 [174c])
<7> The life of the philosopher causes entertainment and amusement because it is a life incomprehensible to the common herd of practical men. Through the dialogue we learn about the life of the philosopher, a life marked by the leisure to converse until an argument is thoroughly reasoned through, by a lack of concern for practical issues such as how to make a meal or where to purchase wares, and above all by a quantity of freedom that does not exist in the life of the practical man: time to spare (Plato, T 299-304 [172cd, 173cd, 174d, 175de]). In contrast, what we learn about the practical man is quite different. When practical man is exposed to spare time—the time for reasoning and examining things themselves, or the essence of things, and not just practical questions about those things—the amusement is reversed.
Such a man, having no spare time, is bound to become quite as coarse and uncultivated as the stockfarmer...[Consider when he is asked] for an enquiry into kingship, and into human happiness and misery in general—what these two things are, and what, for a human being, is the proper method by which the one can be obtained and the other avoided. When it is an account of matters like all these that is demanded of our friend with the small, sharp, legal mind, the situation is reversed; his head swims as, suspended at such a height, he gazes down from his place among the clouds; disconcerted by the unusual experience, he knows not what to do next, and can only stammer when he speaks. And that causes great entertainment, not to Thracian servant-girls or any other uneducated persons—they do not see what is going on—but to all men who have not been brought up like slaves. (Plato, T 302-3 [174de, 175cd])
In this third excerpt from the dialogue, Socrates has turned the tables on the ridicule of Thales' impractical attentions. The dialogue teaches us that the philosopher's obliviousness to the practical matters of living is precisely what makes his life worthwhile, for it is only through the freedom offered by leisure and spare time that he is able to develop the ability and ease which allow him to perceive and engage with the larger questions of existence. This leisure time represents a defining characteristic of the philosopher—it gives stability and order to his symbolic figure and sets him apart from practical men. At the same time, in this third excerpt the specificity of Thales and the Thracian servant-girl, as well as the appearance of any aspect of the physical world, has disappeared. In the clouds there are no wells and no law-courts, nor anyone who sees those things. In their generalization and abstraction, the figures of the dialogue become ordered and stable symbolic figures, defined by their characteristics rather than challenging those characteristics.
<8> It is possible to read the dialogic digression in the Theaetetus on a number of levels. In one sense, it is a description of the difference between appearance, or doxa, and the truth of philosophy, and of what can and cannot be perceived from the gaze of each. For example, Thales cannot see that he should pay attention to the well, while practical man cannot see his way to essential truths; the man of the law-court can perceive only what will save his own skin, while only the philosopher can perceive the true reason for virtue. In another sense, the digression is also a recounting of a specific, relational interaction between Thales and the Thracian servant-girl, which enables a generalizing discourse about the different characters or natures of the philosopher and practical man [12]. Finally, the digression is also an allusion [13] to the entire argument of Plato's Republic, in which he discusses the proper order of the city and the Forms (or, to put it simply, the absolute essences) of its citizens [14]. In each of these readings, however, we learn about the figures that emerge in the dialogue: their characteristics, their essences, their advantages and limitations, and above all about the stable and symbolic relation between them.
Attending to ConversationBackground
<9> In contrast to the dialogue above, the "participants" in the constructed conversation to come, Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Rancière, approach the example of Thales and the Thracian servant-girl without an eye toward consensus or common ground, and their starting points are quite different [15]. Before turning to the conversation itself, and the figures that emerge in it, it therefore seems appropriate to address these different starting points and the contexts in which each of these thinkers make use of the anecdote.
<10> In the text in which he employs the anecdote, The Philosopher and his Poor, Rancière's interest lies in tracing the foundation of spheres of thought, and how these are segregated from spheres of appearance. He engages in this tracing by examining the exclusion from spheres of thought of those whose defined role is to have no spare time. He traces this recurring exclusion from Plato, through the activities of the workers' movement and the writings of Marx and Engels in the mid-1800s, to the French intellectual revival of Marxism in the second half of the twentieth century (PHP 220). The entirety of The Philosopher and His Poor alludes back to the exclusion of those with no spare time and to the order of the city designed by Plato, discussed especially in the Republic (and, as Cornford points out, the dialogic digression in the Theaetetus should be understood as a reference to those arguments in the Republic (PTK 89)). When Rancière recalls these platonic arguments by making specific reference to the anecdote, it is in the midst of a commentary on the shoemakers' insurrection in the 1840s, in which workers took the liberty of engaging in criticism, ideology, and the embrace of communism, much to the displeasure of Marx and Engels (PHP 83, 85). In taking up the anecdote, Rancière continues on his meditative theme of the archival history of actual persons (as opposed to a general history of the workers' movement), a theme that is also present elsewhere in his oeuvre (cf. "Good Times"; NL; IS; NH; OSP).
<11> Cavarero, for her part, takes up the anecdote in her monograph In Spite of Plato as part of her interest in tracing the foundation of philosophical logos in the erasure of the body and the sexual difference that is marked upon that body. She, like Rancière, is concerned with the segregation between spheres of thought and spheres of appearance, and how this segregation frames perceivability and sensibility in the world. At the same time, she is motivated by a concern for the erasure of those unique existents whose defined role is that they are elsewhere than the sphere of thought. She explores this being elsewhere (using a somewhat different translation of the Theaetetus than Rancière uses) by posing the question: why does the Thracian servant-girl laugh, what is the truth of her laughter? Cavarero then considers the servant-girl's place and time in order to offer a reading of the philosophical context of her laughter (ISP 7, 31).
<12> Because of the similar but divergent paths that Cavarero and Rancière take both to and from the story of Thales and the servant-girl, it is relevant to compare how they recount that story before setting them into conversation with one another.
<13> Rancière, in the thick of a description of the shoemaker's insurrection of the 1840s, applies the specific figure of Thales to make an abstract distinction. He writes,
the ideologue is not a person of leisure, the heavenly dreamer who falls into a well while looking up at the stars. He is someone who toils, a drudge who-like Proudhon [16], the modern Hippias: typographer, riverboat clerk, philologist, economist, and philosopher-tries painfully to raise scaffolding between the earth of work and the heaven of science. This backward fellow truly does not see that we are no longer living in the days of Thales, that truth no longer dwells in heaven. It is here on earth where it is only a matter of observing, but where no one sees. (Rancière, PHP 75)
<14> Cavarero, for her part, returns to the scene recounted in the Theaetetus and to the relational specificity of the interaction. In so doing, she makes sure to point out in a note that nothing tragic happened to Thales, he merely took an unexpected bath (ISP 123):
while looking up at the sky and scrutinizing the stars, Thales fell into a well. Then a quick and graceful maidservant [17] from Thrace laughed and told him that he was far too eager to find out about everything in the heavens, while the things around him, at his feet, were hidden from his eyes. (Cavarero, ISP 31, quoting Plato's Theaetetus [174a])
<15> The juxtaposition of Rancière's and Cavarero's two framings of the anecdote displays a common concern—the division of what and who can be sensed and perceived, and of what and who can sense and perceive. These divisions are what I, borrowing language from both Rancière and Cavarero, call the cutting up of appearances. As the conversation unfolds, however, it reveals a tension, a disjunction, regarding which aspects of the cutting up of appearances are of most concern. Via this disjunctive tension quite different figures emerge than those that appeared in the platonic dialogue above. As the conversation proceeds it becomes clear that these figures challenge their ordering in the symbolic context rather than accepting the stability of that ordering. This makes it difficult to learn about these figures, but not, for all that, to learn from them.
Conversing
Analyzing the Effects of the Dialogic Anecdote: Thought Separated from Life
<16> In the anecdote of Thales and the Thracian servant-girl, Cavarero reads the unfolding of a story about the history of philosophy. The story describes the splitting of the world into higher and lower realities based on the value given to truth as the ultimate goal of thought. It is not, however, solely the world that is split in this hierarchy. What it means to be human is also affected. Human beings are split in a hierarchy of thought (higher) and body (lower), and embodied life begins to be disavowed, sliding toward insignificance.
CAVARERO [18]: Truth is a 'higher reality' that supposedly distracts or pulls thought (or the thinker) away from the ordinary things of the world...Indeed, what the anecdote shows most clearly is this very distraction, this being pulled away. A kind of distraction, so to speak, that is intrinsically visible from two different perspectives: that of the Thracian maidservant who laughs at the philosopher, and that of the philosopher himself who pays no heed to her derision, holding theory as a higher value than the world of ordinary experience from which theory distracts or pulls him away. (32)
Up above, one finds the regular movement of the stars which know neither birth nor death but exist forever, and down below, a multitude of transient, individual experiences and evanescent forms. (34-5)
Humans are thus split into thought and body, truth and life, and the second term of the dichotomy is allowed to slide toward insignificance. The split sets up a trajectory that explicitly establishes philosophy's tendency to disavow reality. (38)
<17> For Cavarero, the initial division is one that splits reality into two. Thought aligns with truth and becomes distracted from its physical body and its mortal life, seeking to free itself from the real and temporal limits these impose. What thought seems to seek is not only distraction from the physical and lived world, but abstraction from that world. With his own terminology Rancière also observes the split, noting:
RANCIÈRE [19]: Science, in any case, can act only at a distance. (122)
Philosophy...reserved for itself this right to the luxury of appearances that command the privilege of thought. (203)
<18> The distance from which the man of thought seeks to act is located in the realm of truth. It is the distance named by philosophy, by science and by rational thought. This realm of truth represents philosophy's horizon. As man's thoughts pull away from the ordinary world and toward philosophy's horizon, man begins to distrust that ordinary world. Above all, in the time of Thales, what the man of thought begins to distrust are the facts—the deceptive, surface facts—told by bodies, feelings and his senses.
CAVARERO: Immediately, man named in this way [20] will indicate that his substance, the authentic foundation of his being, lies in his ability to think. 'Man is a rational animal,' Aristotle's famous definition proclaims. Bodies, feelings, and the deceptive senses supposedly belong elsewhere. At times, these are a troublesome burden, while at other times they provide clues to something that must be verified by thought. Yet they are always the clumsy, unreliable baggage that those incapable of investigating their true basis entrust to appearances. The realm of surfaces cannot perceive height or depth. Nor indeed can it perceive truth, which, unlike facts, is never tangible or superficial. (38)
RANCIÈRE: The horizon in philosophy is not simply the backdrop of science. It is also the paradoxical site where science and doxa redistribute their powers. (129)
CAVARERO: The crux of Plato's distinction lies in the claim that the realm of the 'things that are' is real and true, while the world of the things 'close at hand' is devalued as merely superficial appearance, pertaining to the deceptive experience of the senses. This distinction has brought about the philosophically tenacious dualism between being and appearance. More importantly, it has turned our sense of reality upside down, so that the world of the living becomes the phenomenal shell of a kind of truth that is removed from the realm of the senses and is accessible only to thought. (35)
RANCIÈRE: Let us then summarize. In the beginning, there was the following: philosophy defined itself in defining its other. The order of discourse delimited itself by tracing a circle that excluded from the right to think those who earned their living by the labor of their hands. (203)
<19> Pulling away from the ordinary world into the realm of thought, the domain of things that are, does not represent the mere division of tasks or roles between the man of thought and those who populate the physical world. It also represents a declaration of value, and of power. The cutting up of the world into two, into a world of rational thought (the world of philosophy, science, and the search for truth) and a world of bodies, feelings and deceptive senses (the world of appearances or doxa) involves determining a distribution of power between these worlds. That distribution does not split power into like quantities for each world. As Cavarero shares, it is the world of things beneath our feet—the world of the well, the world of the living—that is devalued. And, as both Cavarero and Rancière comment, this devaluation not only effects the sense of reality thought expresses; above all it also effects a sense of being, a way of perceiving human beings, that is contained in thought.
RANCIÈRE: Science teaches only one thing, not knowledge but a way of being. (120)
CAVARERO: The term reality is itself an effect of this dualistic schism. 'Reality' has no close equivalent in the Greek language. Based on the Latin word res, the term has eventually come to mean the same as the Greek ta onta, the being of the 'things that are,' which is precisely the name that Plato gives to pure ideas. (35)
The realm of true and solid knowledge (episteme) is deployed in opposition to appearance, doxa. This realm of knowledge is taken up with the kind of thought capable of contemplating the 'things that always are,' as Plato emblematically defines pure ideas, a realm that is in any case inhabited by external and disembodied essences. (43)
RANCIÈRE: The provocative power of Plato lies in the extraordinary frankness with which he expresses what future epistemologies and sociologies will try to obscure: that the order of the true can no more be grounded in a science of science than the social order can be grounded in the division of labor. ...At the juncture of the philosophical order and the social order only one lie may proceed, the noble lie of nature. (52)
I stumbled across the famous passage in Book II of The Republic where Plato speaks of the workers who have no time to do anything but work. . . . And there was a close correspondence between that structure and the fully elaborated symbolic structure that denied the worker access to the universal logos and, therefore, to the political. That is what I was trying to conceptualize in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, [21] but it also provided the main guidelines for my later research into how the ascription of any relationship with language is also the ascription of a type of being. (Rancière "Interview")
<20> Cavarero and Rancière are both describing the splitting point that cuts up appearances—that is, the point that defines and delimits reality—and ascribes a type of being. This splitting point occurs initially at the division of power between the philosopher's realm of thought and truth, and the doxic realm of the physical and lived world. Importantly, this splitting point also expresses itself as a relation of power [22] between the philosopher and those who are not included in the realm of thought. That power relation ascribes, to Plato's philosopher, exclusive access to determining the meaning of individual experience. As Rancière and Cavarero continue to converse, they begin to address what this means for the appearance and meaningfulness not just of philosophers, but of those who are not philosophers as well. It is not merely the practical lives of these non-philosophers that are affected, but also the way they are ordered and subordinated in the symbolic context. Their freedom, if they are indeed free, lies elsewhere.
Considering the "Natural" Division: Sensibility Interpreted, Bodies ErasedCAVARERO: Within the symbolic order of philosophy, women are either completely absent, or they appear as naive and ignorant persons just like our Thracian maidservant. (38)
Individual experiences...are appearances caught between birth and death, toiling to sustain the brief life of a dissolving moment. The meaning of these mere appearances lies elsewhere, and is accessible to those capable of transcending appearances without being misled by the deception of the surface of things. Their being is real, precisely because it lies elsewhere. (35)
<21> As Cavarero comments, once appearances have been cut up, the realm of thought must transcend the deception of individual experiences and determine what things truly mean. Rancière describes that this clear and exclusive role has been maintained long after the time of ancient Greece has passed. The philosopher's role is to give the truth of experience to those who occupy the realm of appearances, to those who therefore can only be misled by the surface of things. Rancière describes this interpretive role, first, in connection with the shoemakers' insurrection of the 1840s:
RANCIÈRE: The application of science can only be this: learning to interpret the work on the stage of revolution. There is no escaping from the theater [23]. (121)
<22> Then he describes the philosopher's shifting but continual role in connection with the revival of Marxist intellectualism in France during the latter half of the twentieth century.
RANCIÈRE: The coming philosophy will be the reason of doxa: the knowledge of the gap between science and representations...Our social knowledge is that, first of all: a thinking of the poor, an inventory of illegitimate modes of thinking, a science having for its object the thinking that has no time to be thought. A knowledge denouncing the vanity of philosophical leisure that is, at the same time, relegated to the ersatz function of philosophy [24]. (130-1)
<23> In defining this role for the philosopher, however, the occupiers of the realm of thought—already as Plato's Socrates recounts the tale of Thales falling into the well—need to engage in a naturalization of the division of power which allows them their interpretive role. The division of power and the distinct ascriptions of being between those who are and those who are not included in the realm of thought is merely an arbitrary logical creation. Shifting the division of reality and of being that was created by logic into a natural ascription of being maintains the distribution of power between these two worlds. Already in the comparison between the characters of the philosopher and practical man in the platonic dialogue, that naturalization occurs. On this point the language used by Rancière and Cavarero differs, but they see nearly eye to eye.
CAVARERO: The moment when pure thought reserves for itself the pronouncement of truth is also the moment that heralds and institutes the drastic distinction between the source of thought and the source of sensory experience...The proposition 'being is and not-being is not' is constructed by pure logic. It is then assumed as a true principle from which consequences can be consistently drawn. (42)
RANCIÈRE: Philosophy cannot justify itself as a post within the division of labor; if it did so, it would fall back into the democracy of trades. Hence it must exacerbate the argument from nature, giving it the shape of a prohibition marked on bodies...There simply are bodies that cannot accommodate philosophy—bodies marked and stigmatized by the servitude of the work for which they have been made. (32)
Philosophy is too concerned with its 'own business' ever to rethink the extent of the arbitrariness linking the distinctions of the order of discourse to the hierarchy of the 'businesses' assigned to each class. (165)
CAVARERO: It hardly matters if these consequences lead to a denial of the evidence of sensory experience. In fact, if the logic of pure, disembodied thought is the criterion of truth, whatever conflicts with this logic can only be false, which is to say 'apparent,' only in the sense of 'seeming' or unworthy of belief. (42)
RANCIÈRE: Here [25] Plato broadcasts what he does not allow himself to say elsewhere: manual labor is a servile labor...It is for the sake of the philosopher, not the city, that one must postulate a radical break between the order of leisure and the order of servile labor [26]. (32-3)
To put it another way, it is the dialectic itself that is continuous parasitism. (154)
CAVARERO: The servant is destined to daily toil. Her tired gesture seems to provide an exhaustive symbolic transposition of her destiny. But here it becomes the image of its eminently theoretical operation. This act of intelligence cuts itself off precisely from the everyday gestures of work. In a moment of revealing laughter, it illuminates the entire illusory substance of Western thought. Thus although the young Thracian woman is a slave, she is not a pathetic figure, she does not represent the passive docility of female oppression. She is a figure bursting with laughter, and her laughter serves as a frame for a few incisive words of wisdom. The things of the world are hidden from philosophical thought, where Thales begins the process of de-realization, of disavowing the reality of the world. (54)
<24> Cavarero and Rancière agree that the philosophical move which naturalizes the logical distinction between those who are and those who are not included in the realm of thought affects the perceived reality of the body, or the figure. Yet there is a subtle disjunction in the way in which each of them highlights this naturalization. For Rancière, the service of the laborer in justifying the position and leisure of the philosopher is naturalized by being marked on the bodies of the laborers. It is the body of the worker, the body which has no time to think, which both justifies and signals the hierarchical break between those with spare time to think and those who are defined as being without it. Cavarero points out that this naturalization is a denial and a separation of what she calls, "the wholeness of human experience" (ISP 42). What the body knows, what the body expresses, is neither thinking nor being but sensory experience. And this sensory experience is de-realized and disavowed in order to naturalize the division which prioritizes philosophical thought. In Cavarero's reading the naturalized division does not simply involve a lack of time in which to think but also lacks a body that thinks or contributes to thinking.
Cutting Up the Sensible World, Disputing the Stakes<25> As Cavarero begins to reread the laughter of the Thracian servant girl it is precisely the facts of her body which are brought into view. For Cavarero there is a loss, a de-realization, an erasure of the body (and, precisely, the body marked through birth by sexual difference) from the horizon of thought, while for Rancière there is an exclusion from the time for thought marked on the body destined for labor. As Rancière and Cavarero shift from a diagnosis of the cutting up of appearances to a re-reading of the images of possibility, the subtle disjuncture in their readings continues to emerge. While Cavarero holds onto a sense of the body's facticity, for Rancière, the body can be seen—its mark is indeed crucial—but its meaning lies already in the interpretation of its perception rather than in facticity.
CAVARERO: Soon the concept of man (anthropos)—named in the masculine singular but with a universal-neutral valence that is supposed to indicate humankind as a whole—will make its way into philosophical language. From there it will move into the everyday language that we still speak. (38)
RANCIÈRE: I wanted to highlight that the forms of the political were in the first place those of a certain division of the sensible. I understand by this phrase the cutting up [découpage] of the perceptual world that anticipates, through its sensible evidence, the distribution of shares and social parties. It is the interplay of these forms of sensible evidence that defines the way in which people do 'their own business' or not by defining the place and time of such 'business,' the relation between the personal [du propre] and the common, the private and the public, in which these are inscribed. And this redistribution itself presupposes a cutting up of what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard and what cannot, of what is noise and what is speech. (225)
<26> The division of the sensible is Rancière's name for the cutting up of appearances, and is especially relevant in his work—as he intimates above—because it is the link he identifies between aesthetics, as possibilities for perceiving the world, and politics, as the insertion of changes in those possibilities [27]. It is in this vein of the potential instability of the division of the sensible that Rancière's comments on exclusion demand to be understood. As Rancière continues to explain the origins of his concept of the division of the sensible, Cavarero expands upon her argument concerning the disavowal of reality. These diverging paths bring to a head the tension in their divergent interpretations of what is at stake.
RANCIÈRE: It was this that was at stake in The Philosopher and His Poor, the Platonic allocation transforming the work's 'absence of time' into the worker's very virtue. But this 'absence of time' was itself only a symbolic division of times and spaces. What Plato had excluded was the slack time and empty space separating the artisan from his purely productive and reproductive destination: the space/time of meetings in the agora or the assembly where the power of the 'people' is exerted, where the equality of anyone with anyone is affirmed...The admission or refusal of this emptiness defines two antagonistic divisions of the sensible. (225-6)
Appearance is not the illusion of masking the reality of reality, but the supplement that divides it. (224-5)
CAVARERO: This disavowal of reality penetrates everything, takes root, grows, and covers things up. Thus the world of life does not disappear but lies hidden. It is a forgotten presence that continues to seek signification in a true language that might encompass the basic experience of living within its own horizon. The world of life would no longer be considered the blind and meaningless realm of the empirical, the fallacious counterpart of the language of true ideas. For humans, the fact of life is always individual [28] and gendered, even though it is hidden by an abstract language that names man as neutral and universal. This fact is indeed basic. Life is always gendered, never otherwise. This remains true and is renewed at every birth, but its persistent concealment can render life hidden from abstract language, even though it cannot eliminate its presence. (55)
RANCIÈRE: The struggle for the right to speak freely is first and foremost a struggle for euphemization. (200)
CAVARERO: Indeed the Thracian servant is excluded from philosophical knowledge first and foremost as a woman, and only secondarily as a slave. She realizes that within the male order of knowledge she really is not, since there is no woman in the idea of man. The idea of man is said to be neutral and universal, without gender, be it masculine or feminine. If this is the case, in the world she holds onto as her truth, the Thracian servant does not know of any human born of woman who is not perceptibly, factually, and incontrovertibly male or female [29]. (54)
Possibilities for Other Figures to Emerge
<27> In this final section of the conversation, Rancière identifies the emergent possibility of alternative figures and alternative worlds, of
challenging the naturalized division of the sensible, as a struggle for euphemization. The struggle for euphemization is a problem of articulating another
expression that describes the world and what and whom it contains. The possibility of articulation comes about via the power of equality. Cavarero's
concern diverges from Rancière's somewhat. For her, the cutting up of worlds conceals life itself from the realm of thought. The female figure in
particular is not—she goes concealed and has become not just limited in her appearance but invisible. Yet the embodied fact of existence, here most clearly
available to the senses via the servant-girl's laughter, disrupts every effort to erase it. For Cavarero, it is these embodied facts of existence which
offer the emergent possibility of alternative figures who live in the world, and of challenging the naturalized division of the sensible which would render
some figures universal and others invisible. Restoring the meaning of life, and especially of birth, to these embodied facts resists every effort toward
maintaining the invisibility of living bodies. The embodied figures that thus emerge interrupt and
challenge their symbolic subordination, instead enacting a symbolic self-distinction—that is, enacting their symbolic freedom. This symbolic freedom is
temporary but it nonetheless involves interrupting what we might know about these figures, opening up the possibility to learn what it means to be
human from them.
CAVARERO: Female subjectivity denies the patriarchal order's claim to embody symbolic figures that supposedly give meaning to the entire human species, including the functional subspecies 'women.' Indeed, within the scope of female thought, sexual difference is a fact that marks humans from the outset, since one always enters the world as either man or woman...This implies denying central status to the male subject in his universalizing pretensions. (3)
RANCIÈRE: An idea that had been at the heart of The Philosopher and His Poor: the link between the power of equality and that of appearance. (224)
Equality is a presupposition, an initial axiom—or it is nothing. (223)
Equality is fundamental and absent, current and untimely...the transgressive appropriation of an intellectual equality whose privilege others had reserved for themselves. (223)
CAVARERO: My tactic has the explicit intention to steal by leaning on theoretical axes that have already sought to dislodge themselves from their context through a radical shift in perspective. (6)
RANCIÈRE: I...proposed to call 'politics' the mode of acting that perturbs this arrangement by instituting within its perceptual frames the contradictory theatre of its 'appearances.' The essence of politics is then dissensus...the production, within a determined, sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it. (226)
CAVARERO: Though limited to a role that the patriarchal order ascribes to her, the Thracian servant demonstrates with her laughter an unrestrained freedom. She also demonstrates the concrete fact that this world, just as it is, limits all men and women...Feminine realism is anchored in facts, restoring to facts the meaning they demand in a brief moment of laughter. These facts exist in a world that 'resists' every intellectual effort to erase it. (53-4)
RANCIÈRE: Politics...makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field...it makes audible what used to be inaudible. It inscribes one perceptual world within another. (226)
<28> In the final section of the conversation, above, Rancière and Cavarero discuss the possibility of emerging figures who might interrupt and challenge the stability of the symbolic order. Neither Rancière nor Cavarero define these figures, that is, the conversation does not offer to teach us about these figures. Indeed, to the extent that they are given characteristics, Rancière and Cavarero dispute the details of those characteristics. For Rancière, these figures are above all speaking beings—beings who offer an alternative articulation of what it means to be human. For Cavarero, on the other hand, these figures are above all embodied—these figures are born, are sexed, and the facts of their embodied existences resist subordination to a symbolic context that would erase them. In contrast to the earlier dialogical example, it is not, therefore, the characteristics of these figures about which the conversation offers to teach us. Those characteristics are unstable and lack consensus. These figures, in other words, do not tell us about what it means to be human in the sense of offering a model or a norm of humanity. Rather, the figures that emerge in conversation appear as abolitionist figures.
<29> Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault describe what it means to be abolitionist as follows: "concepts are abolitionist in the sense that they do not define the positive content of a norm, but express types of claims made against the current state of affairs" (52, emphasis in original). The figures which emerge in conversation are abolitionist in the sense that they resist being defined by—and defining—the positive content of a norm for what it means to be human. They make an alternate claim, a resistance against or a challenge to the way they are currently characterized. In other words, by enacting their symbolic freedom these figures do not emerge as an enactment of a generalizable what, rather they emerge from a location of resistance as an enactment of a singular who. However, and precisely because they do not emerge as generalizable "whats," these figures cannot be said to be mere concepts, but are in fact others from whose resistance we can learn what it means to be human. At the same time, the resistance and interruption these figures introduce to the stability of the symbolic order offers this teaching without destroying the possibility (which arises from the interruption of order, rather than from the sameness or maintenance of order) that one's own enactment of symbolic self-distinction might take an entirely different trajectory.
Concluding Discussion<30> In this article, I have argued that the value of rethinking conversation and distinguishing it from dialogue lies in the possibility that attending to conversation offers for tracing the emergence of, and learning from, abolitionist figures who enact their symbolic freedom. The figures which emerge in dialogue emerge from the unity and sameness within the discussion. Their appearance does not challenge the stability of the symbolic order. Instead, these figures emerge as ordered and as definable by the characteristics of what they are. By contrast, the figures which emerge in conversation emerge via interruptions of unity and sameness, and they challenge the stability of the symbolic context in order to enact their own self-distinction. This is not a substantive or normative self-distinction, but the enactment of a freedom from the symbolic characterization which up to now has defined them. The figures which emerge in conversation are, therefore, not figures to be learned about, but figures to be learned from. Learning what it means to be human, in this sense, is not about learning a kind of content but about attending to the disruptions which join interlocutors without bringing them together.
<31> Attending to what the conversation has to teach regarding what it means to be human, therefore, involves attending to abolitionist figures rather than to substantive figures. These abolitionist figures emerge without an obvious or natural order in the symbolic; instead, their freedom is a symbolic one, and the possibility that they might teach us lies in the promise of interrupting what we know about them in order to learn from them.
Notes[1] Some of the ideas in this article were presented in nascent form at the Women in Philosophy of Education conference, "Re-imagining Research: Whose Philosophy? Which Research?" in Limerick, Ireland, 4-5 October, 2013. I am grateful to all of the participants at that conference for their helpful and insightful critique. Todd May, Diane Perpich and Curtis Brewer also gave helpful critical feedback on an early version of the conversational text between Cavarero and Rancière. Any interpretive errors are, of course, my own.
[2] A notable exception to this tendency is Thompson & Gitlin, who draw a distinction between the relational quality of conversation and their reading of dialogue as individualizing.
[3] Burbules suggests there are types of conversation which are not dialogue, but does not expand this point. Rather, his discussion of conversation as a subtype of dialogue is explicitly linked to the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who, Burbules reminds us, frequently used the term conversation "to denote dialogue per se" (112).
[4] Interestingly, Ellsworth draws on Shoshana Felman's concept of analytic dialogue—as distinct from communicative dialogue—in a way that resonates somewhat with how I use conversation here (115-38).
[5] For a discussion of how I constructed this conversation, see Ryther ("Other"). See also Ryther (EUR).
[6] According to Blanchot, in between dialogue and conversation lies the arrest-interval, or the pauses and ruptures that give meaning and enable dialogue by allowing for turn-taking (76-77). The interruption characterizing the arrest-interval enables coherence and understanding, while the infinite interruption of conversation does not do so (63, 77). Blanchot notes that conversation is not necessarily marked by silence or a gap, but also by changes in language which cease to move toward unity with an other or the self (77).
[7] Gary Peters discusses some implications for pedagogy of Blanchot's ideas, and compares these implications to those that emerge from the work of Levinas and Husserl.
[8] Indeed, Todd herself has recently turned to the concept of conversation, although she discusses the concept somewhat differently than I do here ("Creating").
[9] Blumenberg links the story of Thales to Aesop's fable of the Astronomer (or the Astrologer, depending on the translator's rendering), making connections between the consequences befalling the astronomer and the fate of Socrates (13-4). Aesop and Thales were contemporaries in Ancient Greece, both living from the late-7th Century to the mid-6th Century B.C., so this linkage is plausible. However, since the participants in the constructed conversation to come, Rancière and Cavarero, both refer specifically to Thales gazing at the heavens, in line with Plato's retelling (and since Aesop's stargazer is anonymous as per the form of fables), I have chosen to connect this conversation with Plato's retelling of the story. Readers interested in Aesop's version, which is not one of his more commonly reproduced fables, can find a translation that is similar to the anecdote in Jones's translation of Aesop's Fables (148), and one that is somewhat less similar in L'Estrange (159).
[10] In Francis Cornford's interpretation, the comparison between the character of the philosopher and the character of practical man is a minor contrast and the primary issue should be understood as the drawing of a distinction between the philosopher and the rhetorician (PTK 88-9). Cornford's interpretation may well be correct in regard to the digression taken as a whole, and Socrates' introduction of the digression as "comparing the up-bringing of a slave with that of a free man," can be read as deriding the rhetorician's character as marked by the extreme ignorance of the slave (Plato, T 300 [172d]; Cavarero, ISP 33). It is however important to note, especially as this conversation focuses on the anecdotal interaction between Thales and the servant-girl from Thrace, that the servant-girl's life was not that of a rhetorician. While the rhetorician's character may be like a slave to Socrates, the life and livelihood of the slave cannot be compared the other way and said to be like that of the rhetorician. I have therefore chosen in the main to read these passages somewhat more openly, and through the contrast drawn by Myles Burnyeat, as that between the life of the philosopher and that of the worldly or practical man (34). It should also be noted that Socrates' interpretive intention in drawing the distinction between the philosopher and the practical man remains a point of philosophical debate.
[11] Plato's Socrates distinguishes between leading philosophers and "second-rate specimens" (T 301 [173c]). Therefore his generalization can be understood to be limited to those who excel in the study of philosophy. This delimitation does not seem to correspond to any on the side of practical man, however, all of whom, to Socrates' mind, have "been brought up like slaves" (303 [175d]).
[12] Or, for Cornford, between the philosopher and the rhetorician (PTK 88-9).
[13] Cornford writes that the digression is "intended to recall the whole argument of the Republic, with its doctrine of the divine, intelligible region of Forms, the true objects of knowledge. This is no mere digression; it indicates—what cannot be directly stated—the final cleavage between Platonism and the extreme consequences of the [relativistic] Protagorean thesis" (PTK 89; cf. Burnyeat 28). Interestingly, Popper indicates that an earlier version of the Theaetetus may have been written prior to the Republic (321-2). Thus, rather than recalling that argument the Theaetetus may represent an earlier version, then refined and expanded in the Republic.
[14] See especially Cornford (RP xxix, 179-89).
[15] I have put "participants" in scare quotes because I have constructed this conversation between Rancière and Cavarero, drawing on excerpts from their published work. To my knowledge, the people Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Rancière have not gotten together to discuss Thales and the Thracian servant-girl—and if they have, we might expect that their spoken discussion was a bit less formal than the conversational juxtaposition of their written work that I present here.
[16] For more on Proudhon, see Rancière's The Nights of Labor.
[17] Cavarero uses the term "maidservant" throughout her discussion of the digression. As the translation of Theaetetus I have used to discuss the dialogue of the digression referred to the unnamed young woman in question as "servant-girl," and since I see no substantive difference between the terms girl and maiden, I have erred on the side of consistency and employ the term "servant-girl" where not directly quoting Cavarero.
[18] All Cavarero quotations in this conversation, unless otherwise specified, are from ISP. All emphases in original.
[19] All Rancière quotations in this conversation, unless otherwise specified, are from PHP. All emphases in original.
[20] Cavarero is referring to "man" as a masculine singular name that also has the abstracted character of a "universal-neutral valence that is supposed to indicate humankind as a whole," and the function of this name in both philosophical language and the vernacular (ISP 38, 51). In other words, Cavarero is referring to man, in language, as having successfully removed himself from the limits of his singular body (and that body's mark of sexual difference) to an apparently universal position.
[21] This is the original French title of The Philosopher and His Poor, the main text informing Rancière's side of the conversation. This comment can be understood as meta-commentary regarding Rancière's scholarly trajectory in relation to the themes of the conversation.
[22] It is important to note here that this relation of power does not mean that Rancière subscribes to the idea that "everything is political." In an important passage he clarifies, "if everything is political, then nothing is. So while it is important to show, as Michel Foucault has done magnificently, that the police order extends well beyond its specialized institutions and techniques, it is equally important to say that nothing is political in itself merely because power relationships are at work in it" (D 32). Rancière's definition of politics is actually quite limited, and always involves the interruption of the inegalitarian logic of society with the logic of equality.
[23] The shift Rancière indicates here is Marx's inversion of the hierarchy between the horizon of thought and the horizon of appearances (PHP xxvii). This inversion prioritizes the doxic horizon, but does not dissolve the distinction between those who have time to think and those who do not. However, it does highlight what seems to be Rancière's truth: that everything is a matter of a division of appearances—there is no escaping the theater (214, 216).
[24] Here, Rancière is referring specifically to Jean-Paul Sartre, but evoking more generally the intellectual attitude of the period. Another of his specific targets with this critique is the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
[25] The "here" Rancière is referring to is Plato's Republic, VI 495de, where Plato compares those who are unsuited for philosophy but seek to pursue it, to the newly solvent bald-headed tinker who sets off to court his master's daughter. Plato writes, "for philosophy, abused as it is, still retains a far higher reputation than other occupations, a reputation which these stunted natures covet, their minds being as cramped and crushed by their mechanical lives as their bodies are deformed by manual trades" (R 291). It should be noted that in her comments, Cavarero is not referring to the Republic but rather commenting on the work of Parmenides and Plato's relation to that work. For Rancière's corresponding comments on Parmenides, see his critique of Bourdieu's sociology, in PHP (165-202, especially 176).
[26] In a critique of the political trajectory implied by Althusser's theory of ideology, Rancière states this point (about the purpose of naturalizing an arbitrary division of the sensible) even more forcefully, in relation to the justification of class domination: "It is precisely this contradiction which gives philosophy its status: philosophy is constructed against the power of the false possessors of knowledge, or, more accurately, of the possessors of false knowledge (sophists, theologians, etc.)...Against the object of false knowledge, it invokes the subject of true knowledge; which, in the final analysis, strengthens the grounds for dominance of those possessing (true) knowledge, and thereby justifies class domination. This passage from the object of false knowledge to the subject of true knowledge would consequently correspond to the political demand of a class excluded from power, lending this demand the form of universality. (The Cartesian 'good sense'.) This movement has ultimately no other end than to bolster the privileged position of the possessors of knowledge—a form of class domination" ("Althusser's Politics" 121-2).
[27] The division of the sensible (partage du sensible) is a recurring concept in Rancière's writing. As Davide Panagia notes, it can be, and has been, translated into English in both the sense of "division" and the sense of "partition" (95). Gabriel Rockhill has also translated the term as "distribution" (passim). The importance of the French partage is that it indicates both the actions of splitting up and of sharing. Because John Drury, the translator of the quote in which the terms appear above, has chosen to translate Rancière's term as "division," I have followed suit in this discussion. I refer the reader who wants to know more to Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics, as well as the linked texts The Future of the Image and The Emancipated Spectator.
[28] Though the translators have employed the term "individual" here, Cavarero is actually engaged in a critique of the Western, masculine concept of the individual. What she is indicating is rather that each human person is singular and unique. The term she employs in Italian is intero singolare, which her translators describe as follows: "the individual is a whole (intero) of mind and body, whose existence is temporary. S/he is a unique and unrepeatable (singolare) moment of being in the larger, ever-changing collective life" (Anderlini-D'Onofrio & O'Healy xxi).
[29] The reader may react to the cis-ness of this statement, and the argument can be made that Cavarero does not take the cis-ness of her perspective into account. As she notes elsewhere, she understands sexual difference as a corporeal given, "a banality, because this is not just confirmed by biology, medicine, and anthropology, but it is also evident when a baby is born; one can see immediately if it is a boy or a girl, with the exception of rare cases" (Cavarero & Bertolino 144). On the other hand, it is important to interpret the binary discussion of sex or gender in relation to the symbolic context Cavarero contests via her concept of uniqueness. In this interpretation, uniqueness can be read not as overlooking non-cis experiences per se but instead as focusing on the level of the symbolic context, in which the two genders of male and female still hold dominant sway (cf. "Towards").
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