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January 2, 2008
For Jacques Rancière consensus interferes with the “political.” The political is “the field for the encounter between emancipation and policy in the handling of a wrong.” In other words, the political, democracy as such, is the theater by which the demos (the unaccounted for minority) intervenes in a localized attempt at consensus in order to question the “givens of a particular situation, of what is seen and what might be said, on the question of who is qualified to see or say what is given.” In other words, democracy is political dissensus as “positive contradiction.”
Being political" is contrasted with "the police order", which is described as:
... the structured embodiment of a society where everything has its place. The police order is the government or process of governance that prescribes our reality or our sensibility – in relation to the underlying norms that define what is allowed or not allowed, available or unavailable in a given situation – in the realm of perception itself. Almost like a code of conduct. There is therefore an underlying division that dictates what can and cannot be said, shown, or done. This creates permanent sets of norms which in turn establish a community that decides who is included or excluded, whose words are significant or insignificant, who is entitled to govern others and who is not.
It regulates the destabilizing potential of the political. It refers to politics in the conventional sense — which would include both political institutions (eg., parliament,) and the ways in which policy decisions are made by institutions like the High Court and the Reserve Bank — operates within the parameters of an already-given, socially sanctioned distribution of the sensible.
Political dissensus is allowing:
those whose voices are only perceived as background noise to receive genuine attention.They are the excluded. They must be perceived as speaking beings, instead of regarded as "animals". This will take place when those who are not included, those who are not allowed to participate in decision-making – the proletariat, women, non-whites, immigrants, refugees – break into the police order's "consensual" system and impose themselves as visible and speaking.
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