LA NUIT DES PROLÉTAIRES: ARCHIVES DU RÊVE OUVRIER [Paperback]

The Nights of Labor Revisited
Jacques Ranciere

Preface to the Hindi edition of The Nights of Labor:
the workers' dream in 19th century France. Trans. Abhay
Dube. English Trans. Rana Dasgupta . To be published by
Sarai

The Indian reader who opens this book in 2009 will no
doubt think it is a strange thing. How can these
stories of nineteenth-century French lockmakers,
tailors, cobblers and typesetters be relevant to the
information revolution, the reign of immaterial
production or the global market? This question, it
should be said, was already present for the French
reader who opened this book twenty-seven years ago. We
did not speak yet of globalization, nor of the end of
the proletariat, of history or of utopia. Quite the
contrary: France had recently elected a combined
socialist and communist government, which proudly laid
claim to the traditions of Marxism and of working class
politics. And it is in this context that the book
seemed to run counter to its own time, and became
difficult to classify. The author was a professional
philosopher who had struck his first blows, in the
1960s, by participating in the theoretical enterprise
of Louis Althusser, who wished to rebuild Marxist
theory. Now, instead of offering philosophical theses,
he was telling stories about the French working class
of the nineteenth century. And he offered nothing by
way of Marxism - no analysis of the forms of industrial
production, of capitalist exploitation, of social
theories or of class struggles or worker movements. His
workers, moreover, were not "real" workers; they were
artisans from olden times, dreamers who dabbled in
poetry and philosophy, who got together in the evening
to found ephemeral newspapers, who became intoxicated
by socialist and communist utopias but for the most
part avoided doing anything about them. And the book
seemed to lose itself in the aimless wanderings of
these people, following the dreams of one, or the
little stories others recounted in their diaries; the
letters they wrote about their Sunday walks in the
Paris suburbs, or the everyday concerns of those who
had left for the United States to try out their dream
of fraternal communalism. What on earth were readers to
do with these stories in 1980?

The question is not, therefore, one of geographical or
temporal distance. This book may seem untimely in an
era that proclaims the disappearance of the
proletariat, but it also seemed so in the previous era,
which claimed to represent the class that had been
united by the condition of the factory and the science
of capitalist production. Let me put it simply: this
book is out of place in a postmodern vision for the
same reasons that it was already out of place in a
classical modernist vision. It runs counter to the
belief, shared by modernism and postmodernism alike, in
a straight line of history where cracks in the path of
time are thought to be the work of time itself - the
outcome of a global temporal process that both creates
and destroys forms of life, consciousness and action.
This book rejects this because, despite its apparent
objectivity, such an idea of time always places a
hierarchy upon beings and objects. The belief in
historical evolution, said Walter Benjamin, legitimizes
the victors. For me, this belief legitimizes the
knowledge that decrees what is important and what is
not, what makes or does not make history. It is thus
that the social sciences have declared that these
little stories of workers taking an afternoon walk, or
straying far from the solid realities of the factory
and the organized struggle, have no historical
importance. In doing so they confirm the social order,
which has always been built on the simple idea that the
vocation of workers is to work - and to struggle - good
progressive souls add - and that they have no time to
lose in wandering, writing or thinking.

This book turns this idea of time on its head. In the
grand modernist narratives of the development of
productive forces and of forms of class consciousness,
this book sees a way of diverting the intimate energy
of the very struggles they claim to represent, and
re-attributing it to the order of time that was
struggled against. It sees such narratives as a way of
reinforcing the power of those who believe they have a
masterful, external perspective on the history in which
they declare everyone else to be collectively
imprisoned. This idea of imprisonment, and this
position of mastery, had found their radical form in
the project of Louis Althusser that I had participated
in. For this project, the agents of capitalist
production were necessarily caught in the ideological
traps produced by the system that held them in their
place. That is to say that our project itself trapped
them in a perfect circle: it explained that the
dominated were kept in their place by ignorance of the
laws of domination. But it also explained that the
place they were in prevented them from knowing the laws
of domination. So they were dominated because they did
not understand, and they did not understand because
they were dominated. This meant that all the efforts
they made to struggle against their domination were
blind, trapped in the dominant ideology, and only
intellectuals, who were capable of perceiving the logic
of the circle, could pull them out of their subjection.

In the France of 1968 it became abundantly clear that
the circle of domination was held in place in fact by
this so-called science. It became clear that subjection
and revolution had no other cause than themselves and
that the science that pretended to explain subjection
and inspire revolution was in fact a part of the
dominant order. It is with this lesson in mind that I
undertook in the 1970s the long period of research in
the labor archives that culminated in this book. On the
way, many surprises awaited me. I set out to find
primitive revolutionary manifestos, but what I found
was texts which demanded in refined language that
workers be considered as equals and their arguments
responded to with proper arguments. I went to consult
the archives of a carpenter in order to find out about
more about the conditions of labor; I first came upon a
correspondence from the 1830s where this worker told a
friend about a Sunday in May when he had gone out with
two friends to enjoy the sunrise over the village,
spend the day discussing metaphysics in an inn, and end
it trying to convert the diners at the next table to
their humanitarian social vision. Then I read documents
in which this same worker described an entire vision of
life, an unusual counter-economy which sought ways to
reduce the worker's consumption of everyday goods so
that he would be more independent of the market
economy, and better able to fight against it. Through
these texts, and many others, I realized that workers
had never needed others to explain the secrets of
domination to them, and that the problem they faced was
having to submit themselves, intellectually and
materially, to the forms by which it inscribed itself
on their bodies, and imposed upon them gestures, modes
of perception, attitudes and language. "Be realistic:
demand the impossible!" the protestors cried in 1968.
But for these workers in 1830, it was not about
demanding the impossible but making it happen
themselves: of appropriating the time they did not
have, either by spying opportunities in the working day
or by giving up their own night of rest to discuss or
to write, to compose verses or to work out
philosophies. These hard-won bonuses of time and
liberty were not marginal phenomena, they were not
diversions from the building of the worker movement and
its great ideals. They were a revolution, discreet but
radical nonetheless, and they made those other things
possible. They comprised the work by which men and
women tore themselves away from an identity forged for
them by a system of domination and affirmed themselves
as independent inhabitants of a common world, capable
of all the refinements and self-denials that previously
had been associated only with those classes that were
released from the daily concern of work and food.

It is the necessity of acknowledging this revolution
which gives to this book its unusual form. The book
plunges us directly into workers' words, in all their
forms - from personal confidences and everyday
anecdotes to fiction composed in diaries to
philosophical speculations and programs for the future.
It does not seek to impose any differences in status,
any hierarchy between description, fiction or argument.
This does not arise from some fetishistic passion for
the lived. This is generally the excuse for a division
of roles in which the people are made to speak in order
to prove that they do indeed speak the language of the
people, which allows the poor to have the experience of
the real and the flavour of the everyday in order to
better reserve for itself the privilege of creative
imagination and analytical language. It is precisely
this division between the language of the people and
literary language, between the real and fiction,
between the document and the argument that these
"popular" texts call into question. We will never know
if their memories of childhood, their descriptions of
the working day or their accounts of their encounters
with language are authentic. A narrative is never a
simple account of facts. It is a way of constructing -
or deconstructing - a lived world. The learned
philosopher and the child of the people go about it in
the same way. In the third book of Plato's Republic,
Socrates asks his interlocutors to accept an unlikely
story: if some people are philosophers and legislators
while others are workers, it is because the gods mixed
gold into the souls of the first group and iron into
the souls of the second. This outlandish tale is
necessary in order to give consistency to a world in
which differences in condition must be accepted as
differences in nature. The worker narratives presented
here are like counter-myths, narratives that blur these
differences in nature.

This is why it was so important to me to unravel the
mesh of words, in which narrative, dreams, fiction and
argument are all part of the same enterprise, in order
to upset the order of things that puts individuals,
classes and forms of speech in their place. There is no
popular intelligence occupied by practical things, nor
a learned intelligence devoted to abstract thought.
There is not one intelligence devoted to the real and
another devoted to fiction. It is always the same
intelligence. This is the message proclaimed in the
same historical period by Joseph Jacotot, a teacher who
broke with all tradition. While his contemporaries
wanted to give the people just the instruction that was
necessary and sufficient for them to adequately occupy
their place in society, he called them to free
themselves intellectually in order to demonstrate the
equality of all intelligences (1).

In the very diversity of their expression, the workers
whose stories are told in this book demonstrate
precisely this equality. In order to show the
subversive power of their work I needed to break with
the conventions of the social sciences for which these
personal narratives, fictional writings and essays are
no more than the confused expression of a social
process which only they can know. I needed to remove
the conventional labels from these texts ? of
testimony, or symptoms of a social reality ? and to
exhibit them as writing and thought that worked towards
the construction of an alternative social world. That
is why this book renounces the distance of explanation.
It attempts instead to weave a sensory fabric of these
texts so that their radical energy may resonate again
in our own time, and threaten the order which gives
categories to times and forms of speech. And this is
the reason why our severe theorists and historians
decided that this book was literature. The issue for me
was to recall that the arguments of philosophers and
intellectuals are made of the same common fabric of
language and thought as the creations of writers and
these proletarian narratives.

This is also why I am not afraid that this book will
suffer too much from distances of time, place and
language. For it does not simply tell the story of the
working class of a far-off time and place. It tells a
form of experience which is not so far away from our
own. Contemporary forms of capitalism, the explosion of
the labor market, the new precariousness of labor and
the destruction of systems of social solidarity, all
create forms of life and experiences of work that are
possibly closer to those of these artisans than to the
universe of hi-tech workers and the global bourgeoisie
given over to the frenetic consumption described by so
many contemporary sociologists and philosophers. In our
world, just as in theirs, the challenge is to obstruct
and subvert the order of time imposed by a system of
domination. To oppose the government of capitalist and
state elites and their experts with an intelligence
that comes from everyone and anyone.

It remains for me to offer my warmest thanks to the
editors and translators who have made it possible for
the voices of these anonymous people, forgotten for so
long, to speak in an Indian language, and so to
encounter new voices with which they may mix and extend
their appeal.

Jacques Ranciere

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  5.0 out of 5 stars