Rancière´s archives: the aesthetes-workers of the nineteenth century and the issue of emancipation in human formation

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the relation between the path Jacques Rancière builds up through the workers’ archives from the nineteenth century in France and the following conceptualization of emancipation. From aesthetic “narratives”, from a storytelling of lonely words and impossible identifications with conscious principles of the great proletarian collective discourse this paper intends to show how the sense of emancipation changes: from social collectivity to intellectual individuality. Question of method it will say Rancière. It´s on the attempt to think about the importance of the archive to the construction of such “rancierean methodology” that this paper will focus. By analyzing that the Proletarian nights were not simply made of miseries of an exhaustive subjection of working bodies, but also of poems, chants and prose, it made it possible thinking in an aesthetic that includes the workers, in aesthetes-workers. Not from the perspective of a “popular aesthetic”, always hostage of its parallel of an “erudite aesthetic”, but only from one and same aesthetic. The ancestral separation between the hands of working and the vision/contemplation of the beauty and the following hierarchical subordination of the former by the latter is, then, unsettled. The question of emancipation, therefore, reassumes by aesthetic a new centrality. And the notion of archive is fundamental to think of how this conceptual re-elaborations proposed by Rancière in aesthetic and politics arise from the use of thinking based on witnesses, letters and narratives registered in “class” journals, in a memorial word which before preserving a sacred truth, unique, from a time, gives us proofs of a polyphony and a poligraphy capable of disturbing the right conviction in which is based all attempts to erase the contradictions on behalf of a conscious historical project, either in political philosophy or in philosophy of education.