by Todd May

Logo International Day of Nonviolence; courtesy askideas.com

It started quietly and almost spontaneously. At 4:30 in the afternoon on February 1, 1960, four black college freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University decided, after some deliberation, to sit down at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina whites-only lunch counter, and try to order. The waitress, herself black, refused to serve them. They waited until the Woolworth’s closed for the day and then announced that they would be back the next day. The four students—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (who later changed his name to Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond—were not trained in civil disobedience. They did not plan their actions in accordance with any wider strategy, although the civil rights movement was blossoming all around them. They did not consider how to react if they were met with violence or arrested. Jibreel Khazan recalled that Franklin McCain said, “We just wanted to sit down and eat like everyone else.” (1)

These four students did not experience significant opposition on their first day, or the next. But as word of the lunch counter sit-in spread and was taken up in other cities and states, white reaction became less restrained. Sit-in participants were verbally abused; smeared with ketchup and other food items, and in many cases arrested. They did not respond to their treatment with violence, but instead with the calm poise that had become the hallmark of the civil rights movement in the U.S. (This sustained reaction among the hundreds of later participants was probably in part due to the fact that many of them were already involved in the nonviolent activities of the movement.) To say that they did not respond with violence, however, does not mean that they did not respond. They returned to the lunch counters, determined to desegregate them. In some places it took years for desegregation to occur. But in Greensboro, Woolworth’s served its first black customers on July 25, 1960, not quite six months after the first sit-in.

The lunch counter sit-ins were only one among the many nonviolent campaigns that took place during the U.S. civil rights movement. There were freedom rides, marches, boycotts, demonstrations, voter drives, and more, in all of which participants suffered violence and in almost none of which they either retaliated with violence or retreated from activity. And, of course, the nonviolence of the civil rights movement is only one example of nonviolent resistance, which appears through the centuries but has become a more systematic object of study and practice since Mohandas Gandhi’s leadership in the Indian independence movement. Furthermore, although nonviolence is often associated with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., it has flourished over the past twenty-five years, appearing in the Baltic resistance to Soviet occupation, the Filipino resistance to Ferdinand Marcos, the Burmese opposition to military dictatorship, the South African overturning of apartheid, and the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square.

It is worth noting as well that, in contrast to violent movements of resistance, nonviolent movements tend to be more successful. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, in a recent important comparative study of violent and nonviolent movements, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, compared 323 violent and nonviolent struggles over the period 1900 to 2006. They did not seek to incorporate all forms of nonviolent struggle but instead confined their work to anti-regime, anti-occupation, and secession movements. They report, “The most striking finding is that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts…in the case of anti-regime resistance campaigns, the use of nonviolent strategy has greatly enhanced the likelihood of success. Among campaigns with territorial objectives, like anti-occupation or self-determination, nonviolent campaigns also have a slight advantage.” (2)

My goal here, however, is not to advocate for nonviolence as a strategy, but instead to display the link between nonviolence, disidentification, and equality. In order to approach this link, it is perhaps best to say something about each. In a recent book, I define nonviolence in political movements this way: political, economic, or social activity that challenges or resists a current political, economic, or social arrangement while respecting the dignity of its participants, adversaries and others. (3) Dignity, in turn, I define as having a life to lead, which in human terms I unpack this way: to engage in projects and relationships that unfold over time; to be aware of one’s death in a way that affects how one sees the arc of one’s life; to have biological needs like food, shelter, and sleep; to have basic psychological needs like care and a sense of attachment to one’s surroundings. (4) To engage in nonviolent resistance, then, is roughly to respect in one’s actions (although not necessarily in one’s thoughts) that one’s adversaries as well as colleagues have human lives to lead. It does not mean that one cannot be coercive. In fact, most nonviolence is coercive, a point we will return to briefly below. Rather, it means that that coercion cannot, if the movement is to be nonviolent, attack the ability of the other to lead a meaningful human life. Such attacks can be both physical and/or psychological, but they can also be structural. (Often, it is the structural violence of a social arrangement that is confronted by a nonviolent movement.)

“Disidentification” is an idea that has come to be associated with the thought of Jacques Rancière. Let me gloss it quickly here. For Rancière, most social and political orders are characterized by what he calls the police. He defines the police in terms that are, as he notes, usually reserved for politics. “Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police.” (5) The police, in short, is the system or structure in which various people or groups have their allotted places, places that are justified (or at least seem to be) from within the system or structure itself.

The police rarely operate by overt coercion. Instead, it works through what Rancière calls le partage du sensible, the distribution or partition or even sharing of the sensible. A partage du sensible is an arrangement of perceptual reality that, just like the institutions and practices of a society, help create and sustain its relationships. It is a dividing up of the way in which we sense things into certain categories or affects. Rancière recognizes that our political relations seep down into our perceptions, and his introduction of this term is a way of grasping that. We literally see and hear things a certain way, a seeing and hearing that helps to organize our social arrangements. In the U.S., for example, black males are often experienced reflexively by whites (or even one another) as either threatening or less intelligent or both, while women are experienced by men (or even other women) as less emotionally stable and also as less intelligent. These are not necessarily judgments that are made by individuals. Rather, they are ways in which members of the collective experience others or even themselves. They are the way the sensible is distributed, partitioned, and shared.

To disidentify, in Rancière’s view of the term, is to refuse to recognize in oneself or another the place that has been allotted in the police order. It is to refuse to identify oneself or another as occupying that allotted space. Often, disidentification is collective rather than individual. A group disidentifies with its place in a police order, often accompanied in solidarity by members of other groups who also refuse the identification that group has been given. We can see disidentification at work in the lunch counter sit-ins. Where blacks were thought unworthy to sit at Woolworth’s lunch counters, they refuse that identification in their actions, and the whites who began to accompany them to lunch counters refused alongside them. There were other forms of identification that were also refused, forms that are related to nonviolence and to which we will return below. For the moment, the key idea is that disidentification in Rancière’s sense is the refusal to identify with a place in a police order, a place that is reinforced not only by ideology or coercion but also and often more importantly by the partage du sensible.

Why might one seek to disidentify with a particular police order? After all, if we eliminate the prejudicial term police from police order, one might argue that any social arrangement needs some kind of order. There can’t be complete chaos. People need to play roles that are coordinated in some fashion (whether by consensual arrangement, markets, or whatever), and those roles ought to be justified or at least justifiable to the people who play them. Moreover, however these roles are distributed and coordinated, they are likely to produce (and be produced by) some partage du sensible, a way of experiencing the social arrangement and those who occupy the various roles in it. So whence the need to disidentify?

For Rancière, what makes a police order a police order is a presupposition that animates it: the presupposition of the natural inequality of its participants. Roles are distributed not on a cooperative basis, not on the basis of mutual agreement or consent, but on the basis of the idea that some people are in essence more suited to have a vital role to play in the operation of the political and social order while others ought to be marginalized. Police orders, in short, are hierarchical. Moreover, that hierarchy lies not simply in some stated ideology inherent in the social arrangement, but seeps into (or stems from) the partage du sensible animating that arrangement. Blacks, women, workers, gays,  lesbians, the transgendered: they are not as capable as others, especially white heterosexual males, of taking part in operation of the social order. They are not, to use Rancière’s term, equally intelligent.

For Rancière, then, a true politics, politics worthy of the name, disidentifies from a police order not in the name of another police order, but instead in the name of equality. “[P]olitical activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.” (6)  Politics, in Rancière’s view, is collective action under the presupposition of equality. It requires a disidentification with a particular police order on the grounds of its hierarchical character, its assumption of the natural and inescapable inequality of participants, that is of the “speaking beings” that comprise it. This disidentification will create a tension within the police order itself as those who operate on the presupposition of a particular inequality will be confronted by those who operate on the presupposition of equality. As he insists, “The essence of equality is in fact not so much to unify as to declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of order and replace it with the controversial figures of division.” (7)

What is the character of such a politics? How is it structured? In order to approach this question, we would do well to divide it into two distinct questions. First, what is internal the relationship among the participants in a political movement, retaining the term political in Rancière’s sense? Second, what is the relationship between the movement and its adversaries, the external relationship? In both cases, we must move beyond Rancière’s own writing. He discusses the former question only briefly and in quick gestures, and does not, to my knowledge, address the latter question at all. Turning to the former, Rancière writes that “The test of democracy must ever be in democracy’s own image: versatile, sporadic—and founded on trust.” (8) Democracy, for him, is the operation of an order that is characterized by the presupposition of equality, and so a political order. It must, then, be versatile if it is not to harden into a police order. He also thinks it must be sporadic—a claim which I have challenged elsewhere and will not address here. (9)

For our purposes, the foundation of trust is the most important idea. To trust another is, among other things, to place stakes that concern oneself in the hands of another. In order to do that, one must believe that the other will not abuse that trust, that the other will not expose one needlessly. But one must also believe that the other is capable of handling those stakes at least as well (or nearly as well) as oneself. That is to say, one must believe the other to be equally capable of handling those stakes. To trust another, then, in addition to relying on good will, also requires the presupposition of equality. Each of those who sat at the lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960 and then across the U.S. Southern states had to presuppose that his or her colleagues were equally capable of withstanding the social disapproval and at times the violence that would be visited upon them. Otherwise, he or she would be left vulnerable to humiliation to physical abuse.

To coordinate together in a movement that presupposes equality is to recognize one another as equally capable of contributing to the movement. This does not entail that everyone has the same skills or must do exactly the same work. The presupposition of equality is not the presupposition of identity or sameness. It may be that some people are better at coordinating complementary activities, while others are better at public speaking, and still others excel at quiet persuasion of those uncommitted to the goals of the movement. Rather, what is presupposed among those involved in the movement is that none is inferior to the others, that all have a valuable contribution to make and should be recognized on the basis of that alone.

Moreover, the presupposition of equality does not require that everyone’s opinions be considered equally correct—which in any case would lead to contradiction in cases where opinions diverged. Rather, it requires that everyone be taken seriously as an interlocutor. An excellent example of this is the “mic check” that occurred in the Occupy movement in the U.S., where—since the police had prohibited microphones—people listening to a speaker had to repeat his or her words so that those behind them could hear the message. As a number of people involved in Occupy reported, saying aloud words they disagreed with forced them to think about the message more rigorously without dismissing it in advance. Even where ultimately they disagreed with the message they found themselves thinking that in most cases the message was at least worthy of consideration. The upshot of this, although this would be a topic for another occasion, is that the presupposition of equality can be combined with various forms of decision-making: not only consensus but also various types of voting.

To recognize others and to be recognized as an equal is an empowering experience for those in a police order who are used to being treated and often experienced as less than equal. It is a commonly recognized phenomenon that persistently treating someone as inferior often results in a person’s thinking of or experiencing himself or herself as indeed inferior. In this way, acting out of the presupposition of equality is, as Rancière notes, emancipating. Political action, he writes, collective action from the presupposition of equality, “is the definition of a struggle for equality which can never be merely a demand upon the other, nor a pressure put upon him, but always simultaneously a proof given to oneself. This is what ‘emancipation’ means.” (10) And what better proof can there be than an emancipation that arises not from what is granted by those better placed in a hierarchy than one that emerges from one’s own activity? What better proof to those who participated in the lunch counter sit-ins of their own character (against the image of blacks portrayed by white Southerners) could they have had than their own actions and their reactions to those who abused them?

So far, we have concentrated on the internal relationships of a movement based on disidentification in the name of equality. How about the relationship with the adversary, with those who oppose the movement? How can they be related to on the basis of the presupposition of equality? In general, the same parameters apply: they must be presupposed to be equal to those in the movement. But how is one to oppose someone politically and at the same time treat them as an equal? Of course, it is not impossible. As we have already seen, one can consider a colleague within the movement to be mistaken without believing that she or he is less than equal. How might this lesson apply to those outside the movement?

Here is where the dynamic of nonviolence begins to show its worth. Nonviolent movements—to the extent that they are nonviolent—require treating everyone, including adversaries, with dignity, that is, as having the ability to engage in projects and relationships that unfold over time; to be aware of one’s death in a way that affects how one sees the arc of one’s life; to have biological needs like food, shelter, and sleep; to have basic psychological needs like care and a sense of attachment to one’s surroundings. As I have already mentioned, this does not require nonviolence to abjure coercion. One can coerce an adversary while still respecting his or her dignity. Although the lunch counter sit-ins were not directly coercive, the collective action of those who participated alongside those who supported them and even those who became indignant at the treatment of their fellow citizens was eventually coercive. Woolworth’s would certainly have preferred to retain its segregationist policies. However, although Woolworth’s was coerced, the dignity of its owners and managers was not violated, whether through physical, psychological, or structural violence.

What is true of the lunch counter sit-ins applies more generally across the various instances of nonviolent resistance. In the Philippines in the 1980s, Ferdinand Marcos was removed from power through a nonviolent movement of Filipino citizens. Once removed, he certainly did not enjoy his previous standard of living; however, the U.S., his longtime supporter, ensured that he continued to live a fully human life. At around the same time, the largely nonviolent anti-apartheid movement in South Africa undermined the exclusive access of white South Africans to the political process without violating the dignity of those who opposed them. The Occupy movement in the U.S. sought to sway public opinion to support policies oriented toward a less inegalitarian distribution of wealth. This would certainly have been coercive to the 1%, but it would not have violated their dignity.

In respecting the dignity of its adversaries, nonviolence need not be coercive. What it requires is the recognition that everyone, including those among its adversaries, has the right to create a meaningful life in the way we have noted above. To put this point another way, it requires the presupposition of the equality of all speaking beings. Nonviolence presupposes that each person, unless he or she is deeply damaged in some way, is equally capable of constructing a life worth living, and nonviolence creates its actions under that presupposition with regard to both participants and adversaries. To cast this idea in Rancière’s terms, the challenge of nonviolence might be said to be this: “[O]ur problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition. And for this, it’s enough for us that the opinion be possible—that is, that no opposing truth be proved.” (11)

It should be noted that the presupposition of equality, implied by the respect for dignity inherent in nonviolence, need not be a matter of committed pacifism. Proponents of nonviolence often disagree about whether nonviolence must be principled or only practical. Those in the former camp see nonviolence as not only a political strategy but also a way of living. To them, for whom Gandhi and King are exemplary figures, nonviolence is not simply a matter of practical politics; it is a matter of how one must live in all areas of one’s life and under all circumstances. Proponents of practical nonviolence do not make such a commitment. For them, nonviolence is often the best strategy of resistance because of the pitfalls of violence in a particular context. Perhaps the adversary is too strong militarily, or perhaps violence will lose the support of critical masses of the population, or perhaps violence might lead to a successful short-term victory but prove undemocratic in the long run: these considerations might lead to an embrace of nonviolence. What is characteristic of practical nonviolence, however, is that its actions (even if not its overall political commitment or the psychological orientation of its participants) presuppose the equality of the adversary.

Given the argument of this essay, it might be wondered here whether it is possible for violent resistance ever to respect the dignity of the other. Can there be a violent resistance that presupposes the equality of the adversary? To be sure, violent resistance is a form of disidentification with a police order. Those who are marginalized in a hierarchy refuse their marginalization in the name of one sort of liberation or another. But does the form that that refusal takes—violence against the adversary—constitute a presupposition of the inequality of that adversary?

The test case to answer such a question is that of self-defense. Is violent self-defense, whether of oneself or one’s community, a violation of the presupposition of equality? Although I cannot argue this complex point in depth here, I believe that it is. To have to defend oneself violently is to be put in a situation where one can only retain one’s own dignity by attacking that of the adversary. This, I think, is the unfortunate but inevitable situation that violent self-defense puts one in, and what makes it so vexed. To be sure, there are different degrees of violent self-defense, and to defend oneself with the minimal degree of force required to fend off an attack may still display some degree of respect for the other. However, the fact that one has to, or feels one has to, attack another physically in order to defend oneself seems to me to require at least a suspension of the respect nonviolence would require for the dignity of others as I have described it here.

There are those who might disagree with this position, arguing that violent resistance can in certain circumstances still presuppose the equality of the adversary. If that is ultimately correct, what it would show is not that nonviolence is not a form of resistance that respects the dignity or presupposes the equality of everyone, but instead that it is not the only form of resistance that does so. Since the case I am making here is fundamentally for nonviolence and not against violence, I would not be loath to accept such a conclusion. My claim is that nonviolence is a form of disidentification with a police order, which presupposes what Rancière calls “the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.” And, in fact, it is an exemplary form of such disidentification. By standing up against an adversary that has more resources, that is often inclined toward defending its privileges with violence, that refuses to recognize one as having a part to play in decisions about the social and political order (or some important aspect of it), and by doing all this without attacking that adversary physically, psychologically, or structurally, one emancipates oneself from a police order in several ways. First, one refuses the place allotted to one by that order. Second, one demonstrates to others the folly of believing or experiencing one to be inferior: one reconfigures the partage du sensible of the social arrangement. And finally, but hardly least important, one liberates oneself from the grip of that partage on one’s relation to oneself. One proves to oneself, through the public bearing that one displays in a nonviolent action or movement, that the inequality presupposed by the police order has nothing to do with who one really is. Even when nonviolence does not convince the adversary, it creates changes in oneself that is already a disruption of—because it is a disidentification with—the presupposition of inequality that gives solace to those who benefit from one’s marginalization.

Endnotes:

(1) Cited in Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_McCain>; accessed July 2016. For a comprehensive view of the lunch counter sit-ins and their place in the civil rights movement, see Taylor Branch’s magisterial history Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988, esp. Chapter 7.

(2) Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict , New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 7.

(3) May, Todd, Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction, London: Polity, 2015.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement, tr. Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1995], p. 28.

(6) Ibid, p. 30.

(7) Rancière, Jacques, On the Shores of Politics, tr. Liz Heron, London: Verso, 1995 [1992], pp. 32-33.

(8) Ibid, p. 61.

(9) Cf., May, Todd, Contemporary Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière: Equality in Action, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

(10) On the Shores of Politics, p. 48.

(11) Rancière, Jacques, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Tr. Kristin Ross. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, p. 46.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor at Clemson University. A political philosopher he is notable for his role in developing, alongside Saul Newman and Lewis Call, the theory of post-structuralist anarchism. His 1994 book The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1994) was the first to combine post-structuralist and anarchist thought, and since then he has authored more than ten books, including Nonviolent Resistance: a Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), which we reviewed here.