Bodies, Affects, Politics. Steve Pile
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marches in London, on Sunday 31 May 2020, to protest the death of George Floyd (in Minneapolis) ended at Grenfell Tower. In silence. As someone wrote Black Lives Matter on the memorial wall.
Body Politic
Before the fire, there were long histories of class, race and social inequality that were all refracted through notions of violence and poverty. Grenfell exposes these: its anger is intimately connected to them. Yet, it also exposed the ordinary affects of family, work, humour, hope, childhood and so on (see Highmore 2011; and Stewart 2007). Communal solidarity formed around the tragedy, not only through anger and feelings of sorrow and generosity, but also around these ordinary affects. This underscores Rancière’s injunction to see politics as a form of experience, not in its exceptionality, but in its everydayness. This asks us to pay particular attention to ordinary life in Grenfell Tower, as a political moment that invites us to consider how people are assigned to places and to a place in life.
Following Rancière, we can see the emergent stories and voices from Grenfell Tower as a challenge to the distribution of the sensible (2004, p. 8; see Dikeç 2015): that is, a recasting of common sense understandings of race, class and religion. In Rancière’s terms, this recasting was forced by marginalised and excluded bodies challenging accepted ways of understanding those bodies, as if from the outside of a bodily regime (to use Fanon’s expression) that seeks to define bodies and assign them a proper place in the scheme of things. In these terms, a bodily regime defines, and is defined by, the senses: not just the visible and the invisible, but all the ways that things are sensed or not, understood or not. Bodily regimes are about how the senses are defined and lived. Significantly, bodily regimes are produced and reproduced by the drawing of an epistemic boundary that differentiates between the sensible and the insensible. This boundary enables a distinction between people who are inside a community of shared sensibilities and those who are outside:
The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space this activity is performed. Having a particular ‘occupation’ [both an activity and a space] thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. (2004, p. 8)
The distribution of the sensible, for Rancière, is as political as it gets:
It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around properties of spaces and possibilities of time. (2004, p. 8)
Let us not romanticise the Grenfell Tower tragedy, nor mark it as some upheaval in the constitution of the political. Yet, the fire, however temporarily, not only illuminated the boundary between who could speak and who could be heard, who was visible and who was invisible, what community looked and sounded like, it also meant that this could be contested…and contested anew. Indeed, a flurry of documentaries on Grenfell made visible and gave voice to the community, the histories of injustice and inequality, and also gave voice to the survivors and relatives (see Sborgi 2019). As Eddie Daffarn, who lived on the sixteenth floor of the Tower, in the 2018 documentary Grenfell (by Minnow Films, shown on BBC1 on 11 June 2018), put it:
I was very proud to live there, and it’s just a tragedy that we’re, you know, not able to show people, you know, what we were actually like […] Justice. Reparation. These words are really meaningless without fundamental change. Grenfell can represent a turning point in history. A change in how society views communities that live in social housing. That, they are listened to and respected, because had we been listened to and respected at Grenfell, it would not have happened. It’s as simple as that.
These kinds of justice, rooted in life itself, are justice from outside a political regime that defines justice from above, that constricts justice in and through the legal system and public inquiries that focus on socio‐technical systems. But they are also coexistent with it.
In this light, disturbances in the distribution of the sensible may not be the consequence of those outside the regime suddenly becoming visible to those inside the regime, but a clash between multiple, already‐existing distributions of the sensible and regimes of the body (see also Rancière 2004, pp. 46–47). This is the analysis that I will pursue in this book. This book explores both the coexistence of bodily regimes, and also the relationship between them. Of course, coexisting bodily regimes (around class, race, gender, sexuality and so on) can be mutually supportive, integrated and coherent. Ideas such as intersectionality have been developed to account for this. However, I am more interested in the ways that bodily regimes fail to ‘add up’ to a single coherent integrated system of privilege and power. Indeed, I am most interested in those moments and places where bodily regimes clash. This is what I see in the Grenfell Tower tragedy. It exposed the distribution of different voices and bodies, yet it also offers new stories – stories that do not add up to a singular understanding of the event, nor that can be closed down around pre‐determined understandings of those bodies, of affects or of politics. Rather, the tragedy reveals the indeterminacy of bodies, affects and politics – and it is in this that its radical possibilities lie. Like Hillsborough, Grenfell simply refuses to settle down, to be quieted.
For Rancière, political subjects are produced by fissures in the distribution of the sensible. It is through these fissures that a political process can be unleashed that opposes or resists the sensible order. The sensible order is an organisation – in Rancière’s terms, a police order – of bodies into ‘a system of coordinates that define modes of being, doing making and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable’ (Rockhill 2004, p. 93, in Rancière 2004). The sensible order assembles and parcels up people, assigning them to a proper place within modes of perception, but also in modes of knowledge, agency and passivity. The sensible order produces self‐evident truths about the way things are: creating modalities of what is visible and what is audible, creating modalities of what can be thought, said, made and done. However, Rancière acknowledges that contradictions can be generated between orders of the sensible, for example, between the visible and the sayable. He terms this silent speech: a hidden layer of meaning, awaiting expression, beneath the orders of speech and visibility.
Rancière’s central insight – about the organisation of bodies and the senses into regimes of the visible, the sayable and the actionable – must be altered in the light of Grenfell. As well as seeing hidden layers of meaning, we must rather register those moments when regimes of the body and the sensible clash or rub up against one another. These frictions and clashes occur between regimes that are organised at many different points in the experience of power relations, of affects and of bodies. They are not somehow outside or beyond systems of organisation of bodies, affects and power relations. Rather, these systems are open, porous, incomplete and mutable in ways that consistently fail to close down experience around a singular distribution of the sensible. Here, I follow work by Mustafa Dikeç (2005, 2015) and Divya Tolia‐Kelly (2019). For both Dikeç and Tolia‐Kelly, Rancière affords the opportunity to include excluded people in an understanding of, respectively, urban politics and the politics of the museum. Significantly, in Dikeç’s and Tolia‐Kelly’s work, those excluded people are further marginalised on grounds of race through the production of space. Thus, for Tolia‐Kelly, the exclusion of racialised artists is achieved through a particular colonial distribution of the senses (see also Tolia‐Kelly 2016). Dikeç, meanwhile, shows how the built environment is used to marginalise racialised groups, especially immigrants, to an (im)proper place: for example, by housing them on the peripheries of cities or making access to the city’s social and physical infrastructure difficult or even impossible. Bluntly, racialised subjects are pushed to the edges of cities and museum spaces – and thereby rendered voiceless, unseen and unintelligible.
Critically, this form of exclusion does not solely operate by policing space such that people are