The Politics OfAesthetics - AUTONOMOUS LEARNING

Translators IntroductionJacques Rancière’s Politics o f Perception3GABRIEL ROCKHILLAs Alain Badiou has aptly pointed out, Jacques Rancière’s workdoes not belong to any particular academic community but ratherinhabits unknown intervals ‘between history and philosophy, betweenphilosophy and politics, and between documentary and fiction (1998:122). His unique methodology, eclectic research habits, and voraciouspropensity for assimilating European intellectual and cultural historyare comparable perhaps only to the unclassifiable work of MichelFoucault, an author with whom he himself acknowledges certainaffinities. If his voice has yet to be heard in full force in the Englishspeaking world due to a lack of translations and sufficient secondaryliterature, it is perhaps attributable to what Rancière himself hascalled the distribution of the sensible, or the system of divisions andboundaries that define, among other things, what is visible and audiblewithin a particular aesthetico-political regime.Although closely affiliated with the group of neo-Marxists workingaround Althusser in the 1960s, Rancières virulent criticisms of thelatter as of 1968 served to distance him from the author with whomhe had shared the common project Lire le Capital in 1965. As Rancièreexplained in the Preface to La Leçon d'Althusser (1974), the theoreticaland political distance separating his work from Althusserian Marxismwas partially a result of the events of 1968 and the realization thatAlthussers school was a ‘philosophy of order whose very principlesanaesthetized the revolt against the bourgeoisie. Uninspired by thepolitical options proposed by thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard,Rancière saw in the politics of difference the risk of reversing Marx’sstatement in the Thesis on Feuerbach: We tried to transform the world

in diverse ways, now it is a matter of interpreting it’ (1974: 14). Thesecriticisms of the response by certain intellectuals to the events of May1968 eventually led him to a critical re-examination of the social,political, and historical forces operative in the production of theory.In the first two books to follow the collection of essays on Althusser,Rancière explored a question that would continue to preoccupy himin his later work: from what position do we speak and in the nameof what or whom? Whereas La Nuit des prolétaires (1981) proceededvia the route of meticulous historical research to unmask the illusionsof representation and give voice to certain mute events in the historyof workers emancipation, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (1983) provideda conceptualization of the relationship between thought and society,philosophic representation and its concrete historical object. Bothof these works contributed to undermining the privileged positionusurped by philosophy in its various attempts to speak for others, be itthe proletariat, the poor, or anyone else who is not ‘destined to think’.However, far from advocating a populist stance and claiming to finallybestow a specific identity on the underprivileged, Rancière thwartedthe artifice at work in the discourses founded on the singularity of theother by revealing the ways in which they are ultimately predicated onkeeping the other in its place.This general criticism of social and political philosophy was counter balanced by a more positive account of the relationship between the‘intellectual’ and the emancipation of society in Rancière’s fourthbook, Le M aître ignorant (1987). Analysing the life and work of JosephJacotet, Rancière argued in favour of a pedagogical methodology thatwould abolish any presupposed inequalities of intelligence such asthe academic hierarchy of master and disciple. For Rancière, equalityshould not be thought of in terms of a goal to be attained by workingthrough the lessons promulgated by prominent social and politicalthinkers. On the contrary, it is the very axiomatic point of departurewhose sporadic reappearance via disturbances in the set system ofsocial inequalities is the very essence of emancipation. This explains, inpart, Rancière’s general rejection of political philosophy, understood asthe theoretical enterprise that abolishes politics proper by identifyingit with the ‘police’ (see below). It also sheds light on his own attemptto work as an ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ who - rather than transmitting

performatively contradictory lessons on the content of emancipation- aims at giving a voice to those excluded from the hierarchies ofknowledge.With the more recent publication of Aux Bords du politique (1990)and La Mésentente (1995), Rancière has further elaborated a politicsof democratic emancipation, which might best be understood in termsof its central concepts. The police, to begin with, is defined as anorganizational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution ofthe sensible or a law that divides the community into groups, socialpositions, and functions. This law implicitly separates those who takepart from those who are excluded, and it therefore presupposes a prioraesthetic division between the visible and the invisible, the audible andthe inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable. The essence of politicsconsists in interrupting the distribution of the sensible by supple menting it with those who have no part in the perceptual coordinatesof the community, thereby modifying the very aesthetico-political fieldof possibility. It is partially for this reason that Rancière defines thepolitical as relational in nature, founded on the intervention of politicsin the police order rather than on the establishment of a particulargovernmental regime. Moreover, politics in its strict sense never presup poses a reified subject or predefined group of individuals such as theproletariat, the poor, or minorities. On the contrary, the only possiblesubject of politics is the people or the dèmos, i.e. the supplementary partof every account of the population. Those who have no name, whoremain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via amode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of thecommunity by implementing the universal presupposition of politics:we are all equal. Democracy itself is defined by these intermittent actsof political subjectivization that reconfigure the communal distributionof the sensible. However, just as equality is not a goal to be attained buta presupposition in need of constant verification, democracy is neither aform of government nor a style of social life. Democratic emancipationis a random process that redistributes the system of sensible coordinateswithout being able to guarantee the absolute elimination of the socialinequalities inherent in the police order.The irresolvable conflict between politics and the police, most visibleperhaps in the perennial persistence of a w rong that cannot be resolved

by juridical litigation, has led many readers to interpret La M ésententeas a simple continuation of Lyotard’s Le D ifférend (1983). Although aconceptual proximity is readily apparent, Rancière is careful to distin guish his project from what he considers to be the essentially discursivenature of le différend. According to his definition, disagreem ent isneither a misunderstanding nor a general lack of comprehension. Itis a conflict over what is meant by to speak’ and over the very distri bution of the sensible that delimits the horizons of the sayable anddetermines the relationship between seeing, hearing, doing, making,and thinking. In other words, disagreement is less a clash betweenheterogeneous phrase regimens or genres of discourse than a conflictbetween a given distribution of the sensible and what remains outsideit.Beginning with the publication of Courts Voyages au pays du peuple(1990) and up to his most recent work on film and modern art, Rancièrehas repeatedly foregrounded his long-standing interest in aestheticswhile at the same time analysing its conjunction with both politicsand history. In positioning himself against the Sartrean preoccupationwith engagem ent and the more recent hegemony of the Tel Q uel group,Rancière presents his reader with a unique account of aesthetics as wellas an innovative description of its major regimes. According to thegenealogy he has undertaken, the ethical regim e of images character istic of Platonism is primarily concerned with the origin and telos ofimagery in relationship to the ethos of the community. It establishesa distribution of images - without, however, identifying art’ in thesingular - that rigorously distinguishes between artistic simulacra andthe ‘true arts’ used to educate the citizenry concerning their role inthe communal body. The representative regim e is an artistic system ofAristotelian heritage that liberates imitation from the constraints ofethical utility and isolates a normatively autonomous domain with itsown rules for fabrication and criteria of evaluation. The aesthetic regim eof art puts this entire system of norms into question by abolishing thedichotomous structure of mimesis in the name of a contradictory identi fication between logos and pathos. It thereby provokes a transformationin the distribution of the sensible established by the representativeregime, which leads from the primacy of fiction to the primacy oflanguage, from the hierarchical organization of genres to the equality

of represented subjects, from the principle of appropriate discourse tothe indifference of style with regard to subject matter, and from theideal of speech as act and performance to the model of writing.Rancière has forcefully argued that the emergence of literature in thenineteenth century as distinct from les belles-lettres was a central catalystin the development of the aesthetic regime of art. By rejecting the repre sentative regimes poetics of mimesis, modern literature contributed to ageneral reconfiguration of the sensible order linked to the contradictioninherent in what Rancière calls literarity, i.e. the status of a written wordthat freely circulates outside any system of legitimation. On the onehand, literarity is a necessary condition for the appearance of modernliterature as such and its emancipation from the representative regimeof art. However, it simultaneously acts as the contradictory limit atwhich the specificity of literature itself disappears due to the fact that itno longer has any clearly identifiable characteristics that would distin guish it from any other mode of discourse. This partially explains theother major form of writing that has been in constant struggle withdemocratic literarity throughout the modern age: the idea of a ‘truewriting’ that would incorporate language in such a way as to exclude thefree-floating, disembodied discourse of literarity. The positive contra diction’ between these two forms of writing, as well as the paradox thatdefines the unique discursive status of literature as such, has given riseto numerous and varied responses through the course of time. In otherwords, this contradiction has played a productive role in the emergenceof modern literature, and it has also been decisive in setting the stagefor later developments in the aesthetic regime of art. To take oneexample among many, Rancière has recently argued in La Fable cinématographique (2001) that a positive contradiction - between elements ofthe representative and aesthetic regimes of art - is also operative in film.On the one hand, the very invention of film materially realized theproperly aesthetic definition of art, first elaborated in Schelling’s Systemo f Transcendental Idealism, as a union of conscious and unconsciousprocesses. On the other hand, however, film is an art of fiction thatbestows a new youth on the genres, codes, and conventions of represen tation that democratic literarity had put into question.In his critical genealogy of art and politics, Rancière has also dealtextensively with the emergence of history as a unique discipline {Les

Noms de l'histoire, 1992) and, more recently, with psychoanalysis(L’I nconscient esthétique, 2000), photography, and contemporary art(Le Destin des images, 2003). Behind the intricate analyses present ineach of these studies, a central argument is discernible: the historicalconditions of possibility for the appearance of these practices are to befound in the contradictory relationship between elements of the repre sentative and aesthetic regimes of art. Thus continuing to work in theintervals between politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and historiography,Jacques Rancière will undoubtedly leave his own indelible mark on oneof his privileged objects of study: the distribution of the sensible.

The Distribution o f the Sensible

ForewordThe following pages respond to a twofold solicitation. At their originwas a set of questions asked by two young philosophers, Muriel Combesand Bernard Aspe, for their journal, Alice, and more specifically for thesection entitled ‘The Factory of the Sensible’. This section is concernedwith aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create newmodes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjec tivity. It is within this framework that they interviewed me on theconsequences of my analyses—in Disagreement—of the distribution ofthe sensible that is at stake in politics, and thus of a certain aestheticsof politics. Their questions, prompted as well by a novel reflection onthe major avant-garde theories and experiments concerning the fusionof art and life, dictate the structure of the present text. At the requestof Eric Hazan and Stéphanie Grégoire, I developed my responses andclarified their presuppositions [8] as far as possible.4This particular solicitation is, however, inscribed in a broadercontext. The proliferation of voices denouncing the crisis of art or itsfatal capture by discourse, the pervasiveness of the spectacle or thedeath of the image, suffice to indicate that a battle fought yesterdayover the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillu sions of history continues today on aesthetic terrain. The trajectoryof Situationist discourse - stemming from an avant-garde artisticmovement in the post-war period, developing into a radical critique ofpolitics in the 1960s, and absorbed today into the routine of the disen chanted discourse that acts as the critical’ stand-in for the existingorder - is undoubtedly symptomatic of the contemporary ebb andflow of aesthetics and politics, and of the transformations of avantgarde thinking into nostalgia. It is, however, the work of Jean-FrançoisLyotard that best marks the way in which ‘aesthetics’ has become, inthe last twenty years, the privileged site where the tradition of criticalthinking has metamorphosed into deliberation on mourning. Thereinterpretation of the Kantian analysis [9] of the sublime introduced

into the field of art a concept that Kant had located beyond it. It didthis in order to more effectively make art a witness to an encounterwith the unpresentable that cripples all thought, and thereby a witnessfor the prosecution against the arrogance of the grand aestheticopolitical endeavour to have ‘thought’ become world’. In this way,reflection on art became the site where a mise-en-scène of the originalabyss of thought and the disaster of its misrecognition continued afterthe proclamation of the end of political utopias. A number of contem porary contributions to thinking the disasters of art or the imageconvert this fundamental reversal into more mediocre prose.This familiar landscape of contemporary thought defines the contextin which these questions and answers are inscribed, but it does notspecify their objective. The following responses will not lay claim yetagain, in the face of postmodern disenchantment, to the avant-gardevocation of art or to the vitality of a modernity that links the conquestsof artistic innovation to the victories of emancipation. These pages donot have their origin in a desire to take a polemical stance. They areinscribed in a long-term project that aims at re-establishing a debate’sconditions of intelligibility. This means, first of all, elaborating thevery meaning of [10] what is designated by the term aesthetics, whichdenotes neither art theory in general nor a theory that would consignart to its effects on sensibility. Aesthetics refers to a specific regime foridentifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation betweenways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, andpossible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposesa certain idea of thought’s effectivity). Defining the connections withinthis aesthetic regime of the arts, the possibilities that they determine,and their modes of transformation, such is the present objective ofmy research and of a seminar held over the past few years within theframework provided by the University of Paris-VIII and the CollègeInternational de Philosophie. The results of this research will not befound in the present work; their elaboration will follow its own properpace. I have nevertheless attempted to indicate a few historical andconceptual reference points appropriate for reformulating certainproblems that have been irremediably confused by notions that pass offconceptual prejudices as historical determinations and temporal delim itations as conceptual determinations. Among the foremost of these

notions figures, of course, the concept of modernity, today the sourceof all the jumbled miscellany that arbitrarily sweeps [11] together suchfigures as Hölderlin, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Malevich, or Duchamp intoa vast whirlwind where Cartesian science gets mixed up with revolu tionary parricide, the age of the masses with Romantic irrationalism,the ban on representation with the techniques of mechanized repro duction, the Kantian sublime with the Freudian primal scene, the flightof the gods with the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Indicatingthe general lack of evidence supporting these notions obviously doesnot entail adhering to the contemporary discourses on the return tothe simple reality of artistic practices and its criteria of assessment. Theconnection between these ‘simple practices’ and modes of discourse,forms of life, conceptions of thought, and figures of the communityis not the fruit of a maleficent misappropriation. On the contrary, theeffort to think through this connection requires forsaking the unsat isfactory mise-en-scène of the end’ and the ‘return that persistentlyoccupies the terrain of art, politics, and any other object of thought.[12]

The Distribution o f the Sensible: Politicsand AestheticsIn Disagreement, politics is examined from the perspective o f what youcall the

Also available from Continuum: Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou (trans. by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze (trans. by David W. Smith) The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray (trans. by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek) Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri (trans. by Matteo Mandarini) Art and Fear, Paul Virilio (trans. by Julie Rose)