Jajuna

I just took another spin through Jacques Rancière’s  “The Politics of Aesthetics” and have been trying to puzzle through the relationship it sets up between art and politics. The book is a relatively brisk read, as it is really nothing more than a series of brief responses by Ranciere to questions posed by editor Gabriel Rockhill. However, I still find it quite difficult to begin a discussion of Ranciere’s philosophy as it is constructed out of a loose arrangement of inter-implicated concepts. As one engages a particular concept within the arrangement, the pull of the remaining conceptual network becomes immediately apparent. This arrangement and interplay of concepts mirrors the theory of aesthetics (and sociality) that Rancière puts forth. I don’t think that it is any accident that this text ends on a meditation concerning the aesthetics of theoretical writing. He states “a theoretical discourse is always an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the fact it is arguing about”. The next line and last sentence of the book reads: “Here we come back to our beginning” (66).The beginning to which Rancière refers is indeed his initial discussion of aesthetics within the first few pages of the text, thus he offers a performative gesture of the theory which he constructs throughout the work.

The poetic form of Rancière’s text, however, does not necessarily confer upon it a political character. Rancière contends that while aesthetics are inherent to any form of politics, politics are a rare occurrence. This is one of the significant distinctions between Rancière and other theorists of his generation such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. While sharing much in common with these thinkers particularly in his critique of representational thinking, Rancière situates politics as singular moments of possibility rather than as intrinsic to everyday relations of power. This means that while aesthetic works (art) may always contain the potential to become political, this does not mean that art and politics share a determined relationship.

As we discover throughout the book “art and politics are contingent notions” (51). Art is the work attributed to ways of “doing and making” within what Rancière refers to as the “distribution of the sensible”. This partition of the sensible describes what presents itself to sense experience: the fields of visibility and sayability which form both what is common and discrete within a community. It constitutes then, the aesthetic frames by which bodies, statements, and shares are arranged within unequal, yet consensual alignments of recognition. While art is inherent to this aesthetic distribution, this does not casually affix political value to works of art. It does, however, indicate that politics contains an inherent aesthetic and artistic valence.

Politics for Rancière occur only when an element (individual, group, statement, image, speech act) is able to disrupt the distribution of perception and, in turn, reconfigure it through its very emergence. This disruptive act, or dissensus, as Rancière refers to it, turns on a particular principle. By rejecting a “science of the hidden”, the search for meaning behind the surface of appearances, Rancière negates the possibility for a privileged position of mastery over knowledge. “Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established. I have tried to conceive of a topography that does not presuppose this position of mastery” (p.49). On this topography outside mastery, which Rancière situates as historically contingent systems of possibilities, relations of interpretation and meaning-making become, in theory, available equally to all. This vision of equality stands as an undetermined universal presupposition. The act of politics occurs when this universal is pressed into service in a singularized form, when a group or an individual with a lesser standing in the social order disrupts the distribution of the sensible, and thus gives form and content to their fundamental equality within the social order.

While this vision of dissensus signals the aesthetic and artistic within the political, it denies any political determinacy to artistic and or aesthetic practices. The problem is that there is an “undecidable” element to art. This is to say that its effects within given frameworks of experience cannot be mapped onto stable forms of meaning. This makes putting art into the service of politics highly precarious. Rancière states that “the dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle” (63). This sets up an aporia for political art. As Rancière would reject art with a “message” that is to evoke proscribed responses, he insists that art must translate meaning through its ruptural potential in such a way that does not altogether eliminate the legibility of political meaning. He states that this entails a process of negotiation. “Suitable political art, at one and the same time, would ensure a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification” (63). Political art negotiates this double effect at its own peril. While the readability of the message threatens to undue arts affective force, this force simultaneously places its political meaning into doubt. Such is the challenge to art and politics that Rancière offers, and which he attempts to navigate within his philosophy and writing.