Jajuna

There are some interesting parallels in this section of Commonwealth to points raised by Zizek in his recent book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce particularly concerning the Haitian revolution. I don’t have the Zizek book in front of me at the moment but if memory serves, he also observes that the Haitian revolution revealed the centrality of resistance in the formation of European modernity. For Zizek, the Haitian uprising marks all the ambivalences and paradoxes of modernity, both its legacy of domination and hierarchy as well as it’s liberatory tradition. The Haitian revolutionaries rooted their project within the emancipatory register of the enlightenment and the French revolution and through their revolt embodied the principles of freedom and equality more purely than the French themselves who sought to deny the Haitian slaves their humanity. Zizek claims that the lesson here is that postcolonial resistance to global capitalism should continue to take a critical de-colonizing stance toward the specters of domination handed down from modernity, while recognizing that this stance is firmly within the modern tradition of human emancipation. According to Zizek, the truly revolutionary event, as demonstrated by the Haitian revolution, is not only to appropriate the democratic tradition in political struggle but to radically realign and alter that tradition in the process.

In some ways this is what the concept of altermodernity is getting at in Commonwealth. For Hardt and Nergi it is not enough to recognize the contradiction within the power relation between modernity and antimodernity. It is not enough to resist. The goal, rather, is to generate new relations and social democratic forms (parallel and intersectional class based, gender, ethnic/indigenous struggles) that cut diagonally across the modern-antimodern threshold. Ultimately, in their chapter on altermodernity and throughout Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri offer a far more dynamic analysis than Zizek, who, whenever confronted with a tight spot often just simply reverts to some sort of grand negative reversal. This brings up a crucial point for me in terms of the broader importance of Commonwealth and the Empire series in general. As Zizek has stated on numerous occasions, himself borrowing from Fredrick Jameson, it is far easier today to imagine the end of human life do to environmental holocaust than even basic transformation of the global capitalist system. This is usually offered within the context of a more general lamentation about how the neoliberal moment exerts tremendous downward pressure on our ability to imagine collective paradigms of social transformation. The precise aim of Commonwealth is to offer a creative design for a new ontology of democratic possibility (a performance of imaginative possibility). This does not mean, of course, that Hardt and Negri should not be subject to critique. In fact as we will see in further posts, critiques of their project were incredibly productive in the formation of this project. It is, however, necessary to consider the dynamic in which critique is offered.

Recently, I have found myself defending Deleuze against people that I think fundamentally misunderstand the nature or point of his project. In my view, Hardt and Negri’s project embodies Deleuze’s insistence that the value of criticism lies in its ability to transform and affect. In each of his books on Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Deleuze offers plenty of criticism, particularly of Kant, however, these projects are all undertaken in the spirit of pushing the philosophical systems of these thinkers into new territory and in the process simultaneously transforming their projects into something new and dynamic (isn’t this Zizek’s point regarding the Haitian revolution?). Everywhere one peers within Commonwealth, one can locate the stamp of this Deleuzian legacy from their treatment of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, to their deployment of the concepts of love, poverty, and altermodernity. The emphasis is not only to unravel faulty assumptions and open up blockages, but to pave the way for new possibilities for thought and being. My comments here are not in any way to suggest that these concepts along with Hardt and Nergi’s theoretical treatment of the multitude are not without their limitations. It is essential that these limitations be made visible and struggled over. However, if we are to adopt Hardt and Negri’s ethico-political co-ordinates, this process would orient itself toward making these limitations useful in the sense of expanding and sharpening our analytical, ethical, and political attunements. Such an approach seems to me to point toward a way out of the de-politicizing neoliberal deadlock. However, this is precisely what Zizek and others have disingenuously failed to do in their efforts to expel Deleuze from contemporary social and political thought (check out this brilliant analysis by Steven Shaviro of Peter Hallward’s recent assassination attempt)

With all this being said, what are the limitations and possibilities of altermodernity as a conceptual figure of revolutionary praxis? In a sense, it is not possible to fully answer this question from this chapter alone. Many of the points raised in Part 2 are developed in much more theoretical detail in later chapters, and not before running the ideas through their critique of political economy in Part 3. Here, as a preliminary matter, I would like to address three interrelated critiques. First, critics allege that Hardt and Negri inadvertently reproduce a kind of Marxian developmentalist teleology through their claim that global capitalism produces both the “objective” and “subjective” conditions of its own demise. Submerged within this critique is a second one that refers to Hardt and Negri’s apparent messianic tendencies, connected to their supposed “faith” in the affirmative power of the multitude to govern itself in horizontal co-operative networks. Third, there is also a great deal of contempt for the notion of affirmation itself as a critical basis of praxis. Doesn’t such emphasis on creativity and affirmation reproduce neoliberal desiring subjects of capital? How can we effectively combat capital without directly negating it? And on and on….Hardt and Negri directly address the first criticism in Part 2 by engaging historical determinism as a misguided vestige of Marxism’s relationship to modernity (which does not in any way negate validity of Marxism as analysis or basis for political struggle!). In relation, they obliquely address both the first and second criticisms by insisting that the move into altermodernity does not share any determined relationship to the present, however, in those moments where it has emerged (Bolivia, Chiapas, etc) it has already embodied many of the characteristics of the multitude that they describe: horizontal organizational forms and intersectional alliances coupled with various dynamics of social production (i.e. new strategies of collective action, imagination, and political creation). Rather than emerging as historical necessity or existing simply as a utopian revolutionary fantasy, these movements embody concrete manifestations of the multitude as it engages in transforming the political relations in which it is immersed and in the process transforms itself through the generation of new forms of social life. As for the last point, Hardt and Negri take great pains to insist (particularly through their mobilization of singularity and multiplicity which we will take up later in further posts) that political articulations contain potential for furthering either reactionary or liberatory aims. The point of altermodernity is to recognize that the existence of the former need not negate the possibility of the latter as it strives to inaugurate potentials for as yet unimagined ways of thinking and acting with others.

What I would like to say in closing out these scattered remarks is that I am interested in continuing to think about criticism in a way that is generative, that opens up rather than closes down productive possibilities for thinking through new intellectual and ethico-political connections. In further posts this will have to mean bringing our notes of Commonwealth into more of a direct conversation with our own interests and projects.

Paul has posted his summary of Part 2 of Commonwealth at Critical Stew:

Part 2: Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)

2.1 Antimodernity as Resistance

Power and Resistance Within Modernity

In this section Hardt and Negri problematise the traditional dialectic opposition of modernity/antimodernity. This opposition, they argue, is what gives rise to problematic notions of modernity as an “unfinished project,” inherently good, and simply in need of further advance. They counter the traditional view of modernity as a process of a benign, universalised enlightened European sensibility that civilises an oppositional savage external world, by proposing that modernity itself is dualistic, characterised by the immanent coupling of domination and resistance. The forces of antimodernity, they argue, cannot be seen as being outside modernity but rather internal to it. This means that modernity, for Hardt and Negri, should be seen first and foremost as a power relation. In order to facilitate this ontological shift they first draw on contemporary characterisations of coloniality as a series of “encounters.” Encounters, as opposed to conquests, acknowledge the mutual mixtures and transformations experienced by the coloniser and colonised. Examples given include the adaptation by colonialists to pre-existing spatial layouts of Aztec city states and the influence of Iroquois Federalism on the political history of the United States. The language of encounter misses the violence of coloniality and thus Hardt and Negri continue with a psychoanalytic metaphor: European modernity is “psychotic” because it forecloses the possibility of alternative existences and the influence of the subjugated on the dominant. This is evident in attempts to erase alternate or antimodern histories, which are seen as a threat from the outside, as opposed to being constitutive of modernity itself. Finally, though centre/periphery models come closest to Hardt and Negri’s proposed duality, they run the risk of homogenising both the coloniser and colonised. “The West” is seen as the only “pole of domination,” without internal struggles and resistances, while “the rest” is seen as uniformly subordinate, without it’s own axes of domination. When modernity is understood as a power relation then seeing modernity as an unfinished project is much less benign than is suggested by Habermas and other theorists of social democracy. “More modernity,” Hardt and Negri argue, “is not an answer to our problems.” (71)

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I just finished reading Loic Wacquant’s new book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. The book accompanies two other recent books by Wacquant (professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley) that explore similar themes: Urban Outcasts and Prisons of Poverty. Punishing the Poor is a detailed sociological analysis of the material and symbolic mechanisms and historical coordinates intertwining the simultaneous retreat of social welfarism and the advancement of new modes of social inequality, the precaritization of labor, and mass incarceration. While these trends have been shared in varying degrees across Western democratic states, Wacquant roots much of his analysis in the “penalization of poverty” in the United States, making the claim that U.S. post-welfare logics have provided the dominant frames guiding contemporary realignments of European governance and social policy restructuring.

There isn’t much here not already widely accepted by social scientists. Wacquant’s primary argument, echoing his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, is that “the downsizing of the social welfare sector of the state and concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are functionally linked, forming, as it were, two sides of the same coin of state restructuring in the nether regions of urban space in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (43). In other words, as the conjoined narratives and structural practices of deregulation and moral responsibility have produced new forms of social insecurity, cultural approbation, and punitive “workfarist” policies for low-income and racialized populations—i.e. those populations left most precarious in the hyper-mobile and flexible circuits of the global economy—the state has expanded its control, surveillance, and punishment functions. Wacquant thus describes the neoliberal state as a “centaur state, guided by a liberal head mounted on an authoritarian body, that applies the doctrine of “laissez-faire” upstream, when it comes to social inequalities and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, deregulation of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or removal of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally paternalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their consequences on a daily level” (43).

A central point in Wacquant’s analysis is that the rise in the penal arm of the neoliberal state serves a variety of key political functions in the government of social insecurity:

The renewed utility of the penal apparatus in the post-Keynesian era of insecure employment is threefold: (1) it works to bend the fractions of the working class recalcitrant to the discipline of the new fragmented service wage-labor by increasing the cost of strategies of exit into the informal economy of the street; (2) it neutralizes and warehouses its most disruptive elements, or those rendered wholly superfluous by the recomposition of the demand for labor; and (3) it reaffirms the authority of the state in daily life within the restrictive domain henceforth assigned to it. The canonization of “the right to security,” correlative to the dereliction of the “right to employment” in its old form (that is, full-time and with full benefits, for an indefinite period, and for a living wage enabling one to reproduce oneself socially and to project oneself into the future), and the increased interest in, and resources granted to the enforcement of order as just the right time to shore up the deficit of legitimacy suffered by political-decision makers, owing to the very fact that they have abjured the established missions of the state of the social and economic front” (7).

Like his other books, Punishing the Poor assembles an incredibly rich and rigorous collection of data to back up its major claims. Armed with a mountain of statistical evidence and acute attention to historical detail, the book pulls no punches as it surveys the intersection of social insecurity and punishment within the neoliberal state across the vectors of political economy and culture. For those interested in the politics of poverty and the law under neoliberalism the book is definitely worth checking out. In particular, Wacquant is very adept at approaching these issues from a variety of different theoretical standpoints while distilling his prose into clever, punchy, and insightful polemical figures. What I see as the fundamental weakness of Wacquant’s work is that it doesn’t delve deeply into questions of agency, resistance, and/or democratic alternatives to the neoliberal juggernaut. Perhaps no other contemporary sociologist has more advanced our understanding of the relations between the post-industrial prison and inner-city poverty, spatial stigmatization, and enclosure. However, Wacquant doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of thinking beyond these relations. Admittedly, in Urban Outcasts he does do an excellent job of dispelling the myths of the contemporary ghetto as a site of total dysfunction, highlighting how such narratives serve to reproduce in both popular and scholarly discourses racist stereotypes while missing the objective conditions of the highly complex social systems and norms that structure daily life in the most dispossessed and disenfranchised spaces of the urban. In my view, however, this doesn’t go far enough in thinking about alternative democratic movements.

While I think Wacquant could do more on this front, he nonetheless does conclude with a brief section on “how to escape the law and order state”. “To avoid getting locked into a penal escalation without end or exit, it is indispensable to renconnect the debate on crime with the paramount social question of the new century, which it now screens from view: the advent of desocialized wage labor, vector of social insecurity, and of increasing material, familial, educational, health, and even mental precariousness. For one can no longer order one’s perception of the social world and conceive of the future when the present is obstructed and turns into a struggle for day to day survival” (281). Wacquant proceeds to offer a series of brief suggestions for re-thinking the economic and cultural valences of insecurity and crime. Unfortunately, these recommendations including “defending the left arm of the state” (a valid and important task to be sure!) are not offered with nearly the depth or theoretical precision as the critique, and can be seen as offering not much more than social democratic reformism as opposed to a more forward looking project of fundamental transformation.

Since my first post on Commonwealth, my friend Paul and I have decided to launch a small intra-blog project. We will first continue to write up a set of notes for the book and to cross-post them on our blogs as well as to another public theory blog belonging to a friend of ours. This is in the interest and spirit of generating critical conversation. Next, we are going to co-write a book review. Unlike, these basic notes we hope to accomplish two things in the review (1) excavate some productive criticisms/limitations of Hardt and Negri’s project (2) create something new by thinking with and against Hardt and Negri in the context of our respective intellectual interests. For me, this means thinking about what productive insights Commonwealth might contribute to discussions of educational policy, security, and insecurity, and for Paul, it means thinking about online communities, internet surveillance, and theories of gifting and exchange. Of course, we hope to also think critically about how these fields speak to one another, the common, and possibilities for social transformation. This underscores a larger project we are working on that seeks to problematize issues of internet surveillance within the neoliberal University by looking at issues of campus-based corporate anti-piracy campaigns and questions of security and governmentality.

Preface

In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.

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This is the introduction to a book chapter I was working on. I ended up ditching it and doing something else. I might come back it at a later time.

Contemporary life is punctuated by a variety of seemingly interminable forms of insecurity. Economic instability, proliferating anxieties over the self and the Other, eroded social safety nets, permanent war, and a looming environmental apocalypse all mark an encroaching political-economy of risk and uncertainty. To borrow a well-worn neologism from Ulrich Beck, we increasingly inhabit a “risk society” marked by an ever expanding constellation of ontological fears both real and imagined. In turn, new insecurities give way to new geographies and technologies of risk management and social control from the high-tech fortification of domestic life to the heightened policing of public spaces, institutions, and marginalized populations. In an atomized political culture dominated by commercial concerns and values, shared public responsibility for security collapses into private, corporate-led technocratic solutions and expanded law enforcement powers. The central danger born from this cycle of risk and control is the suffocating pressure it exerts on the critical and imaginative resources necessary to question and thereby collectively address the underlying systemic causes of human insecurity and suffering.

This climate of expediency and fear has enabled a culture of control to take root in public education. In recent years, school systems across the United States have turned to the corporate and criminal justice sectors in order to ostensibly make schools “safe”. This has meant the adoption of new risk management strategies and enormous outlays of public capital on CCTV cameras, ID card systems, metal detectors, biometric scanners, drug and weapons sweeps, armed security police, zero tolerance policies, and lock-down procedures. To get a sense of scale, today, 79% of all US school districts are now wired with surveillance cameras, with many cameras, such as in the Chicago Public Schools, directly monitored from police stations. Since the year 2000, the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Service (‘COPS’) has freed up as much as $350 million dollars annually to place armed police in schools. The New York City Public Schools now have more police patrolling the halls than the total number of officers in the Boston Police Department. These trends represent an unprecedented incursion of state power into public schools precisely at a time when commitments to equitable distributions in resources are being eclipsed by attempts to restructure education through market reforms and corporate governing strategies.

School securitization is generally presented as a politically neutral and/or inevitable response to various imminent threats. However, the securitization of educational environments needs to be understood as symptomatic of a shift away from the material and ethical referents of social democracy and toward the austere mechanisms of the corporate state. This is marked by rampant commercialization/privatization, public disinvestment, the precaritization of work, and the expansion of economic and sociopolitical inequalities. As David Garland has observed, the “insecure character of today’s social and economic circumstances becomes the social surface that gives rise to our newly emphatic, overreaching concern with control and to the urgency with which we segregate, fortify, and exclude.” This intensive desire for control extends into public education through pervasive insecurities over youth. On the one hand, the securitization of education is presented as necessary to protect children from various perils. In this narrative, youth are imagined as under siege predominately from dangerous “Others”: terrorists, pedophiles, pandemic viruses, and criminals. Here, school securitization provides a means to assuage the anxieties of parents and to fulfill the needs of policy makers for “order, efficiency, and predictability in an increasingly complex, scary, and fragmented social world.” On the other hand, in the corporate media, television, and films, youth, particularly working class and minority youth, are often presented as morally corrupt and predatory. These “folk devils” of popular imagination work to legitimate “enhanced” practices of discipline and punishment in schools as well as the suspension of civil rights for youth.

Seizing on these trends is a corporate security industry – currently one of the fastest growing commercial sectors in the US. Education has become a particularly hot market for security firms as school orders now frequently outstrip sales to prisons and airports. According to Jim Dodrei of Texas based Garret Metal Detectors,

we never dreamed there would be markets in schools. Now its the largest-selling segment of our business…three or four years ago we would hear parents saying, ‘We do not want metal detectors. It looks like a prison’ now they are demanding a safe environment.

Clamoring for more “safety”, parents, administrators, and politicians have come to increasingly rely on the corporate sector/media for defining and providing the “expert” knowledge and technology of school security. Christopher Robbins has recently written that as “safety is reified as a commodity, schools can never have enough safety.” Within a rush to the corporate sphere, educational environments are only thought to be made “safe” after the “security industry organizes the visual field…in ways that permit a persistent redefinition of what “safer” means, what devices promote the next level of safety, and who is seen as a threat.” Within neoliberal culture, school “safety” comes to signal a material and immaterial process of affective labor: a making “safe” for the consumption of security commodities and the securitization of schools and youth.

The corporate media and private security industry consistently mobilize fear in order to promote an agenda of securitization in public education. In particular, narratives of “child protection” and “child demonization” have come to define the school safety debate. This chapter explores the tensions within this discursive framing particularly as it reveals a symbiosis between commercialization and various embodied and sociopolitical states of exceptionality. I suggest that this has three primary consequences: (1) it enriches and empowers the security and law enforcement industry at the expense of the public (2) it obscures forms of structural violence which create and sustain insecurities in the educational system and in the lives of youth more broadly; (3) lastly, it normalizes a culture of risk and control in public education which delimits the conditions of possibility for conceiving security within social rather than militaristic terms. What is crucially needed is a reconnection of risk and security to questions of public responsibility, investment, and justice. Ultimately, a new ethics of safety must be cultivated through substantive commitments to social advancement, human agency, and equity.

It has been a long time since I have posted. This is because I have been crazy-busy writing and delivering conference papers (three in the last two weeks) and trying as I can to organize and write my PhD exam and dissertation proposal (a terrifically masochistic endeavor indeed!). Below is something I came across in my files today as I was writing a section for my comps exam which critiques Foucault’s use of biopower, particularly its Eurocentric orientation. I wrote this awhile ago in response to Ann Stoler’s critique of Foucauldian biopower, which she expands to include the reciprocal relations between European identity and colonialism.

In Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) Ann Stoler takes up Michel Foucault’s theoretical propositions in his A History of Sexuality Vol 1 and “refigures” them in a wider imperial field in order to link discourses of sexuality and the production of bourgeoisie subjectivity to race, and specifically to “racial thinking”. Thinking is a crucial word for it means that race must not only be confronted within an epistemological framework (how we know) but also within the ontological (what we know). Race is confounding in the sense that it blurs the material and symbolic lines of the visible and the invisible as well as the known and the unknown. I would like to briefly situate Stoler’s notion of “racial thinking” within this field of the thought and the un-thought and the visible and the invisible. By insisting that “racial thinking” was, and is, intrinsic to the production and circulation of discourses surrounding sexuality, Stoler is able to situate race as a fundamental category in the construction of not only what and how we know, but also who we are.

Stoler argues that the colonial “order of things” hinged upon the development of biopolitical technologies that enabled, albeit in an obvious asymmetry of violence, the efficient management of the colonizer and colonized alike, and bound them through mutually constitutive networks of material and affective relations. Intimately linked with the biopolitics of colonialism were discourses of sexuality which were interwoven with the subjectivization of colonial bodies: their study, classification, and manipulation in the interest of maximizing the rationality of the colonial endeavor. Discourses surrounding the racialized and sexualized bodies of the colonized were intrinsically tied to the production of bourgeoisie subjects. She claims that widely circulating notions of the racialized colonial “Other” served as “racially erotic counterpoints” which contrapuntally coded the terrain of European morality, health, and desire. Stoler argues that by failing to incorporate this expanded field of knowledge/power Foucault’s History of Sexuality misses a crucial axis in the production of European sexuality as well as the fundamental role of racial imaginaries in the historical modifications and developments of regulatory and normalizing techniques of rule. She asks, “was the obsessive search for “truth about sex” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this “truth about sex” recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those working through the language of race?”

According to Stoler, although Foucault understood that race underwrote the operation of power in the modern liberal (biopolitical) state, he failed to address how the material and symbolic exchange between metropole and colony produced mutually constitutive regimes of truth. Foucault restricted his analysis of race to a category of biopolitical regulation. In other words, he describes race as a “mechanism which allows biopower to work”, or, a category from which the vital capacity and health of bodies is regulated and managed in space and time. Stoler doesn’t feel like such a description goes nearly far enough in grappling with the way race is active within the constitution of modernity as it developed in out of the discourses and practices of imperialism. In this sense Stoler is making the claim that race is not only a “technique of power” but is a fundamental category underwriting the development the liberal state, its subjects, and the logics and rules governing and binding them together. By situating Foucault’s frame within this expanded field of power, Stoler argues that race functions as a grammar underlying the interstices of thought and experience within the construction of European and non European identities. This insistence deepens Foucault’s descriptions of biopower and complicates the field of thought and visibility. It claims that biopower is not only underwritten by the application of racial violence in the interest of maximizing the productive capacities of populations, but also predicated on racial thinking within the inter-subjective mediation of self and other. It involves the way ideas concerning difference are folded into thought and action as well as the processes of self governing and collective regulation. In this formulation, thinking is regulated by racial grammars which mediate the “relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence”…and the “untraceable identity markers” that negotiate what is possible to know and not to know, between what we see and do not see, and what we think and do not think.

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.