Preface

Perceptions acquire a rigidity that comes to light only when they break into pieces, only when they shatter. We just do not realize, most of the time, how hemmed in we are by them, these ways in which the world presents itself to us. And then, one day, as Chinua Achebe, following William Butler Yeats, puts it, things fall apart.¹ With such dislocations, the knowledge that, as it turns out, this fluff, this cotton wool, this unspecifiable environment, this atmosphere, held together, comes tumbling down. Who would have known that it was so important? This all too vague, ineffable, gauze, this finely woven, all but transparent, fabric of the world. It glues together the things we think we know, but is not itself knowledge. It is implicit, assumed, tacitly agreed upon. It facilitates knowledge; it feeds into the background that allows knowledge to have settled where it has. Malleable, but all too susceptible to fixity, having settled into undisturbed grooves along which our thoughts travel, into habits that structure perceptual patterns, into psychic and discursive tics that replay themselves over and over, repeating and refining themselves perhaps, but adhering more or less to the same scenario. There is something important about this fabric of the world not quite being knowledge, yet having something to do with knowledge. In being misaligned with what it is we think we know, it can turn into a site of resistance to knowledge.

What is the difference between failing to notice a pile of stones in an idyllic landscape, and seeing the pile of stones as a roadblock, preventing the access of Palestinians to goods vital to their survival? It is the difference between allowing one’s gaze to pass over a pile of stones as an unobtrusive part of the landscape, and seeing the pile of stones as preventing people who live on their native land from going to their place of work, from seeing their families, as a roadblock that interferes with their freedom of movement, with their way of life.² What is the difference between seeing something and not seeing it? Nothing more, perhaps than connecting a miniscule event, a small observation, with a series of other minute perceptions, and allowing the pattern they form to emerge as significant. What is the difference between trusting someone absolutely, and seeing them as a threat to one’s very existence? Or the difference between reading a situation in terms of racism, and not reading it as such? What is the difference between the pathological, and the so-called normal? Almost nothing. And yet there is all the difference in the world. A nuance, an inflection, the way a voice rises or a pair of eyes dip down, looking away from you, how a smug smile appears on a face in the morning, and how these gestures appear to fit into a pattern, or fail to do so.

Every now and then, a break occurs. A fissure, a rupture, a fault appears. Things shift. New objects become visible, things arrange themselves in different patterns, in new ways. We see things in a completely different light. How this happens is uncertain, and it cannot be foretold, prescribed or predicted. A historically sedimented environment, riven with affects, is just there. Until, all of a sudden, it isn’t. It undergoes a shift, and precisely as it does so, we can sometimes catch sight of it, just a glimpse at first, but slowly we can begin to record, classify, unpick, analyse, adumbrate its features. We can begin to put them together in a different way, discard some of them, refigure others, let them fall into new patterns, reimagine them. This might be done more or less consciously, more or less deliberately. With each slight shift, new possibilities can occur, new perspectives can open up as old ones close down.

This play back and forth, between objects in the world and our conceptual, imaginative and affective grasping of them is what Immanuel Kant considers in terms of the faculties of understanding, judgement and reason, and the knowledge of nature, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and the principles of morality that the faculties provide. We might say this play is what Kant refers to in The Critique of Judgment as ‘cognition in general’.³ To break the habits of perception is to break with patterns of knowledge, to rework the discursive frameworks that make sense of sensory knowledge, and to reframe the enunciative possibilities that define and legitimate knowledge as objective. Artists make such interventions; so do political actors. Art and politics are two different ways of redistributing the sensible, as Jacques Rancière puts it.⁴ What distinguishes them is that while politics focuses upon the emergence of a new collective subject, the emergence of a new ‘we’, art effects new forms of visibility, making available new possibilities for perceiving the world, and in the process rearranging the conditions of enunciative possibility.⁵

For quite a long while now, I have been thinking about how things become visible, while other things remain invisible, about what it takes for something to be seen, and why it eludes visibility, about the way in which politics is shaped by forces that are irreducible to concepts or intellect, about how there is something aesthetic, in the broadest sense, in this shaping, about how things arrange themselves, present themselves, are noticed or ignored, are read or remain insignificant, how they obtrude, or fade into the background t o the point of becoming not just negligible, but invisible, unavailable, unseen, non-existent: how they do not count.

A flick of a switch is all it takes. After which, nothing will ever be quite the same again. And yet, even if it is not the same as before, it too will become habitual, it will come to constitute part of the commonsensical way of seeing things. None of us is immune. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been part of it. I’ve been assimilated into the police order. So have you. The police order is how we think, how we make sense of the world, what constitutes itself as common sense. Take feminism, for example. First there was sexism. Then there was feminism. Feminism became part of the police order, insofar as it started policing who could, and who could not, count as a woman. Then there was the transgender movement, and as feminists, we found ourselves having to rethink why certain body parts had somehow become essential to what it had come to mean to be a woman, and who had the right to determine which body parts qualified, and how some feminism’s policing of bodies reflected in highly problematic ways the very order of thought it was trying to escape.

How we see things limits, or opens up, the possibilities for thought, and the meanings we attach to what we see. Shifts in perception are bound up with shifts in thinking, shifts in what seems possible or impossible. While changes in the perceptible are not related to changes in the possibility of that which can be thought by causal necessity, there is nonetheless an intricate relationship between on the one hand, what we see and what we do not see, between visibility and invisibility, between what we hear and what we do not hear or cannot hear, between the perceptible and the imperceptible, and on the other hand, the significance that assumes salience and legitimacy, circulates as knowledge and becomes sanctioned. There is, in other words, a relationship between what we see, hear or perceive – more specifically what it is possible to see – and the meanings that become prevalent, accepted or dominant, and which, as such, constitute, determine and govern the limits of both perception and understanding. The possibilities of comprehension are circumscribed by implicit political assumptions (and, I would add, psychological habits) that define the borders of communities, and as such, determine the contours and limits of comprehension. Things arrange themselves according to narratives that take on a certain self-evidence, and then they come to appear to us as the way things are, yet this very appearance, the very possibility of appearance, is already circumscribed by particular narratives, presenting themselves as if they were the truth, as if they had universal purchase, as if there were no point of access from which to question them. Meanings become institutionalized, and appear unavoidable. The way that the world appears to us conforms to institutionalized ways of appearance. The very possibilities of seeing and knowing, of doing and being are circumscribed in advance, but this circumscription remains unavailable for thematization, insofar as it coincides with what presents itself as the only possible way of seeing. This is what Rancière calls the ‘police order’, which presents itself as the natural order. It passes itself off as the truth, presenting itself as simply given.⁶

The efficacy of political or aesthetic dissensus is unpredictable and contingent. It erupts without warning. When it does so, things begin to line up differently in a new order of the perceptible, they settle into new places, occupy new functions, and the way things line up distributes people in new roles. There is a ‘redistribution of the sensible’. Sometimes art effects a shift in perception. There is no telling when, or whether, it will do this. There is no causal necessity, there is nothing inherent about the impact a work will have on a viewer, or the effect a film will have on the spectator. There is no direct line of transmission from artist to audience, no guarantee that what the author intends is that which the reader will understand. And this is as it should be. Otherwise, the work would be didactic; it would fall into the trap of telling us what to think, and we would become passive recipients of ideas that are communicated to us. The artist would reveal a hidden truth, the artwork would be revelatory, and the spectator would remain an empty vessel, ready to be filled with whatever the one who knows the truth intends to communicate. The artist would be the one who knows, and the spectator would be the one who is ignorant, in whom knowledge is deposited, as if a passive repository. Enlightenment would be granted.⁷

Yet this is not how art, or knowledge for that matter, works. Learning is not passive, it is active, and seeing, hearing or perceiving are activities too. To assume that there are those who know and those who do not (and cannot), is to buy into an assumption that there is a fundamental divide between two categories of people, a divide that entitles those who know to set the standards for what counts as knowledge, and to thereby disqualify those who do not know from constituting legitimate knowers. They can only be recipients of the knowledge that belongs to those who control what counts as knowledge. When Aristotle distinguishes between voice and speech, or when Plato distinguishes between social classes, what is at stake is not just differentiating between those who have, and those who lack logos (speech/reason), but also distinguishing between those who are entitled to set the terms of what counts as knowledge, and those who are not, between those who define what constitutes legitimate knowing, and those who are excluded from setting such standards, those whose voices are heard as speech, as contributing to the whole, and those whose voices have no place, those who have no part.⁸

There is a fundamental miscount that Rancière sees as characteristic of a politics that construes democracy as consensus.⁹ This miscount goes hand in hand with a negation of politics, a negation of the struggle of those who have no part that is considered as meaningful. Their voices do not count; they cannot be heard as speech. This is key. It is not that their voices are not heard at all; it is that they are dismissed as meaningless, as mere noise, as pure plaint. They do not signify. They do not signify as meaning anything meaningful. They only signify as noise, or as suffering, as complaint, or as revolt – as unintelligible. They signify as just so much nonsense, to be quelled by the powers that be, by those in charge of meaning, by the police order. They signify as animal noises, as grunts, and groans, as cries and moans, as pain. They signify as unintelligible noises that cannot be integrated into prevailing discourse, because to integrate them would be to change prevalent meanings, to restructure the account of what counts as meaningful.

When such a restructuring happens, and it happens rarely according to Rancière, there is politics. When previously discounted voices are made to count through a reorganization of what counts as meaningful, there is dissensus. For Rancière, politics is not defined by consensus, but by dissensus. When dissensus takes place, when it is staged, a wrong is demonstrated. There is a divergence of meaning from itself, there is a reframing of common sense. Someone makes an intervention, and that intervention becomes political in the sense that it reorders the domain of what passes itself off as reality, and in the sense that the intervention speaks for and as a class that is not counted. In speaking for those who have no part, a subject contests the miscount, by making those who remained uncounted count as part of the political. What is said or staged starts to make sense. It starts to be heard. It is translated into a language that renders it meaningful, instead of being dismissed as nonsense. What this means is that at the same time, it constitutes a challenge to the boundaries of what hitherto qualified as meaningful.

Art and politics are intertwined with one another in various distributions of the sensible, in the ways the world appears to us, and in the ways it is parcelled out, authorized and legitimated.¹⁰ Such is their entanglement that subjects pronounce upon the meaning of objects, their significance, and their place within discursive systems in ways that tend to demarcate a particular place for art and artists that is rigorously delineated from other objects and from everyone else. Rancière disputes the permanence of any such distinction. For him, ‘Art and politics do not constitute permanent, separate realities’.¹¹ For Rancière, there is no permanent boundary separating works of art from other objects. Indeed, a hallmark of what he calls the aesthetic regime is precisely the refutation of any permanent distinction between the objects of art and those of ordinary life. By this he means that: (i) what constituted art for what he identifies with the (chronologically earlier) representative regime or the (still earlier) ethical regime does not necessarily constitute art in the aesthetic regime, and that (ii) anything can become art, that there are no intrinsic objects of art.¹² The fact that Rancière declines to ascribe any permanent, ontological reality to art or politics means that what counts as an artwork can differ over time. ‘One and the same statue of a goddess may or may not be art, or may be art differently, depending on the regime in which it is apprehended’, says Rancière (AD 28, ME 43).

What the work of art does not do, according to Rancière’s conception of what makes art political, is to tell us what to think, or ensure a particular reaction, or establish a causal relation between whatever affect the artist might have intended to inspire, and an action that intervenes in the world. Political art, in the sense that Rancière understands it, does not depict a state of affairs that it decries in order to counteract that state of affairs. It does not content itself with depicting victims of genocide in order to solicit action, for example. If it did so, the artist would be appealing to a straightforward, causal relation between whatever the intention behind an artistic representation of a particular state of affairs might be, the promotion of certain, negative affects in the spectator or viewer for example, and the translation of those affects into a motivation to act in the world in order to transform the situation represented.

In what follows, I pay particular attention to the way in which visibility itself is underwritten by certain legitimating narratives that prevent us from seeing, blinding us, and eclipsing from view that which might later come to be seen as quite obviously unjust, exclusionary, unequal or racist. Such narratives have often been unselfconsciously woven into the fabric of national collectivities. The distribution and figuration of affects play into the ways in which such collectivities understand themselves.¹³ To question the ways of seeing that such narratives legitimate is to interrogate that which passes as sanctioned, publicly accepted mythologies that have established themselves as truths, or as just the way things are.

It is not just that there is a kind of aesthetic orientation that organizes our perception, and that cannot be reduced to concepts. While, on the one hand, politics is arranged aesthetically, on the other hand, aesthetics, what we see or hear, is infused with signification; there is no strict dividing line between the objects of politics and the objects of art. There is no rigid, ontological divide, as there is for Emmanuel Levinas, for example. Objects of art can become, or can also be, objects of life. Art can also be a commodity. There is, here, none of the purism found in Theodor Adorno’s ‘modernist rigor’ (DPA 201). An image is part of a complex network of signs, which never stands alone.¹⁴ This is not to say that art and politics are the same, any more than the artist and the viewer are the same. They are not the same.¹⁵ Yet, neither are they absolutely other, absolutely foreign to one another.

One of the challenges that Rancière’s work presents is its investment in a constant, deliberate and strategic blurring of boundaries, such that discourses which other philosophers have distinguished have to be rethought. Rather than occupying distinct realms, Rancière understands politics and art as ‘intermix[ed]’ with one another.¹⁶ Yet, at the same time as construing politics and art as always implicating one another, Rancière is also committed to maintaining a tension between the two, refusing to resolve one into another, resisting any hierarchical resolution.¹⁷ He insists upon ‘the aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151), with the result that the political impact of works of art remains undecidable (see PA 64), its effects outside the control of artists themselves (see PA 62). The figure of dissensus – conflict, disagreement, resistance, polemic – is central to the operation of Rancière’s thought, informing his understanding of politics and his understanding of the potential art has to be political in the aesthetic regime. Political dissensus and art as dissensual are not the same as one another, yet they are always in relation to one another, informing one another. The distinction between art and politics is not categorical. They do not occupy permanently ontologically distinct realms. Another way of putting this is that the judgements, according to which philosophers have distinguished ontological realms, are themselves bound up with the aesthetic, and that categorical distinctions turn out to be contingent, historical and infused with politics.¹⁸ The relationship between art and politics is negotiated. To acknowledge the impermanence of art, its porosity as a category, is to acknowledge it is a historically and politically inflected concept.

Notes

1 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Penguin, 2001). Achebe’s title quotes a line from William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’.

2 See Jacques Rancière’s discussion of Sophie Ristelhueber’s photograph from her West Bank series, WB 2005, an illustration and discussion of which appears in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 103–4; Le spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), pp. 113–14. Hereafter cited in the text with the abbreviation ES, SE followed by page numbers.

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 102 and p. 104.

4 See Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’ in Dissensus, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 141. Hereafter this essay will be cited in the text as DPA.

5 As José Medina points out in The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), the language of sight might be taken as discriminatory against those who identify as not sighted or partially sighted. That the language of vision operates pervasively in Anglo-American and other Western contexts as a metaphor for a much broader sense of comprehension and intellection testifies to the predominance of visual culture as a model for understanding. While I retain the metaphor of vision in keeping with Rancière, I also want to acknowledge, along with Medina, the problematic baggage this term carries with it. I endorse Medina’s eloquent consideration of the issue in his foreword, ‘Insensitivity and Blindness’.

6 The police order is that which passes itself off as just the way things are, as fact. As Rancière puts it, ‘What characterizes the mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions, and utopias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus by hollowing out that “real” and multiplying it in a polemical way. The practice of fiction undoes, and then re-articulates, connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs and spaces, framing a given sense of reality, a given “commonsense”. It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done’ (DPA 148–9).

7 Rancière distances himself from the desire to believe in what he refers to as the ‘straight line between perception, affection, comprehension and action’ (ES 103, SE 113), by associating this belief with what he calls the ‘logic of the stultifying pedagogue’ (ES 14, SE 20).

8 Rancière emphasizes that ‘Politics exists because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech’, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 22–3. La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1995), p. 44. Hereafter cited as DT, M in the text. That is, those who endow themselves with the capacity for logos, also render judgements about what counts as legitimate speech, and what does not, relegating the latter to ‘noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt’ (DT 23, M 45).

9 Those who have no part, the people whom Plato confines with a lie about the nature of their souls (see DT 16, M 36), are discounted. They are the ‘constitutive wrong … of politics as such’ (DT 14, M 34). Hence, Rancière concerns himself with the ‘founding wrong of politics’, a wrong before which, he says, ‘Quite simply, parties do not exist’ (DT 39, M 64). They do not exist due to the fundamental ‘miscount of that demos that is both part and whole’ (DT 58, M 89). Politics is the deployment of this wrong, this dispute, while the rich indulge in a negation of politics, by denying that those who have no part should have a part (see DT 14, M 34).

10 Even before an artist intends anything, there is, according to Rancière, a ‘politics of aesthetics … predates artistic intentions and strategies: the theatre, the museum and the book are “aesthetic realities” in and of themselves. In other words, they are specific distributions of space and time, of the visible and the invisible, that create specific forms of “commonsense”’ (DPA 141).

11 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 25; Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 39. Hereafter cited in the text as AD, ME.

12 As we will see further, while Rancière associates the ethical regime with Plato and the representative regime with Aristotle, he does not understand these regimes as merely historical; contemporary art can embody elements of both regimes.

13 The work of Falguni Sheth and Sara Ahmed contributes to an understanding of the metaphorical work that emotions do in shoring up certain configurations of the public as if they were immovable and unchangeable, and in understanding how certain associative meanings operate to delegitimate particular subjects as unruly, or threatening. See Falguni A. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: State University of New York, 2009), and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).

14 For Rancière, an image is ‘a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid’ (ES 93, SE 103) and ‘it never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit’ (ES 99, SE 108). So, when an artist changes the frame, speed or scale of what we perceive they ‘make the invisible visible’ or ‘question the self-evidence of the visible’ or ‘rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely … invent novel relations between things and meanings that were previously unrelated’ (DPA 141).

15 As Rancière says, the ‘film remains a film’ and the ‘spectator remains a spectator’ (DPA 151).

16 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 62. Hereafter cited as PA. See also DPA 133.

17 See, for example, Rancière ‘The Monument and its Confidences’, Dissensus, p. 183. Hereafter cited in the text as DMC.

18 See PA 50 and 65.

List of Abbreviations

Rancière, Jacques