4
The purpose of the this chapter is to provide an overview of the three regimes of art Rancière identifies, and to build on the previous chapter in order to understand how dissensus functions to redistribute the sensible, not only in politics but also in terms of art. Rancière’s understanding of dissensus, which is characteristic of, but not completely co-determinate with, the third regime, the aesthetic regime, whereby art or politics creates a split, clash or confrontation of two worlds, is indebted to certain key aspects of Kant and Hegel. Focusing upon this philosophical legacy, I emphasize the permeability of the distinction between art and politics for Rancière, yet at the same time, the importance of not completely collapsing art and politics into one another. Along the way, I suggest there is a sense in which Rancière thinks Lyotard ends up captive to the very representative regime he would escape, despite his best intentions.
While he does not share Hegel’s pessimism about the fate of art, nor his teleological conception of history, and he certainly does not affirm the political implications of Hegel’s philosophy, one might say that Rancière radicalizes and generalizes Hegel’s insight that art is art, only insofar as it is something else as well. Rancière allows the consequences of this ‘basic contradiction’ to ramify across the spectrum of art, philosophy and politics in a way that resists the reticence philosophers typically display in the face of the political.1 For inevitably, the question of what kind of thing is a work of art, and whether or how the kind of being we ascribe to it is ultimately distinct from the discourse of philosophy itself, is inhabited, structured and informed by ethical, moral and political commitments. How far these commitments are allowed to explicitly orchestrate philosophical reflections in the field that has come to be identified in the modern period as aesthetics, and how far they remain in the background, silently conducting what can and what cannot be said, varies considerably from philosopher to philosopher.
What is not in doubt, however, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to definitively separate the ontological hierarchy that is posited between the work of art on the one hand, and the philosophical concept on the other, from any accompanying ethico-political commitments. Whether the latter are explicitly stated, systematically explicated, and definitively defended as in Plato, or merely hinted at and left for the reader to reconstruct, ontology and politics are invariably intertwined to the point of being mutually constitutive of one another when it comes to the question of art.
Yet so often, when they do not manage to sidestep the issue altogether, philosophers adopt a mildly apologetic stance regarding the politics of art, such that the political overtones of aesthetics are either minimized, or dismissed as an unfortunate but inessential aspect of their thinking about art. Important exceptions to this include Adorno, whose solution to the relationship between politics and art proves problematic for Rancière, as we will see. In a refreshingly rigorous fashion Rancière resolutely refuses to play down the politics of aesthetics, making this a major feature of his philosophical enquiry, and leading us through the conceptual contours of the history of aesthetics in such a manner as to uncover, rather than downplay, their political commitments. In doing so, not only does he avoid subordinating art to philosophy or philosophy to art, but also eschews the melancholic discourses that follow in the wake of Hegel’s proclamation that art has come to an end, the effort to safeguard art against its alleged impurification by commodification or commercialism we see in Adorno, or the enlisting of art in the service of an ethics of absolute alterity that evacuates or disguises its politics, a gesture Rancière attributes to Levinas and Lyotard.
In the case of Plato, who becomes emblematic for Rancière of the ethical reign of images, his political agenda is quite overt. Plato famously subordinates the image to philosophy, on the basis that the artist and the philosopher (whether wittingly or not) should share the same intention, but one falls woefully short, where the other succeeds in asking after the true nature of the intelligible world. The artist is condemned because artistic images fail to measure up to the only standard of value Plato judges to be applicable, which is the standard that philosophy provides. Images are judged to be deficient because they are misleading, because they deceive us about the truth, and as such, they can only play a strictly negative role, one that is detrimental to knowledge; they merely achieve obfuscation. Images are a dangerous distraction from what is deemed to be the proper task of philosophy, which is to discover the eternal truth of the Ideas. Plato thus assumes a normative and ontological continuity of images and concepts, but finds the former wanting.2 Since images are simply confused or deficient Ideas, artists are to be outlawed in so far as they are content to sow confusion and perpetuate misinformation. Images are only acceptable for Plato insofar as they uphold the ethical and ontological order of the truth.
Bolstering up his elevation of philosophers who pursue true knowledge over poets, whom Plato judges to distract from the truth, is a political division of social classes, such that those who produce images that amount to inferior imitations of true knowledge are relegated to the lower ranks of society. Thus, a rigidly hierarchical sociopolitical order supports, facilitates, permeates and is required by Plato’s condemnation of those whose images he understands to interfere with the true perception of the intelligible world.
Rancière emphasizes that Plato’s suspicion of mimesis is not just that it corrupts the truth, but that the mimetician confuses the social order, the division of labour that supports the hierarchy he sets up between images and truth, confining workers to a single role, which excludes them from participating in political deliberation. As such, it is the duality of mimetic activity that is problematic for Plato, who maintains that the artisan is assigned ‘by nature’ to one task only, an assignation that restricts artisans to the private space of their work, which leaves them no time for anything else. Each must operate according to his or her (mythologically assigned) nature, and perform the task for which they are best suited, for the good of the whole. This economic distribution of roles and occupations is also a distribution of place and time, a distribution of the sensible, a distribution that is disrupted by the mimetician who ‘provides a public stage for the “private” principle of work’, and thereby ‘sets up a stage for what is common to the community’ (PA 43).
Plato’s view is clearly driven by an ethical agenda that enlists politics in his metaphysical and epistemological commitments. Hence Rancière identifies Plato with what he calls the ethical regime of images. Plato judges images as wanting by the stringent standard of philosophy, and hence judges both those who produce what he takes to be corrupt images of the truth, and those who are deceived by these misleading images, as inferior to philosophers. We can safely assert that few philosophers approach the subject of artistic images with a political agenda that is as overt as Plato’s.
Aristotle, whose Poetics inaugurates the representative regime, wants to ‘extract’ tragedy from Plato’s world, which demands of mimetic representations an ‘ontological consistency and ethical exemplariness’.3 He seeks instead, to impose on it the ‘order’ of representation. He thinks he can do so by transforming the ‘ethical pathos of knowledge into a stable relationship’ such that mimesis becomes a relationship of concordance between a ‘poiesis’ or ‘a way of making’ and an ‘aesthesis’ or an ‘economy of affects’ (FI 112, DI 129). As royalty, Sophocles’s Oedipus ‘satisfies in exemplary fashion the Aristotelian criterion of the prince who suffers reversals of fortune’ (FI 117, DI 133) in a tragic plot that Aristotle understands to elicit the affects of pity and fear. Rancière’s explication of the features of the representative regime, which he takes to follow on from Plato’s ethical regime, and with which Rancière contrasts the aesthetic regime, emphasizes that it is governed not simply by the ideal of verisimilitude or mimesis. Rather, the representative regime is characterized by a host of conventions concerning the propriety or impropriety of what can and cannot be represented, what it is appropriate to represent and what not, what can be seen and heard, and what cannot, what should be felt and what not. Ultimately then, the representative regime turns out to comprise a series of rules and regulations that dictate what can be represented and how it should be represented, and therefore also what cannot be represented: ‘If there are things that cannot be represented’, says Rancière, ‘it is precisely in this regime’ (FI 117, DI 133). Far from art being representative in any straightforward, objective and impartial way, it has always been highly selective in what it depicts, in the manner in which it represents, and in terms of the audience it assumes.
The grounding presupposition of the representative regime, as Rancière understands it, is that it defines some subjects as appropriate for artistic representation, while ruling out others as inappropriate (see FI 117-18, DI 133-34). In an extended example that Rancière develops in relation to the representative regime, he suggests that when, in 1659, Pierre Corneille decides to stage his own version of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, he introduces a series of changes designed to render appropriate that which he finds inappropriate. Corneille thus moves offstage two elements that he judges to be excessive, namely the spectacle of Oedipus gouging out his own eyes and the oracles delivered by Tiresias, which he considers to reveal too much too soon. Corneille also introduces new characters, which allows him to include a love interest. Rancière understands Corneille’s manipulation of the plot as a judgement that Aristotle’s theory of tragedy on the one hand, failed to control the excesses of Sophocles’s Oedipus, and on the other hand, failed to rigorously subordinate the logic of the play to the logic of action. The key to Rancière’s understanding of the representative regime, and to representation ‘as such’ (FI 112, DI 128), is the idea that if an element is found to violate the rules of what passes for appropriate, that element can be changed, such that it becomes appropriate.
The ‘pathos of knowledge’ – which, Rancière suggests, Corneille understands to exceed the logic Aristotle seeks to impose on the tragic genre, of which he considers Oedipus Rex exemplary – refers to the intricate imbrication that pertains between Oedipus’s insistence on knowing ‘beyond the bounds of what is reasonable’, and Tiresias the blind prophet, who does not want to say what he knows, but who ‘says it without saying it’ and thereby prompts the reversion of Oedipus’s ‘desire to know into a refusal to hear’ (FI 114, DI 130). The logic of peripeteia, or reversal in terms of which Aristotle reads Oedipus – whose active knowledge turns to passive suffering, on his discovery that the criminal he seeks is none other than himself – is situated within Aristotle’s effort to harmonize ‘an autonomous arrangement of actions and the bringing into operation of affects’ (FI 115, DI 131). The audience comes to recognize and identify with ‘feelings, volitions and conflicts of will’ (FI 116, DI 132) across the distance that separates them from the ‘fictional entities’ (FI 116, DI 132) presented in characters that are ‘removed in space and time’ (FI 113, DI 129), and who therefore facilitate a dual dynamic of distance and identification.
For Corneille, then, Aristotle’s logic cannot contain the excess of Oedipus, whose gesture of blinding himself is too much, too monstrous. It violates the ‘dependency of the visible on speech’ (FI 113, DI 129), which subordinates visibility to the peculiar kind of ‘quasi-visibility’ that constitutes speech. For speech shows without showing; it shows, but it does not show too much. Drawing on Edmund Burke’s explication of the sublime, Rancière says, ‘The descriptions of Hell and the angel of evil in Paradise Lost produce a sublime impression because they do not allow us to see the forms they evoke and affect to show us’ (FI 113, DI 129).4 Were Milton to have shown these forms, the suggestion is, the sublime would have become grotesque, or monstrous, in the same way that Oedipus’s self-blinding is judged as monstrous, and therefore in need of correction, by Corneille. Speech must show that which is hidden or absent through an ‘under-determination’ of speech or through its ‘own failing, its restraint’ (FI 113, DI 129-30).
Not only does Oedipus, in Corneille’s assessment, go too far, so too does Tiresias, whose oracles say too much, giving away more than they should, and thus violating the logic of suspense and gradual revelation. They too are moved offstage by Corneille. Thus, an ‘excess of knowledge … thwarts the ordered unfolding of significations and revelations’ and an ‘excess of pathos … thwarts the free operation of the spectator’s affects’ (FI 115, DI 131). Further, Corneille ‘subjects the pathos of knowledge to a logic of action’ by introducing new characters, including, among others, a sister for Oedipus and a love interest for her. In providing other characters to whom the oracles (which in fact refer to Oedipus) might refer, Corneille thereby imposes a logic of intelligibility that subordinates the ‘ethical pathos of tragedy’ to a ‘logic of dramatic action’ (FI 116, DI 132) by identifying the causality of action with that of characters.
Summing up, Rancière claims that the representative regime employs a ‘triple constraint’ (FI 120, DI 136). First, there is a ‘visibility of speech that organizes a certain restraint of the visible’ (FI 120, DI 136). When too much is shown and too much is said too soon, it must be circumscribed. Secondly, this regime adjusts the ‘relations between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects’, governing them by the primacy of action. Some actions are removed from sight, while others are subordinated to the introduction of new characters. Thirdly, the representative regime adopts a ‘rationality peculiar to fiction’. 5 This regime of rationality ‘exempts its speech acts from the normal criteria of authenticity and utility of words and images’ and subjects them to ‘intrinsic criteria of verisimilitude and appropriateness’ (FI 120, DI 136).
If Aristotle’s Poetics, which hails Oedipus Rex as a model, inaugurates the representative regime for Rancière, this is because it institutes an order in which two hierarchies correspond to one another, that of form over matter, and the distinction of two types of humanity. The tragic poet is understood to impose an appropriate form on events. The plot is organized in such a way as to render the actions of characters intelligible and to elicit appropriate emotions. While what is judged appropriate might change over time, what remains is that ‘the dignity’ of the ‘forms’ of artwork is ‘attached to the dignity of their subjects and different sensible faculties attributed to those situated in different places’ (AD 12, ME 23). It is this correspondence between the subordination of passive matter to active form, and the domination of a class of people of refined sensibility capable of taste, over a class of people whose unrefined taste marks them as those for whom art should not be of concern that Rancière sees the aesthetic regime as suspending (see DMC 176-7), signalling the end of the ‘reign of free form over slavish matter’ (AD 32, ME 47-48).6 Thus there is a dual suspension of power, that of ‘form over matter’ and the corresponding suspension of the ‘power of the class of intelligence over the class of sensation, of men of culture over men of nature’ (AD 31, ME 46). Rancière credits the communicability in Kant’s ‘aesthetic universality’, which he reads through Friedrich Schiller (see DMC 176), for displacing this model of domination, according to which an ‘active intellectual faculty constrains passive sensible materiality. The aesthetic suspension of the supremacy of form over matter and of activity over passivity makes itself thus into the principle of a more profound revolution, a revolution of sensible existence’ (AD 32, ME 48).
Against the background of the regulatory schema for what can and cannot be shown that characterize the representative regime, unfolds the aesthetic regime, in which poetry is ‘anywhere and everywhere’ (FI 122, DI 138), and where the conventions for representation that circumscribe art in the representative regime, as rules for appropriate versus inappropriate subject matter, are abandoned. ‘There are no longer rules of appropriateness between a particular subject and a particular form, but a general availability of all subjects for any artistic form whatsoever’, says Rancière (FI 118, DI 134). In the aesthetic regime there are no limits placed on representation. Consequently, not only is it the case that, as Rancière puts it, ‘There is nothing that is “unrepresentable” in the aesthetic regime of art’ (DAR 131), but neither are there any intrinsic objects of art.7 This then becomes the hallmark of the aesthetic regime as Rancière understands it: the porosity of the category of art, its impermanence, its permeability. The boundary between art and ordinary life is constantly under negotiation.
When Marcel Duchamp shocks the world by placing a urinal in a museum and calling it art, he might be taken to illustrate Rancière’s thesis that ‘common objects may cross the border’ (DAR 125). Objects from ordinary life can become art.8 When the museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University devoted to teaching toleration puts on display an ashtray bearing a caricatured Jezebel, the ashtray ceases to be a commodity and becomes art. As Rancière says, ‘By becoming obsolete … any commodity or familiar article becomes available for art’ (DAR 126). So too, the statue of Juno Ludovisi is art ‘for us’ in the modern, contemporary world in a way that it was not for the Greeks. For the Greeks, according to Schiller and Hegel, Juno Ludovisi was an object of religious veneration in an epoch when art had not yet separated itself from life. It was not yet art in the sense that it embodied, rather, the collective, cultural and religious values of its people, while for ‘us’ the statue is no longer a religious icon. It no longer appears in the context of the world of the Greeks, the world in which it was constituted, harmoniously and seamlessly, as part of life itself, a world in which art did not yet occupy a separate domain from that of life. Torn from this world, the statue now appears in a museum. As such it is available as art to anyone who visits the museum, but it has lost the original function it had for the Greeks, as an expression of life, an expression of religious values.
Among the consequences of the continual renegotiation of the boundary separating works of art and the objects of ordinary life, in which can be discerned the Hegelian legacy of the historicity of art, is that objects which previously did not register as art can become art. Whether or not this Hegelian narrative about the seamless meshing of art and life for the Greeks is accurate is less significant for Rancière, than what it tells us about the historical status of the category of art, which shows itself to be malleable, shifting, contingent and unstable. Rather than taking up historicity in a teleological narrative, Rancière develops a narrative around a series of overlapping regimes, three regimes, which do not operate mutually exclusively of one another, but which are nevertheless associated with selective features of a historical sequence of philosophical figures (see PA 50) – first Plato, then Aristotle, then, most notably in the aesthetic regime, Kant and Hegel.
Rancière abstracts certain moments from Kant and Hegel, in the service of a larger narrative he wants to tell. Rancière’s deployment of Kant and Hegel in the aesthetic regime is driven less by any exhaustive exegetical fidelity, and more by a highly selective appropriation of certain ideas. His understanding of dissensus and the aesthetic free play is informed by the interplay of the faculties in Kant’s aesthetic judgement, yet at the same time, his understanding of art is informed by the influence of Hegel, especially that aspect of his thinking that Rancière summarizes and distils into the phrase the ‘identity of opposites’, an identity that Rancière also applies beyond its Hegelian application, to Kant’s understanding of genius, for example.9 Rancière detaches these ideas from the philosophical and political architecture that supports them, an ahistorical transcendentalism and cosmopolitanism in Kant, and a teleological vision of world history in Hegel. Rancière is indebted to only certain aspects of Kant and Hegel; his readings are partial, motivated – one might even say his readings are dissensual.
Rancière sets Kant and Hegel against themselves, by aligning his contemporaries such as Jean-François Lyotard with precisely those aspects of Kant and Hegel from which he disassociates himself. In Rancière’s view, Lyotard requires of sublime art that it become an art of witnessing the unrepresentable, of testifying to the unthinkable. The art of witnessing is the art that comes at the end of Hegelian thought, after dialectical thought has attempted to cancel all alterity through its logic of determinate negation. The Holocaust is figured as the event that surpasses all efforts to think it. The ‘flash of lightening that traverses the monochrome of a canvas by Barnett Newman’ testifies ‘not to the naked horror of the camps but to the original terror of the mind’ (FI 134, DI 149), that is to the ‘unthinkability’ of extermination and to the ‘unthinkable project of eliminating this unthinkability’ (FI 134, DI 149).
Rancière thus resists the suggestion that the Holocaust demands the invention of a peculiar language, a language of the unrepresentable (see FI 124, DI 140). To claim that this is a trauma beyond all traumas that requires a language unique to its unspeakability is problematic both because it privileges this one event over others, as if by definition it is more unthinkable than other traumas, and because it runs counter to a defining feature of the aesthetic regime, in which there is nothing that is unrepresentable. To appeal to the ‘irreducible singularity of certain events’, Rancière points out, in fact, amounts to a claim that ‘some things can only be represented in a certain type of form’ (FI 137, DI 153). Thus in Rancière’s view, to assert the unrepresentability of a particular event is ‘vacuous’ (FI 137, DI 153). It is to express the desire that ‘in the very regime which abolishes the representative suitability of forms to subjects, appropriate forms respecting the singularity of the exception still exist’ (FI 137, DI 153).
Yet, insofar as he endows the abstract expressionism of Newman – or ‘any other procedure whereby painting carries out an exploration of its materials when they are diverted from the task of representation’ (FI 134, DI 149) – with the responsibility of being the only form of art capable of signifying the unrepresentable, Lyotard casts the Jewish people as those who remember the forgetting of the Other. Against his best intentions in Rancière’s view, Lyotard thereby capitulates to the Hegelian trope of making a form of art stand for a historical people in a particular moment of the ‘development of Spirit’ (FI 134, DI 150). Lyotard claims that the unthinkability of the Holocaust resists ‘dialectical assimilation’ (FI 134, FI 149), yet sees the ‘professed unthinkability of extermination’ as ‘a tendency constitutive of Western reason’ (FI 134, DI 150). In Rancière’s view, Lyotard thereby transforms what Adorno considered to be ‘the “impossibility” of art after Auschwitz into an art of the unpresentable’ (FI 134, DI 150) and thus perfects dialectical thinking rather than resisting it.
The critical distance Rancière takes from Lyotard takes shape as a demonstration that to maintain the unrepresentability of the Holocaust is in fact to fall back into the unacknowledged assumptions that govern the representative regime. Having suggested that at the heart of the representative regime lies an appeal to rules that govern what is appropriate to represent, what is inappropriate and what forms are appropriate for what content, Rancière inscribes Lyotard’s insistence on construing the Holocaust as unrepresentable as a throwback to the regulatory scheme governing what can and cannot be represented. At the same time, Rancière sees Lyotard as inadvertently subscribing to a Hegelian narrative that makes certain forms of art uniquely suited for a specific subject. If Lyotard is assimilated into Hegel’s penchant for making forms of art representative of historical peoples, and for perfecting, rather than resisting, dialectical thinking, he is also chastised for championing the Kantian sublime. Rancière sees Lyotard as emphasizing the Kantian sublime at the expense of Kant’s analysis of the beautiful. Contrary to what he sees as the undue emphasis of the sublime by thinkers such as Lyotard, Rancière is more interested in Kant’s discussion of the beautiful, in which he already finds dissensus. Rancière is critical of the ethical undertones he sees in Lyotard’s appeal to the sublime as a discourse of the unrepresentable. Just as Rancière associates Lyotard with those aspects of Hegel he finds unappealing, so he distances himself from the discourse of the sublime, which is so central to Lyotard’s engagement with Kant.
By holding up the art of Newman, Primo Levi and Robert Antelme as exemplary because this art testifies to the absolute alterity of the other that Western thought has suppressed, Lyotard in fact requires the art of the unrepresentable, the task of which is to witness ‘the unthinkable at the heart of thought’ (FI 131, DI 147), to take on a representative function. Its representative function is to stand for an ethics of alterity, an ethics that marks the absolute otherness of the unthinkable in its unthinkability. Levinas also takes his place, along with Lyotard as a target for Rancière, who finds problematic what he calls the ethical turn in philosophy, which he understands as an evacuation of the political that thereby not only capitulates to representationalist norms with regard to what passes for appropriate, but at the same time revives certain aspects of the ethical regime with which he associates the name of Plato.
Kant and Hegel signal the aesthetic regime, which introduces disorder into the ‘mimetic legislation’ (AD 7, ME 16) that Rancière takes to govern the conformity that pertains for Aristotle between poeisis as a way of doing and aesthesis as a way of being affected. Aesthetics effect a break in this adequation of productive nature to receptive nature, a rupture of the threefold relation between mimesis, poeisis and aesthesis that organizes Aristotle’s account of poetic technique.10 The free play of understanding and imagination of Kant’s aesthetic judgement is read through the politicizing lens of Schiller, such that the promise of universality is also a promise of equality, while the creativity of Kantian genius resides in the passivity of not willing, of being governed by no law.11 Aesthetic judgement and the genius who is unaware of what he does become sites in which the domination of active form over passive matter is recast, where activity and passivity no longer oppose one another according to the hierarchies of the representative regime, where the subordination of nature to cognition is suspended, as is sensibility’s requirement of an object of desire (see AD 30, ME 45), and where there are no longer two classes of humanity. The paradox that characterizes the aesthetic regime is the neither/nor of Kant’s aesthetic idea, the fact that it conforms neither to an ‘object of knowledge’ nor to an ‘object of desire’ (DMC 173), but inhabits a gap between the subordination of sensory perception to understanding by the categories, and the subordination of affections to the search for the good. Aesthetic judgement is neither conceptual determination, where the ‘anarchy of sensation’ (DAR 117) is subsumed by an already available concept, nor is it the reasoning of the moral law. Just as Kant’s aesthetic idea inhabits this in between region, in a manner Kant characterizes by the oscillating movement of imagination and understanding, so Kant’s theory of genius embodies the paradox of artistic will that is not willed (see AD 10, ME 19).
The artist as genius is a creator who creates without knowing what he is doing, without a law; a law unto himself, the genius breaks new ground, formulating a new law for others to follow.12 The genius of the artist consists in the paradoxical fact that the artist does not know what he or she does. Art is ‘the manifestation of a thought that is unaware of itself in a sensible element that is torn from the ordinary conditions of sensory experience’ (DMC 174).
If Kant’s aesthetic judgement (as neither cognition nor morality) and his theory of the genius who does not know what he does are dissensual moments for Rancière, he also finds dissensus in Hegel. The dissensus that Kant introduces in aesthetic judgement, and in his theory of the genius is taken up by Hegel, in Rancière’s narrative, in his commitment to the contradictory thesis that art is only art insofar as it is also something else. Art is art insofar as it is also not art, ‘inasmuch as it is something else than art’ (DAR 123). Specifically, he finds it in the ‘contradictory mutation’ (AD 8, ME 18) of the status of art that Hegel thinks through. On the one hand, there is a ‘new historicity’ (AD 8, ME 18), signalled by the ‘distance’ separating ‘us’ from the world of the Greeks, where art was not yet separate from life, so that the Greek statue becomes art for ‘us’ in a way it was not for the Greeks.13 For the Greeks, the statue is a figure of religious devotion, which was not aimed at as art (see DAR 118). On the other hand, a transformation takes place with the institution of the museum, such that art is open to the gaze of an ‘undifferentiated public’ (AD 9, ME 18), rather than being addressed to the patron or the one who commissioned it, or devoted to the celebration of seigniorial splendour or religious ritual. ‘The effect of these displacements’, says Rancière, ‘was to accentuate the sensible singularity of works and to undermine not only their representative value but also the hierarchy of subjects and genres according to which they were classified and judged’ (AD 9, ME 18). Thus, when Hegel re-evaluates paintings from the Netherlands, depicting scenes of ‘domestic and civic life’ (DAR 122-3) rather than religious figures, a series of shifts take place. The type of subjects that are represented, the prominence of the figurative, the boundary between art and commerce, and the relation between form and matter, all undergo transformation. In these paintings, which had enjoyed a certain amount of commercial success, it is the ‘gesture of the painter and the manifestations of pictorial matter’ that asserts itself rather than the ‘figurative subject’. The subject is pushed into the background, and the picture is ‘transformed into an archive of its own process’ (AD 9, ME 18-19).
The aesthetic regime breaks with the rules governing what is appropriate and what is inappropriate, and with the model that imposes active form on passive matter, that is, ‘in-appropriation is constitutive’ of the aesthetic regime (AD 11, ME 22).
For Rancière, the ‘break with representation in art is not emancipation from resemblance, but the emancipation of resemblance from … the triple constraint’ (FI 120, DI 136) of the representative regime. The emblematic hero of the aesthetic regime is none other than Oedipus, since he is the ‘one who knows and does not know, who acts absolutely and suffers absolutely’ (FI 118-19, DI 134). Oedipus thus exemplifies the ‘identity of opposites’ (FI 119, DI 135), an identity of wanting and not wanting, thought and non-thought, activity and passivity. The aesthetic regime ‘counterposes to the norms of representative action an absolute power of making’ yet at the same time it ‘identifies the power of this unconditioned production with absolute passivity’ (FI 119, DI 134-35). The contradiction of this identity of opposites is precisely embodied in Kant’s theory of genius, for the genius gives the law to himself, ‘and does not know what he is doing’ (FI 119, DI 135).
The aesthetic regime, then, does not indicate the end of resemblance, it indicates that the rules excluding certain subjects from representation no longer apply. It indicates an equality of representation, where ‘Everything is equal, equally representable’ (FI 120, DI 136). Rancière suggests that in the aesthetic regime speech is no longer a way of making visible, as it was in the representative regime. Rather ‘an equality of the visible invades discourse and paralyzes action’ (FI 121, DI 137). More specifically, ‘speech is invaded by a specific property of the visible: its passivity’ (FI 121, DI 137). Instead of transparency, there is ‘opacity’ (FI 121, DI 137). What confronts us in the aesthetic regime is not action but description; there is a ‘primacy of description over action’ (FI 121, DI 137). Here we find a ‘form of the visible that does not make visible’, but rather, ‘deprives action of its powers of intelligibility’ (FI 121, DI 137). The ‘absolute freedom of art’ is ‘identified with the absolute passivity of physical matter’ (FI 126, DI 142), an identification that Rancière takes to be as characteristic of Flaubert as it is of Antelme (see FI 124-25, DI 140-41). Thus the ‘powers of ordered distribution of knowledge-effects and pathos effects’ (FI 121, DI 137) that governed Aristotle’s conception of poetics are upset. So too the privilege the representative regime assigned to theatrical space as a ‘space of visibility’ is revoked (FI 122, DI 138).
Rancière suggests that the ‘organic totality’ that organized meaning for Aristotle ‘is now absorbed into little perceptions, each of which is affected by the power of the whole’ (FI 121, DI 137). He draws on Antelme’s ‘paratactic syntax’ (FI 125, DI 141) to illustrate the ‘appeal to minimal auditory and visual experience’, displaying ‘a logic of minor perceptions added to one another’ (FI 125, DI 141). This ‘paratactic style’ that Antelme adopts is not ‘specific’ (FI 126, DI 142) to the experience Antelme conveys, but rather echoes the style of Flaubert. The minimalist language in which Antelme states plainly a succession of events is the same language in which Flaubert describes how Emma and Charles experience the sounds of a farmyard in Madame Bovary. Here is Antelme: ‘I went outside to take a piss. It wasn’t yet daylight’ [Je suis allé pisser. Il faisait encore nuit] (FI 125, DI 141), and here is Flaubert: ‘She did not speak, neither did Charles. … He could hear nothing but the throbbing inside his head and the cackle of a laying hen somewhere away in the farmyard’ (FI 125, DI 141).14 Such language becomes, for Rancière, the ‘common language of literature’ in the aesthetic regime, ‘in which the absolute freedom of art’ is ‘identified with the absolute passivity of physical matter’ (FI 126, DI 142). It is a language used not only by Antelme and Levi, but also by Flaubert and in Albert Camus’s L’étranger. This is not a language called up by the unrepresentable, of that which is somehow beyond available literary tools. It is the language of everyday use.
If the commonplace language of the ordinary is used to capture events that are extraordinary and inhuman, this suggests, contrary to Lyotard, not that there are events – nor indeed a singular event – that are by definition unrepresentable or unthinkable. If ordinary language seems inadequate or inappropriate for the task of representing the Holocaust, this is not because of the inherent resistance of any specific event to representation, but is reflective rather, in Rancière’s view, of the ‘principled identity of appropriate and inappropriate’ that ‘is the very stamp of the aesthetic regime’ (FI 126, DI 142).
Rancière understands art and politics in the aesthetic regime as capable of effecting different types of dissensus.15 To understand the relationship between art as dissensus and politics as dissensus, we must understand that Rancière takes up the essentially Hegelian contradiction that art is always also something other than art as the paradox of the aesthetic regime, a paradox that is not, however, to be resolved in Hegelian fashion by ultimately prioritizing one pole over another such that a hierarchy results, whereby life is posited above art, or indeed art above life as an unrealizable goal to be striven for. Rather, this tension is to be inhabited, kept alive, revived, with a vigilance that prevents art collapsing into a social ideal and thereby avoids the dangers potentially accompanying such a collapse, not the least of which are the dangers of art succumbing to totalitarianism, on the one hand, and the false pretension of art to purism, on the other hand (Adorno and Lyotard).
Were art guaranteed to be completely successful in eliciting certain affects and in motivating certain reactions, it would succeed in its political aspirations precisely to the extent that it also succeeded in evacuating its status as art, in no longer being art, but in becoming politics. We can think this through by referring to an example of a work that Rancière thinks risks completely collapsing art into politics, such that nothing is left of art except a political message, where art disappears and all that is left is a slogan.16 Rancière takes a critical distance from artists such as Martha Rosler, whose ‘photomontages accentuat[e] the heterogeneity of elements’ (ES 28, SE 33), for example Balloons, a work that is part of the series ‘Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful’ (1967/72) in which Rosler registered her protest against the Vietnam War.17 Against the background of a serene domestic space, a man holds a dead child in his arms; Rancière says, ‘the image of the dead child could not be integrated into the beautiful exterior without exploding it’ (ES 28; SE 33). This heterogeneous clash is intended to ‘reveal the imperialist violence behind the happy display of goods and images’ (ES 29; SE 36). Rosler’s art is intended to ‘sho[w] the spectator what she does not know how to see, and mak[e] her feel ashamed of what she does not want to see’ (ES 29-30; SE 36). Such an artist, as Rancière sees it, adopts the pedagogical position of the one who knows, one whose art will play a revelatory role, in which the artist adopts the position of the expert whose task it is to enlighten an ignorant viewer in order to mobilize action in the form of a graphic presentation of a contradiction to underline the hypocrisy of the military industrial complex endemic to capitalism. In so doing, Rancière suggests that Rosler’s art loses its identity in serving the unambiguously political, agenda-driven message that the capitalist war machine is hypocritical. The question Rancière raises is whether in making these points, a work of art becomes too didactic to remain a work of art in any meaningful sense, or whether it crosses a definitive line and becomes politics.
In construing politics as a matter of staging, of making visible, the miscount as a leaving out of account those who have no part, Rancière understands politics in the sense of dissensus, as a conflict of worlds, a conflict about the meaning of the perceptible, indeed about the very availability of that which can be seen and heard. At the same time, it is a conflict about who is legitimated to speak and interpret what there is to be seen and heard, and to have their interpretations count. Dissensus puts into question what passes for common sense, the ‘police’ order of consensus, and thus provides the possibility of shaping meaning and intelligibility, the seeing of what there is to see, and the hearing of what there is to hear in a new way.18 The very possibilities of seeing or hearing, of perceiving the world, are renewed, such that the transcendental is subjected to a radically contingent, historical process, by which subjects who previously did not count not only insist on being counted, but in doing so change the terms in which subjectivity is thought, and therefore revise the conditions of possibility both of what it means to be a subject and also what it means to both think and perceive.19
For Rancière then, it is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of politics as consensual, which claims to speak for all but in fact speaks only for those who govern the terms on which claims are deemed to have or lack intelligibility. It is a question of seeing what happens when we move away from a model of art that takes itself to be representative, but in fact consists of a set of highly specific and exclusive norms that dictate what can and cannot be represented, how it should be represented, and who is entitled to judge it. Expressed positively, it is a question of seeing what happens when politics is reconceived not as consensus but as dissensus, when representation is no longer restricted by rules of appropriateness, where the operative model of art is porous, rather than a model that secures the boundaries of art by preserving its purity from contamination by everything it stipulates as something other than art.
Notes
1 Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, Dissensus, p. 118. Hereafter cited in the text as DAR, followed by page number.
2 Of course, it is more complicated than this in that the very dialogues in which Plato dramatizes the views Socrates and his interlocutors exchange are themselves works of art. This is not an aspect of the Platonic dialogues that Rancière emphasizes.
3 Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2009), p. 116; Le destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), p. 132. Hereafter cited in the text as FI, DI.
4 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited by James T. Boulton (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 61–4.
5 In this particular formulation, like so many others have done before him, Rancière, privileges literary art above other genres (even if he allows that poems or paintings can be identified with a story).
6 In the aesthetic regime, there is a ‘rupture of agreement between the rules of art and the laws of sensibility which distinguished the classical representative order. In this order, active form was imposed on passive matter via the rules of art. And the pleasure experienced was taken as verification that the rule of artistic poiesis corresponded to the laws of sensibility. It was taken as verification by those senses could be taken as veridical witnesses: men of taste and men of a refined nature as distinct from those of an uncultured nature’ (DMC 175-6).
7 See also FI 137, DI 153.
8 See Rancière in ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An interview with Jacques Rancière’, Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 289–97, pp. 291–3.
9 For a good discussion of Hegel’s influence on Rancière see Alison Ross, ‘Equality in the Romantic Art Form: The Hegelian Background to Jacques Rancière’s Aesthetic Revolution’ in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, edited by Jean-Philipe Deranty and Alison Ross (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 87–98. In the present discussion, I explore the dual influence of Kant and Hegel on Rancière’s aesthetic regime, as well as showing how Rancière distances himself from Lyotard.
10 It is the loss of a humanity for whom art was not yet separate to life that undoes the adequation of productive nature to receptive nature. Hence the melancholic nostalgia of those who seek to restore the lost worl d that is, perhaps, retrospectively imposed on the Greeks.
11 Rancière sees in Kant’s theory of genius an ‘equivalence between the will and the unwilled’ (AD 10, ME 19).
12 I refer to the genius in gendered terms that reflect Kant’s assumptions, which remain untouched by Rancière. In Chapter 7, I suggest that these terms need to be analysed.
13 Rancière emphasizes that art is art only so far as it ‘expresses a thought unclear to itself in a matter that resists it. It lives inasmuch as it is something else than art, namely a belief and a way of life’ (DAR 123). Hegel’s account of art as part of the ‘plot of the spirit of forms’ yields an ‘ambiguous historicity of art’ (DAR 123). ‘On the one hand … the life of art as an expression of history’ has an autonomy that is ‘open to hew kinds of development’, but on the other hand, this plot ‘entails a verdict of death’ for art, since, ‘When art is no more than art, it vanishes. When the content of thought is transparent to itself and when no matter resists it, this success means the end of art’ (DAR 123-124). What Hegel sees as the ‘limit’ to the Greek artist, is also the ‘condition for the success of the work of art’ (DAR 123). The artist wants to express divinity, but can only conceive of it as ‘deprived of interiority’ (DAR 123). Clearly informing Hegel’s view is the assumption that philosophy can express better than art can, more clearly, what art tries but fails to express. In other words, in a way that is similar to Plato, he assumes the illegitimacy of art on the basis of the ontological superiority of the concept. The ‘history of the forms of art’ is ‘a history of the forms of mind’ (AD 8, ME 17-18), and it is a history that assumes the superiority of a culture that has divided subjects and objects, mind from matter, form from content, freedom from nature, only to cast a nostalgic look back to the Greeks for whom these divisions were not yet in place in the same way, and to draw on them in order to project a future in which culture fulfils itself as nature.
14 See Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 35. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, IL: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, 1998), p. 9.
15 This does not mean that all art in the aesthetic regime operates dissensually. The three regimes Rancière articulates are not understood as mutually exclusive of one another, so that, for example, representative art can persist under the aesthetic regime, and the aesthetics of such art can have elements of the ethical regime. In Rancière’s view, Lyotard attributes to Barnett Newman’s art a representative function that has ethical overtones, despite Lyotard’s own effort to construe Newman’s art as the art of unrepresentable.
16 Rancière questions both the idea of politics (as social cohesion or consensus) and the idea of art as education, understood on the pedagogical model, where the artist is set up as the one who knows and the spectator plays the part of a passive ignoramus, where the artist’s intention is understood on the model of the active imposition of form on the passivity. This imposition is thus taken to refer not only to the material of the work that receives form but also to the minds of the audience assumed not to know.
17 See http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/195582
18 See the interview with Rancière, ‘The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière with Gabriel Rockhill’ (PA 65).
19 See PA 50.