5
In this chapter I follow, sometimes closely and sometimes more loosely, the conceptual development of an essay in which Rancière tackles head-on what I take to be the central defining issue of his work, namely, how to construe the relation between art and politics. At the same time, I situate Rancière’s argument in the essay ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’ in the context of some of his most decisive philosophical precursors, drawing strategically on some key texts and ideas in his broader corpus, and developing some suggestions embedded in his critical interventions to indicate two of the decisive framing mechanisms on which he draws in explicating his argument. I adopt this approach as it seems particularly suited to shed light on Rancière’s thinking, the articulation of which is often strewn with shorthand phrases which summarily condense complex moves he elaborates more fluidly, with more precision and exactitude, elsewhere in his corpus. I expand the suggestion broached in the previous chapter that Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime is indebted both to Kant and to Hegel (though I focus more upon Kant in this chapter) by showing that it is in inheriting and reinvigorating a Foucauldian problematic that Rancière effects a displacement of Kant’s transcendental approach, while at the same time breathing new life into Hegel’s dialectical reconciliation of opposites. I will specify two respects in which Rancière’s argument is indebted to Foucault. If Rancière’s modification of Foucault can be identified as a more immediate framing mechanism, he also embeds this framework within a wider retrospective historical sweep, which, as we have seen, looks back to Plato and Aristotle, in terms of whom he specifies the ethical and representative regimes, elements of which still inhabit contemporary politics of art. This is not of course to suggest that there are no other decisive philosophical influences on Rancière, only to elaborate the way in which I think these key figures play into Rancière’s philosophical framing and formulations.
Let me begin by describing the specific polemic in terms of which Rancière’s argument advances, before going on to frame it in the broader contexts indicated above. At one level, the narrative arc of ‘Paradoxes’ moves from one model of the efficacy of art to another, from a pedagogical model to a dissensual or paradoxical model. The polemical insight that informs this shift, which will be the focus of this chapter, is wielded against contemporary art that takes itself to be politically subversive, yet remains entrenched in pedagogical logics that fail to move beyond the mimetic assumptions of the ethical and representative regimes that Rancière articulates, and which constitute the conceptual architecture against which his arguments unfold. As we have seen, Rancière suggests that pedagogical logic posits an unproblematic, direct causal relationship between the intention animating the artist and the spectator viewing art. The artwork is the vehicle that transmits or conveys to the audience a transformative effect; the artist’s intention is to mobilize the spectator’s intervention into the situation exposed by the artist, eliciting a particular understanding of the world and specific effects, the purpose of which is therefore corrective of spectator behaviour. ‘This logic’, says Rancière, ‘posits that what the viewer sees … is a set of signs formed according to an artist’s intention. By recognizing these signs the spectator is supposedly induced into a specific reading of the world around us, leading, in turn, to the feeling of a certain proximity or distance, and ultimately to the spectator’s intervening into the situation staged by the author’ (DPA 135-6).
Rancière problematizes the economy of affects, and the distribution of activity and passivity operative in this model of efficacy, which is embedded in a conception of the relationship between art and politics that he brings into question. Unlike the mimetic gestures characteristic of the pedagogical logics governing the representative and ethical regimes, and into which contemporary politics of art inadvertently relapses, Rancière calls for an understanding of the efficacy of art in relation to dissensus – a dissensual or paradoxical model governs art’s efficacy. For Rancière, not only do art and politics constitute different forms of dissensus, but also the relation between politics and art itself is to be understood in terms of dissensus. He understands dissensus as a specific type of disagreement or conflict, one in which sense dissents from itself. By dissensus, Rancière designates a conflict between ‘sense’ as ‘sensory perception’ and ‘sense’ as the ‘regime of meaning’ that consensus enforces (see DPA 139 and DPA 144). The notion of dissensus, where sense, understood as sensory perception, dissents from sense understood as a regime of meaning, is key for understanding the aesthetic regime. In a move that will need to be unpacked, Rancière situates the politics of art within a complex network of logics that he describes as the ‘criss-crossing’ of what he calls the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’ (DPA 148).
The mistake of the pedagogical logic of the politics of art that Rancière targets is to suppose that there is a direct relation of cause and effect between what an artist intends, and a political transformation in the world. ‘There is no straight path from the viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the state of the world, and none from intellectual awareness to political action’ (DPA 143). To assume that artistic intention will elicit an intended effect on the world is to assume that there is a real world outside of the world of art. As Rancière understands it, there is no such reality ‘outside of art’ (DPA 148). There are, rather, a series of fictions, artistic fictions and political fictions, so many modes of constructing or framing the world. The ‘police order’ is the name Rancière gives to the fiction that lays claim to an indisputable reality, by suggesting that there is only one meaning, a univocal meaning, which is self-evidently true. Politics disrupts the police order of the sensible. It enacts dissensus. The ‘police order is that which passes itself off as the real’ (DPA 148), as the natural (DPA 139), as reality itself. The police order ‘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’ (DPA 148-9), appealing to the self-evidence of the particular construction of reality it promotes as reality. Dissensus intervenes in and reconfigures the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (DPA 141) that the police order establishes and legitimates as common sense. Allowing this brief outline of ‘Paradoxes’ to stand as an initial tour of some of its major conceptual and heuristic contours, let me develop the strategic directions and emphases within which I want to situate the concepts I have cursorily introduced, several of which will need to be parsed more carefully.
Rancière’s appropriation of Foucault can be understood as the first of two framing mechanisms within which he embeds his analysis of contemporary art that takes itself to be politically subversive, but relies upon the most didactic of gestures characteristic of the ethical and representative regimes, and on the most problematic of metaphysical assumptions. This first framing mechanism, which remains implicit in ‘Paradoxes’, can be specified in two respects, one of which is telegraphed by Rancière’s references to ideology, consensus and economic globalization, and underwritten by Foucault’s critique of neo-liberalism.1 Rancière sees the causal logic operative in the return to politics effected by contemporary art as a throwback to the classical theatre of the eighteenth century, which, however, itself replays a basically Aristotelian model of poetics, and as such participates in the representative regime. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already brought into question the mimetic model assumed by the classical dramas of Moliére and Voltaire, whose moralizing theatre is intended to correct the behaviour of spectators, as if the display of virtues and vices onstage could directly impact on how people act in ‘real’ life.
If Rancière, like Rousseau, is critical of positing any straightforward causal connection between actors dramatizing a situation on stage and the correction of spectators’ behaviour in the ‘real’ world, Rancière is equally critical of the solution that Rousseau proposes. For, in rejecting one form of pedagogical logic, Rousseau merely embraces another, in nostalgically advocating a return to the unity embodied in the ‘Greek City Festival’, where art is at the same time the embodiment of community (DPA 137). Even as he puts into question the idea that by exposing hypocrisy or displaying tolerance or intolerance onstage actors can directly affect the behaviour of an audience, Rousseau returns to a model of ethical immediacy, which Rancière finds just as problematic as the representative mediation to which Rousseau objects.
To be political, in the sense that Rancière embraces, art should not coalesce with the political ideas that it calls for. Political art, in Rancière’s sense, does not just dispute the value of economic globalization by exposing the hypocrisy of hyper-commodified consumerism, for example; it refuses to concede that economic globalization is the only game in town. We used to speak of ideology, but Foucault shows us ideological analysis assumes the transcendental status of a subject presumed to know the truth.2
When Rancière asks, ‘What happens to critical art in the context of consensus?’ (DPA 143), it is Foucault’s critique of neo-liberal ideology that informs his understanding of consensus as the overriding conviction that economic globalization provides the only criterion in terms of which reality can be judged. Whether we conform to that ideology or reject it, whether art provides us with a model of how to act by holding up a model that is intended to cement social bonds that have been eroded by hyper-commodification, or whether art displays a counter-model, by exposing hypocrisy in some shape or form, it fails to displace the ideology of economic globalization.
If Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberalism provides traction for seeing what is at stake in Rancière’s critique of consensus, the other respect in which Rancière is indebted to Foucault is more explicit, if only signalled in a few terse remarks in ‘Paradoxes’, while elaborated more fully elsewhere. Foucault’s historical a priori, has purchase in facilitating an understanding of how Rancière’s aesthetic regime recasts Kant’s transcendental approach. Rendered through the historicizing lens of Foucault, Rancière’s recasting of the transcendental approach formulates aesthetics as a system that conditions or delimits the possibilities of what can be experienced, what can be seen and heard, and at the same time what claims can be made about it, by whom, and with what authority. The distribution of the sensible organizes the temporal and spatial ways in which the world appears to us, making available to us the possibilities that shape how understanding makes sense of perceptual experience. Rancière puts it like this:
Aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (PA 13)
Rancière thus considers his approach to be ‘a bit similar to Foucault’s’ in that it ‘retains the principle from the Kantian transcendental … the search for the conditions of possibility’ (PA 50). Characterizing his approach as transcendental, Rancière goes on to specify that his search for the transcendental is deflected through the Foucauldian insight that the transcendental must be historicized, rendered particular to a specific episteme, when he says, ‘these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression’ (PA 50).
We can think of the three regimes Rancière elaborates – the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic – as regimes of ‘perception and intelligibility’ in the sense that he explicates when he says, ‘The visibility of a form of expression as an artistic form depends on a historically constituted regime of perception and intelligibility’ (PA 50). The relationship between the regimes, however, does not render them mutually exclusive of one another, rather ‘several regimes coexist and intermingle’ (PA 50). Even if the representative regime is ‘dominant’ in one period, it is not abolished by the aesthetic regime. Hence, says Rancière, he tries to ‘de-historicize these systems of conditions of possibility’, the regimes of art. At the same time, he ‘historicize[s] the transcendental’ that is, he wants to articulate not the universal conditions of possibility of thought in general, but ‘a system of possibilities’ understood as a regime of perception and intelligibility, ‘that is historically constituted’ (PA 50).
What Rancière construes as the aesthetic regime is indebted to a retrieval of guiding motifs from Kant’s third critique, such as indetermination and the conflict of the faculties of imagination and understanding, motifs which in effect Rancière takes up and applies to the first critique, especially to space and time as forms of intuition. He thereby radicalizes and historicizes Kant’s metaphysical understanding of how the forms of space and time organize our sensory perception of the world. In thinking dissensus as a way of refiguring the landscape of the sensible, as a redistribution of the sensible, Rancière is effectively challenging Kant’s transcendental approach by taking up some key ideas regarding communities of aesthetic and political judgement from the third critique and reading them back into the first critique. By reading the transcendental through the spectrum of Foucault’s historical a priori, Rancière is at the same time disputing the status of the transcendental as universal and necessary, recasting it as contingent and historical, and in doing so, rethinking the mode in which history conditions thought, thought conditions itself, and the sensible world conditions the possibilities for thinking. In other words, he is taking account of the complex ways in which a world is never brought to us unconditioned, and our thinking of it is never without the constraints of prior, historical conditions. As a result, the task of thinking conditions is never itself unconditioned, and it is in thinking through the difficulties of the ongoing production of this layered relationship of conditions and conditioning that philosophy must cont ent itself, and not with the futile and misplaced attempt to maintain unsustainable universal, ostensibly timeless, ahistorical claims.
Space and time are not the uniform, universal frames for understanding that Kant took them to be; the configurations they provide us to make sense of the world are contestable, renewable, revisable. Such configurations congeal into habitual grooves, well-worn tracks along which our perceptions trundle, making it difficult for us to take on board anything that fails to corroborate the narratives that thereby establish themselves as true. Rancière suggests that the ‘efficacy of art’ lies ‘first and foremost in partitions of space and time that it produces to define ways of being together or separate, being in front or in the middle of, being inside or outside’ (DPA 136-7), a formulation that recalls, even as it displaces and reworks, Kant’s formulation of space and time as forms of intuition. The suggestion is that art can reorganize the way we perceive the temporal and spatial ordering of the world, in such a way as to reshape and re-orchestrate those communities constituted in and through its judgement. ‘Artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning’ (DPA 141). By bringing into existence new possibilities of framing the world, art is caught up in the shifting of boundaries defining the communities that legitimate, and are in turn legitimated by, the world they see and hear, the world they judge. We might say that the redistribution of the sensible is Rancière’s reworking of Kant’s sensus communis. The bonds that bind communities themselves, the common of a given community, consists of – constitute and are constituted by – the sense such communities make of the world, and the sense such worlds make of them, the way the world appears to them, and the legitimation the world in turn offers them, corroborating the ways they see and understand themselves and the meanings they accord to objects, reflecting the sense of the world back to them in the significations that cohere communities as meaningful.
What is given as the fabric of common experience makes sense to a given community, but through dissensus, such a configuration is swept up and subject to constant renewal, open to incessant reconfiguration in the dissensual movements of politics as much as the dissensual movements of art. It is this temporal, political and perceptual movement that Rancière captures when he describes the criss-crossing of the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’ (DPA 148). There is a constant renewal of the ways in which objects arrange themselves according to specific configurations, a ceaseless reordering of the frameworks according to which objects are given specific meanings, there is an ongoing renewal of the frames through which we try to make sense of the world. It is precisely because such meanings are not fixed once and for all that, when Rancière defines the politics of aesthetics in distinction from the aesthetics of politics, he prefaces each phrase with the qualifying caveat ‘if there is such a thing as’ (DPA 140). The distinction between the two can hardly be watertight. Rather, there is a complex topography of folds, a visual and intelligible landscape that is not static, but which re-orchestrates itself in a wave-like motion, subject to intertwining logics, such that the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics mutually impinge on one another. A seascape, then, rather than a landscape. Precisely because the contours of this seascape cannot be pinned down once and for all, the line dividing what is inside and what is outside is not given, but, like the shoreline, constantly redraws itself.
Having indicated that in his approach to the three regimes he articulates Rancière inherits a Foucauldian problematic that recasts Kant’s transcendentalism let me say more about the second framing mechanism, the broader historical sweep within which Rancière situates the aesthetic regime, the ethical and representative regimes. Together with the aesthetic regime, the ethical and representative regimes structure and inform Rancière’s reflections on art and aesthetics; they provide the scaffolding or framework against which his reflections unfold. While Rancière refers the ethical and the representative regimes to the historical figures of Plato and Aristotle respectively, he conceives of all three regimes as overlapping with one another, and specifies them conceptually, rather than confining them to a particular era. Like the line dividing politics from art, the distinction between each regime is fuzzy in the sense that elements of both the regimes that Rancière situates historically in relation to Plato and Aristotle can find their way into the practice of contemporary artists and aestheticians.
We have seen that foundational to Rancière’s conception of the ethical regime is the subordination of images to politics in Plato’s Republic, where politics is understood as the task of harmonizing the aims of individuals for the good of the whole, on the basis of requiring individuals to adhere to the tasks to which they are imagined to be ‘naturally’ suited. Rancière takes up and makes emblematic of the ethical regime the gesture that Plato has Socrates effect in the Republic, when he banishes poets. Images must be sanitized by the requirement that they cohere with philosophical truth, and the social order must be stabilized by resorting to the myth of metals to ensure that individuals adhere to their proper places. The ethical regime is a regime that expunges art in the name of preserving a harmonic social order devoted to the unity of the polity. When images are tamed to promote the harmony of social order, not only are the poets jettisoned, so too is politics (DPA 137). Art and politics are fused together ‘by framing the community as artwork’ (DPA 137). All that matters is the harmony and well-being of the whole, in the service of which disparate political voices must be quelled as much as dissenting poets. The well-oiled machine of the ideal city in words requires that those suited to menial work remain in their places, so that the work they perform frees up the time of others for more leisurely pursuits.
Thus, it is precisely when such workers refuse to adhere to their allotted roles, refuse to stay put, when they step out of line, and insist on being counted as part of the whole, that they disrupt the given distribution of the sensible, creating in its place a new distribution, one which ‘breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the “natural” order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific “bodies”, to specific ways of being, seeing and saying’ (DPA 139). New temporalities and spatialities emerge when workers refuse to be merely workers, and insist on reformulating the common of common sense, demand to be included in discourse, when they take the time they do not have according to their allotted tasks, according to the distribution of social roles. Politics happens, Rancière says, ‘when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing “anything else”, take the time that they “have not” in order to affirm that they belong to a common world’ (DPA 139). In claiming visibility and audibility, they insert themselves into discourses in which their claims become meaningful, in which they can be understood to count as legitimate, as having a point of view worthy of being heard.
When a fictional diary recounts the divorce of the ‘fleeting gaze from the laboring arms’ as the worker ‘stops his arms and glides in imagination toward the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences’, an ‘aesthetic rupture’ or dissensus produces a ‘new configuration of the sensible, overturning the “proper” relationship between what a body “can” do and what it cannot’ (DPA 140). A worker takes the time to gaze at the view from a house when his or her time is supposed to be taken up with laying a floor, where the labour of his or her arms is that for which he or she is being paid. He or she disrupts the distribution of the sensible, by taking the time he does not have – according to the economic and political order that circumscribes him or her as a manual labourer – by using his or her body in a way that defies that order. There is a dissensual reconfiguration of the sensible, a reapportioning of the temporality and spatiality of bodies, a realigning of the boundaries according to which certain bodies are visible while others are invisible, in which specified capacities line up with particular bodies.
It is not only the ethical regime that Plato advocates which requires bodies to be kept in their proper places, so too does the Aristotelian representative regime. At the descriptive level, the representative regime might be adequately characterized as a ‘mimetic tradition’ (DPA 135), yet, at the same time as describing it, Rancière is also providing a critique of the representative regime as such. Rancière’s normative assessment of this regime suggests that what and who it represents, how its representations are effected, who is doing the representation, and the audience to whom the representations are directed, all turn out to be highly selective. It turns out, then, that the representative regime does not after all represent anything in a straightforward way, rather, it represents objects from a highly specific (we might say subjective) point of view, for highly specific purposes, and for a highly circumscribed audience. It will not come as a surprise, perhaps, that this specificity has traditionally been infused with structured social privilege, and that artists who seek to overturn such a system without intervening in the apparatus of mimesis itself merely succeed in replaying the mechanism in one way or another. They continue to ‘believe that art has to leave the art world in order to be effective in “real life”’ (DPA 137) instead of understanding that there is no sharp opposition between the art world and real life, indeed that what is taken for reality is merely a fiction maintained by consensus thinking. To ‘try to overturn the logic of the theatre by making the spectator active’ (DPA 137) is to retain the idea that artists are fundamentally active while spectators are passive, when in fact, to view a work of art is always a matter of interpretation, and as such spectators are already active. To turn ‘the art exhibition into a place of political activism or by sending artists into the streets of derelict suburbs to invent new modes of social relations’ (DPA 137) is to assume that art as usual maintains a sharp divide between art and politics, while at the same time attempting to subvert the purity of art by transforming it into politics. Yet, this is precisely to attempt to fuse art and politics, as Plato wanted to do, and thus to eradicate art except in so far as it upholds a specific, ideal vision of the state.
What, then, is to be done? If current attempts to render art political in meaningful ways fall back into time-honoured tropes that prevent art from moving beyond the mimesis it takes itself to be subverting, in what ways can art claim political significance? Having outlined two framing mechanisms Rancière draws upon, a Foucauldian inspired reworking of Kant, and the specification of the ethical and representative regimes of art, let’s return to the immediate argument of ‘Paradoxes’, in order to flesh out in more detail how Rancière understands political art. Let’s review Rancière’s rebuttal of the assumptions informing a good deal of contemporary art that takes itself to be political.
One might be forgiven for thinking that art which excavates biases ‘in mainstream representations of subaltern identities’ (DPA 134), or in how ‘colonizers represent the colonized’ (DPA 136) serves a vital political function, and that as such it constitutes art at its most valuable – as a critical tool for exposing the hypocrisy of the Western world. As we’ve seen, however, several fundamental problems emerge with such an assumption. Bringing into question the model of art’s efficacy underlying much of what takes itself to be political art in the contemporary political world, Rancière is concerned to show that art that tries to display the fallacies of mainstream representations, or to show us what ‘revolts’ us in order to incite revolt, to be political by venturing ‘onto the streets’ or by any number of other strategies that fail to displace the ‘mimetic tradition’ is still caught up in a model of art that was ‘debunked two hundred years ago’ and succumbs to the ‘pedagogical model’ of efficacy (DPA 136). The ‘logic of mimesis consists in conferring on the artwork the power of the effects that it is supposed to elicit on the behaviour of spectators’ (DPA 136). Such a model assumes that the artist’s intention can be transparently and unproblematically communicated to the spectator, who will be enlightened by the intention animating the work of art or performance; the spectator undergoes a revelation, the effect of which will be to mobilize an intervention in the world, thereby transforming the world in accordance with the intention of the artist. A passive spectator reacts then to the input of the inspired artist as genius, an empty vessel, to be animated, infused with the spirit of the artist’s creative mind or intention. The point of the work of art will have been to ‘correct’ the behaviour of the spectator. In other words, the artist plays the role of moral arbiter of the world. ‘Art is presumed to be effective politically because it displays the marks of domination, or parodies mainstream icons, or even because it leaves the spaces reserved for it and becomes a social practice’ (DPA 134-5). Such art either remains committed to the mimetic paradigm of the representative regime, in which the artist as expert reveals to the spectator, posited as heretofore ignorant, the reality of the situation by representing it, mimicking it. Or it tries to overturn the pedagogical logic of representation, by transforming art into politics or by taking art onto the streets in order for it to become a mode of direct social intervention. Such art ‘purports no longer to produce duplicates of objects, images or messages, but instead real actions, or objects, that engender new forms of social relationships and environments’ (DPA 146). Rancière is wary of any kind of reduction of art and politics to one another, such as the fusion that occurs in Plato’s jettisoning of the poets in order for the ideal community to emerge, and such as the one that Rousseau evokes. To abandon the art world for the ‘real’ world is another variation of fusing art with politics, effectively eradicating both.
In disrupting the narrative that aesthetics has written for itself, Rancière both puts into question the script that artists who take their practice to broadly conform to the (Platonic) ethical regime and the (Aristotelian) representative regime, and points to ways in which artists who take themselves to be breaking away from these scripts are in fact rewriting them in new ways. Thus, artists such as Brecht, Godard and Rosler conflate the strategies of ‘representational mediation and ethical immediacy’ by evoking ‘a sensory form of “strangeness”’, as when ‘Brecht portrays Nazi leaders as caulif lower sellers and presented their discussions about the vegetable business in classical verse’. He then aims to bring about an ‘awareness of the reason for that strangeness’, in this case, an ‘awareness both of the trade relations hidden behind hymns to the race and the nation, and of the forms of economical and political domination that are hidden behind the dignity of high art’. Finally, he wants to mobilize individuals ‘as a result of that awareness’ (DPA 142). He thus ‘endeavours to produce a fusion between the aesthetic clash of heterogeneous forms of sensory presentation and the correction of the behaviour through representation’ (DPA 143). What Rancière disputes is whether such processes of ‘dissociation’ can be ‘calculated’ (DPA 143).
Or when Martha Rosler ‘juxtaposes photographs of the war in Vietnam with advertisements for petty-bourgeois furniture and household goods’, she might intend ‘to reveal the realities of imperialist war’ and ‘the empire of the commodity’ that underlies ‘American happiness’ and the ‘defence of the “free world”’ (DPA 142-43). Rancière’s point is that in exposing this hypocrisy there is no guarantee that Rosler will succeed in motivating protests against the war, and that in any case her effort might be superfluous. He comments that ‘it is very difficult to find anybody who is actually ignorant of such things’ (DPA 144). For Rancière, artists are political, not because they become pedagogues, in the sense of demonstrating to the public what we should be doing. Rather artists are those who intervene in the perceptual field that makes it possible to assume ‘the self-evidence of a dissensual world’ (DPA 143). It is such self-evidence that artists such as Brecht and Rosler assume, Rancière contends, and in doing so they lay themselves open to the critique of resorting to hackneyed techniques, while at the same time claiming for themselves as artists the privileged position of enlightening the public, as if the role were to educate their audiences, and as if the task of art should be to intervene in the world in order to set it to rights.
Rancière diagnoses the politics of contemporary art to be schizophrenic, since artists who are in thrall to the ideology of economic globalization are impelled to shuttle back and forth, in and out of art museums. There is both a temporal shuffling back and forth between novelty and an anachronistic falling back into mimetic strategies, and a spatial scuttling in and out of the museum as a space reserved for art, and a space that is conceived as the real world outside of the museum. In its temporal register this artistic schizophrenia expresses itself, on the one hand, in an interminable resituating of art in ‘ever new contexts’, – ‘late capitalism’, ‘economic globalization’ or ‘computer communication and the digital camera’ – yet, on the other hand, in an appeal to the model of art’s efficacy to which Rousseau had already objected on the basis that there is no straight line from the events performed on stage to the behaviour of spectators. Irrespective of the medium, we are still being shown how to act, as if politics needs a blueprint that art must provide, as if the experience of art must reveal to us the true nature of the world, as if art appreciation amounts to understanding how to act in the world. The artist, in effect, still unveils for us the true essence of things, telling us what to do, how to behave. Art thus relies on the most traditional, didactic model in a throwback to the past, while also insisting that it is moving forward with the latest technology.
Responding to the consensus that the police order designates as the only reality that counts, namely economic globalization, either artists are engaged in efforts to turn art into something that restores ‘the basic social functions threatened by the reign of the market’ (DPA 145), and art thereby ‘anticipate[s]’ the ‘reality of what it evokes’ (DPA 146), or artists flee the museum altogether, fusing their art with politics itself.
The contemporary politics of political art, Rancière suggests, partakes in a spatial schizophrenia in scurrying to and fro, at one moment retreating into the meditative space of the museum, responding to a cohesive, impulse towards unity, which construes art as reparative of the social bond. It seeks to shore up community bonds dissipated by neo-liberal capitalism, and ‘cast an attentive gaze on the objects of the common world and the memory of our common history’ (DPA 145). At another moment such art responds to a dispersive impulse, which abandons the refuge of the museum altogether, in order to intervene in the ‘real’ world. Taking to the streets, artists bring art out to the people, putting it to work to solve economic, political and social problems. Art becomes a means for fixing and re-establishing the communal bonds that have been eroded by commodified culture. René Fernandez, for example, uses an art grant to conduct a survey in the suburbs of Havana, and as a result, to restore a woman’s house in order to intervene in the poverty of the area; artists ‘become masons, plumbers and painters’, in an effort to restore the social bond (DPA 147). In taking art into the streets in this way, turning art into objects that no longer mimic or represent anything, artists might eschew representational art, but they fall into the trap of ethical immediacy when they fuse art with politics. The very fact that art has become a ‘refuge for dissensual practice’ gives ‘a renewed impetus to the idea that art’s vocation is actually to step outside itself, to accomplish an intervention in the “real” world’ (DPA 145). At the same time, this effort to ‘exceed consensus by supplementing it with presence and meaning’ capitulates to the ‘oversaturation’ that is the very law of consensus itself (DPA 148).
Both the spatial ‘shuttling-back-and-forth between the museum and its “outside”, between art and social practice’ (DPA 145), and the temporal effort to keep up with the latest technological advance while remaining confined to traditional strategies of mimesis are symptomatic of the schizophrenia Rancière diagnoses in a politics of art that cannot settle. It is a schizophrenia endemic to consensus thinking. So long as we adhere to the law of consensus, whether we uphold the laws of the free market in the spirit of competitiveness, or denounce commodity fetishism and consumerism, the reality of economic globalization goes unchallenged. In a formulation of consensus thinking that is clearly indebted to Foucault, Rancière says that consensus thinking insists that ‘there is one unique reality to which everything must be related, a reality that is experienceable as a sense datum, and which has only one possible signification. The context that is invoked to enforce the ideas and practices pertaining to “consensus” is, as we know, “economic globalization”’ (DPA 144).
Rancière sees this schizoid behaviour of contemporary artists as symptomatic of consensus as a form of government that imposes one reality – economic globalization, that is, it makes sense agree with sense. In this context, even the efforts to expose the power of commodification through parody are merely the flip side of the economic, political law that presents itself as unquestionable: there is only one reality. It is against the background of the consensual dogma of economic globalization – the police order – that the significance of dissensus accumulates for Rancière. Dissensus is the breaking apart of the univocity that is imposed by the consensus that there is only one reality, and that reality is governed by ‘only one possible signification’, namely ‘economic globalization’ (DPA 144). Whether one conforms to that order or decries it, so long as the terms of that order provide the only currency for discussion, it remains the effective reality, providing the values in terms of which any and all positions are to be judged.
For Rancière there is no reality as such, there is no real world. There are only constructions, and the police order is a construction that claims the legitimacy of objectivity for itself by naturalizing social divisions that keep people in their place according to their social functions, and distribute time and space accordingly. This ‘natural’ logic is a ‘distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise’ which ‘pins bodies to “their” places and allocates the private and the public to distinct “parts” – this is the order of the police’ (DPA 139), says Rancière. ‘Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the “natural” order’ (DPA 139). The police order ordains that meaning is univocal, and that univocity is cashed out in terms of economic globalization. Dissensus intercedes in the prevailing order, the police order. It redistributes the sensible, and it does so in two different registers – as art and as politics. The ‘police order’ then is a name for the refusal of politics as much as a refusal of art, in so far as politics proposes to change the participants in the conversation, while art composes new propositions on what there is to see and hear, by rendering objects visible in a new way, and lining them up with novel significations.
In place of the pedagogical model of efficacy, which he identifies as replaying the causal logic at the heart of the mimetic tradition espoused by eighteenth-century classical theatre, or the ethical immediacy that replaces it (and the critical art of Brecht and Rosler hovers between the two models), Rancière proposes another model. Rancière appeals to a ‘paradoxical’ model of the efficacy of art, based on ‘indifference’, and operating according to the ‘suspension’ of ‘every determinate relation correlating the production of art forms and a specific social function’ (DPA 138). Rancière takes this ‘paradoxical efficacy of art’ – in which one can hear strong echoes of Kant – to define the ‘aesthetic regime’ (DPA 138). Rancière reads Winckelmann’s description of the Belvedere Torso and Schiller’s account of Juno Ludovisi as breaking with representational logic, because they offer nothing to imitate; both of them refuse to anticipate the effects of art on the viewer (DPA 138), embodying, rather, the indifference of the paradoxical model of art’s efficacy that Rancière elaborates. Neither statue is ‘an element in a religious or civic ritual’, neither ‘depict[s] belief’, refers ‘to a social distinction’, implies ‘moral improvement, or the mobilization of individual or collective bodies. No specific audience is addressed by it’ (DPA 138). The Torso, a ‘mutilated statue’, which Winckelmann takes to be an ‘idle Hercules, sitting among the Gods at the end of his labours’ has ‘no mouth’, ‘no face’ and ‘no limbs’ and so cannot ‘deliver messages’, ‘express emotions’ or ‘carry out action’ (DPA 138). As we saw in the previous chapter, it is from Hegel that Rancière takes up and reinvigorates the notion of the identity of opposites, by which he designates an identity between activity and passivity. Like the rippling muscles of the Belvedere Torso, which resist the distinction between activity and passivity, calling to mind the infinite wash of oceanic waves, whereby one wave gathers up another, each becoming indistinguishable from the other, the ‘torso-less head’ Juno Ludovisi is also characterized by indifference. Rancière finds this indifference summed up is Schiller’s account of its ‘aesthetic “free play”’ (DPA 138), an account which is itself of course influenced by Kant’s aesthetics. It is the free play of imagination and understanding, which, in the absence of any determinate concept, is capable of reshaping assumptions about the world which might seem to have been set in stone, but which turn out to be susceptible of reconfiguration. A redistribution of the sensible, of how temporality and spatiality organize our experience of the world can be effected through the conflict of the faculties. The aesthetic object can shake up how we perceive the world. It can do so, but there is no certainty that it will.
Rancière understands the relation of art to politics as a paradoxical relation, as operating under an ‘original disjunction’ that entails a suspension of any direct correlation between the artist’s intention and the impact or effect of the work of art on the viewer (see DPA 142). The relation between art and politics is itself one of dissensus (see DPA 140). What then is dissensus? We have said that dissensus is the dissenting of one type of sense from another, the conflict of sense as sensory perception and sense as a regime of meaning. We are now able to clarify that dissensus occurs as a breaking up of the distribution of the sensible that consensus thinking ordains as the only register of meaning that counts as meaningful, that of economic globalization. To reiterate, there are two different forms of dissensus, artistic and political. Both reconfigure the ‘common experience of the sensible’ (DPA 140). How then, more precisely, does dissensus in politics distinguish itself from dissensus in art? In politics, dissensus marks moments at which those whose voices were previously discounted as the ‘mere noise of suffering bodies’ begin to be heard as capable of ‘discourse concerning the “common” of community’ (DPA 139), they begin to count as meaningful. Dissensus in its political register establishes a new configuration of subjectivity whereby the collectivity is reconstituted in such a way as to include those whose part was to previously ‘have no part’ (DPA 142), those who did not count, the ‘anonymous’ (DPA 142). Politics ‘creates a new form … of dissensual “commonsense”’ (DPA 139), a common sense that insists on including those who have been the casualties of a miscount. In this sense politics is ‘the framing of a we’ (DPA 141) that gives a ‘collective voice to the anonymous’ (DPA 142). Politics ‘invents new subjects’, ‘new forms of collective enunciation’ and ‘new configurations between the visible and invisible, between the audible and inaudible, new distributions of space and time – in short new bodily capacities’ (DPA 139). We see here that space and time are not the universal forms of intuition Kant took them to be, but rather that they can be distributed differently.
As politics, then, dissensus operates by allowing the emergence of ‘those who have no part’ (DPA 142), by the ‘reframing of a “we”’, or through affording ‘a collective voice to the anonymous’ (DPA 142), that is, to those who were previously discounted by legitimated regimes of meaning, through a process of ‘subjectivation’ (DPA 140). Dissensus as art, on the other hand, fosters the creation of a ‘fabric of a common experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed’ (DPA 142). In artistic dissensus, new forms of visibility emerge in the fabric of the sensible, so that what was previously invisible becomes visible or the ‘self-evidence of the visible’ is brought into question (DPA 141). The effect of dissensus is ‘to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings’ (DPA 141). Dissensual art ‘re-frames the world of common experience’ (DPA 142). The effect of such reframing is a redistribution of the sensible (DPA 141).
For Rancière, although the distinction between art and politics is one that admits of some ambiguity, equally, it is important that there must be some kind of distinction between the two realms, so that art does not completely turn into politics any more than politics collapses completely into art, as in Plato’s fusion of art and politics into one. Yet, while he resists the reduction of art and politics to one another, Rancière, equally resists the clear-cut line that the police order draws when it appeals to the self-evidence of what it takes to be the real world, the natural order of things. This constitutive haziness of the distinction between politics and art is an important part of his account of art in what he calls the aesthetic regime, of which dissensus is the ‘kernel’ (DPA 140). It is not that all art in a historically determined aesthetic regime is dissensual. As the opening pages of the ‘Paradoxes’ make clear, and as we have already seen, contemporary art which takes itself to be political often partakes inadvertently in assumptions that are governed by the ‘mimetic tradition’ (DPA 135).
Despite itself, art conforms to elements of the ethical and representative regimes – the threads that imitate the social bonds they call forth, for example, in a work entitled The People by Chinese artist Bai Yiluo, which consists of ‘1600 ID photos stitched together’ and is intended to ‘point to “the delicate threads uniting families and communities”’ (DPA 146). Rancière observes that this work anticipates ‘the reality it evokes’, that it creates a metaphorical representation of the situation it both embodies and calls for, such that the ‘practice of stitching photos together’ (DPA 146) comes to stand for the social unity the artwork itself is imagined to effect. The work of art thus participates in both the ‘representational distance’ of the representative regime and the ‘ethical immediacy’ (DPA 146) of the ethical regime. Rancière wants to avoid the dangers, on the one hand, of reducing art to mere ideology, where its use-value prevails, and its status as art becomes all but evacuated, and on the other hand, he also resists positing art as if it existed in some pure, transcendent ether of its own, uncontaminated by anything as prosaic or banal as politics.
The distinction between the ‘politics of aesthetics’ and the ‘aesthetics of politics’ is not a stable one precisely because there is a constant renewal of that which passes for common sense. With every reconfiguration of the fabric of common sense effected by art, new possibilities are opened up for voices that have hitherto gone unheard to be granted legitimation. It remains crucial however, that while art opens up such possibilities, on account of the original disjunction that defines the relation of art to politics, or what Rancière, also refers to as the ‘aesthetic cut’ (DPA 151), art does not guarantee such political transformations. Politics effects a dissensus such that there is no direct line between artistic dissensus and political dissensus. The mistake that the pedagogical logic of contemporary politics of art makes is to suppose that there is a direct relation of cause and effect between what an artist intends, and a political transformation in the world.
The ‘politics of art’ are in fact involved in ‘the intertwining of several logics’ (DPA 141). Museums themselves are specific distributions of the sensible, they are ‘“aesthetic” realities in and of themselves’ (DPA 141). They ‘create specific forms of “commonsense”, regardless of the specific message such-and-such an artist intends to convey’ (DPA 141). In Chapter 7, I shall ask what happens when artists address the ‘specific distributions of space and time’ that museums are, and whether particular works of art can intervene in the way in which a museum frames ‘common space and a mode of visibility’ (DPA 138), whether they can redistribute the specific distribution of the sensible that constitutes a museum. If a ‘politics of aesthetics … predates artistic intentions and strategies’ (DPA 141), what happens when artists address the politics of aesthetics embedded in the museum itself? What happens when the ‘anonymous and indeterminate museum spectators’ (DPA 138) that are said to be addressed by an art work turn out not to be as anonymous or indeterminate as might be supposed? What happens when the gaze is rendered less ‘indifferent’ than Rancière seems to assume, and when an art work is less ‘disconnected from a specific destination’ than it might first appear (DPA 139). In other words, when a work seeks to draw attention to the ‘framework of distributions of space and the weaving of fabrics of perception’ (DPA 141) that constitute the museum itself, does such a work open up the question of how some of Rancière’s own assumptions might stand in need of reworking?
What I hope to have accomplished in this chapter is some appreciation of what Rancière means when he says,
There is no ‘real world’ that functions as the outside of art. Instead, there is a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common, folds in which outside and inside take on a multiplicity of shifting forms, in which the topography of what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ are continually criss-crossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics (DPA 148).
In doing so, I have adumbrated the distance Rancière takes on contemporary art that takes itself to be political, but in his view, fails to remain art, falling into the trap of becoming didactic. Along the way, I have pointed out the influence of Foucault and Kant on Rancière’s articulation of the aesthetic regime, and its relationship to the ethical and representative regimes that precede it.
Notes
1 For an illuminating discussion of Foucault, see Shannon Winnubst, Way too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 20 15).
2 See Winnubst, Way too Cool, pp. 30–1.