6
I began this book by raising some critical questions about Rancière. The last two chapters engaged with Rancière’s work more exegetically. Here, I return to a more interrogative mode of engagement, in order to track how successfully Rancière rethinks the way in which the classical distinction between form and matter orchestrates aesthetics. I do so first, by returning to Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, and then by providing a critique of Heidegger that is inspired by Rancière.
An organizing motif of Rancière’s understanding of Kant is the way in which he locates the decisive operation of dissensus in Kant’s analytic of the beautiful, without turning to the analytic of the sublime, to which many recent aesthetic interventions, including Lyotard’s, have returned.1 He thereby calls into question the privileging of Kant’s sublime over his aesthetics of the beautiful, and by implication, also associates not only the sublime with the formless, but also the beautiful. Key to understanding Rancière’s own focus on the beautiful, rather than the sublime, is the way in which he sees Kant’s understanding of the free play of aesthetic judgement, read through the lens of Schiller, as breaking with the order of domination he construes as having governed the representative regime. Insofar as Kant aligns the sublime with masculinity, and the beautiful with femininity, by turning not to Kant’s analytic of the sublime, but to his analytic of the beautiful in order to elaborate dissensus – a notion that is essential to Rancière’s understanding of the operation of both art and politics – Rancière might also be understood to be moving away from the implicit masculinization of aesthetics in the latter’s emphasis of the sublime.2
However, if in this limited respect Rancière might be said to feminize Kant, in another way, I suggest he remains in thrall to a tradition that fails to put in question the feminizing and racializing conceptual architecture in which aesthetics is embedded. Specifically, I argue that Rancière does not ultimately manage to dislodge this architecture surrounding and supporting the form/matter distinction and the series of associated distinctions that he sees Kant’s understanding of aesthetics as disrupting. In order to articulate this argument, I make reference to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art later in this chapter. Before doing so, I clarify why Rancière moves away from the discourse of the sublime in favour of the aesthetics of the beautiful. Here, I return to Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, whose reading of Kant Rancière differentiates himself from, while redeploying some its aspects. Rancière describes his practice as ‘a matter of locating myself in the language of others and, in a way, paraphrasing it … up to the point where suddenly something new, something other, something else appears in those phrases’.3 His reading of Lyotard is a case in point.
At stake for Rancière, is the confusion into which he believes Lyotard falls in burying ‘art’s operations along with political practices underneath the indistinctness of ethics’ (AD 15, 26). To understand what Rancière finds disturbing in what he construes as Lyotard’s dissolution of ‘the specificity of political and artistic practices’ (AD 109, 145) in favour of an ethics of indistinction, let’s unpack how, for Rancière, Kant’s understanding of the sublime is a site in which aesthetics defers to morality. For Rancière, Lyotard takes up the Kantian notion of the sublime, but in doing so, he eliminates the political promise that Rancière takes to be inherent in Kant’s aesthetics. Rather than the promise of an ‘unprecedented equality’ (AD 13, 24) to which Rancière takes the free play of Kant’s aesthetics to point, Lyotard substitutes a submission to the law of the Other. For Rancière, Lyotard’s stance of attempting to purify art of the confusion to which he alleges aesthetics subjects it is a way of ‘undoing the alliance between artistic radicality and political radicality’ that Rancière understands to go by the name of aesthetics (AD 21, 34).
For Rancière, Kant’s sublime concerns a failure of imagination that results in the revelation of reason’s legislative power in the domain of morality. The sublime ‘translates the incapacity of the imagination to grasp the monument [a pyramid, for example, or a monumental mountain or wild ocean] as a totality. Imagination’s incapacity to present a totality to reason, analogous with its feeling of powerlessness before the wild forces of nature, takes us from the domain of aesthetics to that of morality’ (AD 89, 120). When confronted with a pyramid or a wild ocean, ‘imagination … reveals itself to be powerless to master the form, or the exceptional nature, of the sensible power with which it is confronted’ (AD 92-3, 125). Imagination finds itself unable to provide that which might have been expected of it. As ‘the greatest faculty of sense’ the imagination thus ‘betrays its powerlessness to give sensible form to the Ideas of reason’ (AD 93, 125). Thus it ‘proves the power of reason twice over’ (AD 93, 125). First, it is unable to live up to reason’s demand that it ‘provide the representation of the whole’. Secondly, experiencing this failure or the ‘incapacity’ of imagination, understood as the subject’s faculty of sense, attests to the presence of the ‘unlimited faculty’ of reason (AD 93, 125). Imagination is ‘thrown into disarray’, which opens first onto the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic free play of the faculties’ and then in turn to ‘a superior autonomy: the autonomy of legislative reason in the supersensible order of morality’ (AD 93, 125). Thus for Kant, the failure of imagination ‘brings forth the autonomous law of the legislative mind’ (AD 93, 126).
If, in the experience of the sublime, imagination’s failure proves reason’s autonomy, the key feature of Kant’s account of the beautiful, for Rancière, is that ‘form is characterized by its unavailability’ (AD 91, 123). In the experience of beauty, there is no ‘conceptual form imposing its unity on the diversity of sensation’ (AD 91). Rather, the beautiful is ‘neither an object of knowledge, subordinating sensation to the law of the understanding, nor an object of desire, subordinating reason to the anarchy of sensations’ (AD 91, 123). This ‘unavailability’ of form makes way for ‘a new form of autonomy’ in the ‘free play of the faculties’ (AD 91, 123).4 Rancière emphasizes the double suspension of negation that characterizes aesthetic experience for both Kant and Schiller, in which experience is ‘subject neither to the law of understanding, which requires conceptual determination, nor the law of sensation which demands an object of desire’ (AD 97, 130-131). Rancière understands this double negation not only as a suspension of the law of understanding and that of sensa tion but also as a suspension of the ‘power relations which usually structure the experience of the knowing, acting and desiring subject’ (AD 97, 131).
As we have seen, Rancière understands the representative regime as marked by the active imposition of what is taken to be an appropriate form on passive matter, which he understands as ‘a form of domination’ (AD 97, 131), since what counts as appropriate is determined by mimetic laws of art ensconced in forms of power and privilege. These laws not only dictate what and who should be represented, by whom and for whom, but in doing so, they also define a distribution of social functions and roles, which they assign to human nature. As we have also seen, there are those whom art concerns, and there are those it should not concern; the latter are to be kept in their place according to a social distribution of the sensible underwritten by a division of human nature into two classes. The class that actively imposes form on matter conceived as passive is the class that orchestrates, arranges and authorizes sensible experience. The relation of form and matter participates in the distribution of forms of visibility and audibility, of ways of making and doing, dividing humanity into two classes. It is for this reason that Rancière claims that the relation between Kant’s faculties in aesthetic experience as ‘the “free agreement” between understanding and imagination is already a disagreement or dissensus’ (AD 97, 131). It breaks with the order of domination, and it does so, not merely by blurring the social hierarchy, but also by interrupting and rearranging the forms of sensibility. Read through Schiller, as Rancière understands it, ‘aesthetic common sense … is a dissensual common sense. It does not remain content with bringing distant classes together. It challenges the distribution of the sensible that enforces their distance’ (AD 98, 132). Hence for Rancière, the ‘dissensual common sense of aesthetic experience is … opposed to the consensus of traditional order’ (AD 98, 132). The agreement of imagination and understanding is already disagreement. ‘Dissensus i.e. the rupture of a certain agreement between thought and the sensible already lies at the core of aesthetic agreement and repose’ (AD 98, 131–2). Thus, in Rancière’s view, the agreement between Kantian faculties ‘in aesthetic experience is not the harmony of form and matter that Lyotard claims’, but rather it is precisely a ‘break with this … agreement’ (AD 97, 131).5
For Rancière, one does not have to turn to Kant’s account of the sublime in order ‘to discern a disagreement between thought and the sensible’ (AD 97, 131). Reading Kant’s understanding of the beautiful through Schiller’s response to Juno Ludovisi, Rancière sees it as already involving the ‘double bind of attraction and repulsion’ (AD 97, 131). It has a ‘charm that attracts us and a respect that makes us recoil’ (AD 98, 131). For Schiller, the ‘statue’s free appearance … draws us in with its charm and keeps us at a distance through the sheer majesty of its self-sufficiency. This movement of contrary forces puts us in a state of utter repose and one of supreme agitation’ (AD 98, 131).6 The statue Juno Ludovisi both attracts and repels us because it ‘manifests the character of divinity which is also … that of humanity in its fullness: she does not work she plays. She neither yields nor resists. She is as free of the ties of commandment as she is of those of obedience’ (AD 98, 132). As such, the statue ‘stands in contrast to the state that governs human societies and puts each person in his place by separating those who command from those who obey, men of leisure from working men, men of refined culture from those of simple nature’ (AD 98, 132). It is, claims Rancière, this ‘identity between agreement and disagreement’ that enables ‘Schiller to confer on the “aesthetic state” a political signification over and above the simple promise of social mediation implied by Kantian common sense, which hoped to unite the elite’s sense of refinement with ordinary people’s natural simplicity’ (AD 98, 132).7 Aesthetic sense is dissensual precisely because, divorced from the conceptual hierarchy whereby form subordinates matter, and from the social hierarchy whereby ‘separate classes have distinct senses’ (AD 13, 23), the beauty of Juno Ludovisi is available to ‘anyone at all’ (AD 13, 24). As the site of aesthetic play and the appearance of the beautiful, Juno Ludovisi is ‘the refutation within the sensible’ of the ‘opposition between intelligent form and sensible matter which, properly speaking, is a difference between two humanities’ (AD 31, 46). Kantian aesthetic experience points to a ‘new form of sensible community’ (AD 104, 140).
Schiller understands Juno Ludovisi as exemplary of the free play and free appearance of Kant’s aesthetic idea. Whereas in the representative regime art was defined according to its ‘technical perfection’, in the aesthetic regime it is defined in terms of ‘a specific form of sensory apprehension’ (AD 29, 44), one that is ‘heterogeneous to the ordinary forms of sensory experience’ (AD 30, 45). The latter are embedded in a series of dualities characteristic of an ‘order of domination’ that Rancière construes as ultimately resting on ‘a difference between two humanities’ (AD 32, 47). In the representative regime, this domination takes shape in form’s active rule over passive matter and in the governance of intelligence or understanding over sensibility, whereas in the aesthetic regime ‘inventive activity and sensible emotion encounter one another “freely”’ (AD 13, 24).
The statue holds promise in the first place, ‘because it is art, because it is the object of a specific experience and thereby institutes a specific, separate common space; on the other [hand], it is a promise of community because it is not art, because … it expresses … a way of life which has no experience of separation into specific realms of experience’ (AD 35, 52). In Lyotard’s interpretation, art retreats from the promise of collective emancipation in order to retain its purity in endorsing the claims of a specific community. On Rancière’s interpretation, it is matter that comes to the fore in Lyotard’s understanding of the aistheton, but matter fused with a particular approach to form, namely a form bound to the expression of a specific community, the Jewish community.
For Rancière an encounter with beauty can undo the concatenation of form with the active shaping of the artist, and matter with the passivity of that which merely receives a form imposed upon it after the fact, as if the relation between form and matter were preconceived, such that the artist shapes passive matter according to a fully formed intellectual idea. Crucially, Rancière shows how aesthetic judgement is bound up with the imposition of form upon matter as conceived in the classical and representative regimes, an imposition itself bound up with social distinctions that cannot be divorced from judgements about what counts as art, judgements that are entangled with political judgements. For Rancière, what is at stake in the genius of the artist as Kant conceives it is an artistic intention that is beset by an unwilling or unconscious imperative, a will that is not merely active, but also passive, a willing that is also an unwilling, an activity that is also just as much a passivity, a consciousness that is at the same time unconscious, a knowledge that is also an ignorance. By corollary, beauty is perceived not through anything that can be anticipated, but precisely in a moment that is unpredictable as it is unformed. Kant’s aesthetic idea harbours radical potential because it is a site of play with regard to form, a play which mixes up and reformulates the relation between subjects and objects inasmuch as it repudiates the canons that supported classical conceptions of the mastery of form over matter, activity over passivity and voluntary, subjective intention imposed on an inert world.
For Rancière, the paradox of the aesthetic regime is that it promises precisely the elimination of art’s autonomous existence insofar as it holds art to be the promise of its realization as a form of life. As ‘the becoming-life of art’ the end it ‘ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality’ (AD 44, 62). At the same time, it carries the danger of turning into a form of totalitarianism. In Rancière’s view, it is in response to such a threat that thinkers such as Adorno and Lyotard have rejected ‘engaged art’, not in order to embrace a view that conforms to the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ (AD 43, 62), but to endorse a view of art as political insofar as it maintains a status radically distinct from that of ‘objects of consumption’ (AD 96, 129). Yet in doing so, Rancière thinks they risk isolating art from politics, in enclosing ‘the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life’ (AD 44, 62). In Rancière’s view, the tension between politics and art must be preserved; to dissolve it would tip the balance one way or another, such that either art insists on a disengaged purity, or it dissolves itself into the political. Rancière understands the regime of aesthetics as a ‘regime of the functioning of art and a matrix of discourse, a form for identifying the specificity of art and a redistribution of the relations between the forms of sensory experience’ (AD 14, 25-6).
In sum, then, in the aesthetic regime, the social distribution of roles is no longer lined up with human nature in such a way as to adhere to the norm of mimetic legislation, whereby the rules of art ordain that there is a class of people whom art concerns, and a class of people to whom it is of no concern (see AD 12, 23). The free play that is the hallmark of Kant’s aesthetic idea, in which there is a dual suspension of the ‘conceptual determination’ by cognition or understanding and of ‘the law of sensation which demands an object of desire’ (AD 97, 130-131), disrupts the distribution of the sensible that is orchestrated by the legislation of two separate classes of humans. Read through Schiller, Kant’s aesthetic common sense ‘challenges the distribution of the sensible that enforces’ (AD 98, 132) the distance of these two classes, and it does so by a ‘neutralization of the very forms by which power is exercised’ (AD 99, 133). What is at stake here, Rancière insists, is a ‘new revolution’, one of ‘forms of sensory existence, instead of a simple upheaval of forms of state’ (AD 99, 133).
Let’s conclude this part of the discussion by reviewing the constraints that Rancière understands to have defined the representative regime, in order to clarify the way in which aesthetic free play in Kant and Schiller breaks with the hierarchical order of representation. In the aesthetics that Kant inaugurates ‘There is a break with the hierarchical order that had defined which subjects and forms of expression were deemed worthy of inclusion in the domain of art’ (AD 10, 20) says Rancière. Stendhal stands, for Rancière, as exemplary of this break. The worth of art is no longer calibrated in terms of the dignity it establishes for itself, in celebrating those deemed worthy of its representation, in which its forms of expression are bound up with the dignity of gods and goddesses or kings and queens.
In Stendhal, for example, the most ordinary and apparently insignificant noises and sights become worthy of the artist’s attention, the mundane minutiae of everyday experience become the material of art. Art is born of the ‘pure contingency’ (AD 12, 22) that the ‘proximate’ world presents. For Rancière, Stendhal ‘testifies to an aesthetic regime in which the distinction between those things that belong to art and those that belong to ordinary life is blurred’ (AD 5, 13). By evoking in his autobiographical Vie de Henry Brulard (1835) ‘the first – insignificant – noises that marked him as a child: ringing church bells, a water pump, a neighbour’s flute’ (AD 4, 13), Rancière understands Stendhal to be testifying to ‘the ruin of the old canons that set art objects apart from those of ordinary life’ (AD 5, 14). Rancière claims that in ‘the neighbour’s flute and the water pump which shape the soul of an artist’ (AD 8, 17), poiesis (as ‘a way of doing’) and aesthesis (‘a way of being that is affected by it’) are no longer mediated by mimetic legislation (see AD 7, 16); rather they stand in a relation of immediacy with one another. Yet their relation to one another is premised on ‘the very gap of their ground’ (AD 8, 17). That is, it is premised on the loss of the ‘human nature’ that underwrote or guaranteed the mimetic legislation of the representative regime, or else it is premised on ‘a humanity to come’ (AD 8, 17), a community that has not yet arrived but for which the art in question calls.
The break with the hierarchical forms of the representative regime which confined the subject of art to highly circumscribed arenas, to the pomp and circumstance of the lives of the rich and powerful, effects a rupture of the ‘norm of adequation’ (AD 12, 22) that pertained ‘between poiesis and aesthesis’ (AD 10, 20), established under the auspices of the mimetic, representative regime. This norm correlated an ‘active faculty’ with a ‘receptive faculty’ (AD 12, 22), a faculty of active intelligence responsible for imposing the appropriate form on passive matter, thereby evoking the appropriate emotional sensibility in an audience that could be moulded to feel whatever was necessary to support the hierarchical order of things. In the representative regime, ‘artworks were tied to celebrating worldly dignities, and the dignity of their forms were attached to the dignity of their subjects and different sensible faculties attributed to those situated in different places’ (AD 12, 23).
The aesthetic regime disrupts this arrangement, causing ‘disorder’ such that ‘artworks no longer refer to those who commissioned them, to those whose image they established and grandeur they celebrated. Artworks henceforth relate to the “genius” of peoples and present themselves, at least in principle, to the gaze of anyone at all’ (AD 13, 24). In the aesthetic regime, ‘human nature and social nature cease to be mutual guarantees’ and there is no longer ‘any hierarchy of active intelligence over sensible passivity. This gap separating nature from itself is the site of an unprecedented equality’ (AD 13, 24). The transition from the representative to the aesthetic regime, thus, lies not only in the subject matter depicted, but also in the shifting contours of those to whom art became available to view. A major development that facilitates this shift is the institution of the museum, which severs ‘paintings and sculptures … from their functions of religious illustration and of decorating seigniorial and monarchic grandeurs’ (AD 8, 18). Henceforth, an ‘undifferentiated public’ comes ‘to replace the designated addressees of representative works’ (AD 8-9, 18).8
We have seen that Rancière is critical of the way that form and matter, along with a series of associated distinctions have orchestrated thinking about art within the representative regime, and that with Kant, the hierarchy between these distinctions is disrupted. Corresponding to the suspension of the power of form, understood as active, over matter understood as passive, is another suspension, that of the hierarchy between two different classes of humanity, the class of intelligence over the class of sensation. No longer are ‘different sensible faculties attributed to those situated in different places’, and no longer is ‘the dignity’ of the ‘forms’ of artwork ‘attached to the dignity of their subjects’ (AD 12, ME 23). In the aesthetic regime, the function of art is no longer to celebrate dignitaries, but to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, in the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, in a fleeting instance, to capture the beauty that is to be found in that which might have heretofore been judged to be a trivial existence. At the same time, there is a redistribution of the sensible in the disruption of an order in which certain humans are destined for the roles of rulers and leaders, while others are destined to be those who serve, providing the necessities of life that free their employers to pursue art and politics.
In the rest of this chapter, I focus on the relation between form and matter by approaching Rancière’s work obliquely. Heidegger’s critique of the relation between form and matter as classically conceived will be the site of my oblique approach; his recasting of this essentially Aristotelian distinction in terms of the strife of world and earth is fundamental to contemporary aesthetics, including, even if indirectly, that of Rancière. However, Rancière inflects his rethinking of this classical distinction in a manner that, in my view, while not without its problems (as we will see in the next chapter), is much more politically progressive and productive than Heidegger’s rethinking of it within the context of truth recast as aletheia, understood by Heidegger in terms of unconcealment, unveiling or bringing out of oblivion or hiding. In what follows, I elaborate Heidegger’s effort to overcome the pervasive influence of the form/matter distinction in aesthetic thinking, and his ultimate recapitulation of the tropes in terms of which this distinction continues to orchestrate metaphysical thinking, a recapitulation to which I think Rancière also ultimately falls prey.
I provide a commentary on selected aspects of Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in an effort to show how he construes the work of art, and how his account marks an ultimately inadequately radical departure from the guiding distinction of matter and form, which he claims has been a hallmark of the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics that he sees as preceding him.9 I suggest that the form/matter distinction is embedded in a series of other problematic distinctions, which Heidegger does not manage to dislodge, distinctions that might be understood to anchor the account of form and matter, distinctions that therefore remains to haunt his account. Heidegger’s effort to overcome a metaphysical aesthetics remains ensconced in a further series of distinctions which themselves are in need of displacement and rethinking, not the least of which is the differentiation of feminine and masculine.
An organizing motif of Heidegger’s argument – indeed his main argument against traditional aesthetics – is the inadequacy of the distinction that characterizes the aesthetic approach to works of art, namely the distinction between form (morphe) and matter (hule).10 Heidegger acknowledges that the form/matter distinction has been associated with a series of other metaphysical distinctions. Form has been ‘correlated with the rational and matter with the irrational … the rational is taken to be the logical and the irrational the alogical … the subject-object relation is coupled with the conceptual pair form-matter’ (PLT 27, H 12). His acknowledgement does not extend, however, to the association, also found in the history of Western metaphysics, of form, rationality and subjectivity with masculinity, and of matter with irrationality, the object and femininity.11 Yet, while Heidegger seeks to shed what he construes as the confining and misleading conceptual framework of ‘formed matter’, he still adheres to the conceptual machinery in which the distinction of form and matter is grounded, an apparatus that not only lines up form with shape, and matter with the stuff contained by shape, but which also construes form as the organizing principle, and associates masculine creativity with this organizing principle, modelling the creativity of artists on the creative capacity of a divine maker.12 By corollary, as we saw in Chapter 3, femininity is associated with passive matter, infused with an organizational and decisively masculine principle/form. Racialized distinctions follow a similar pattern, and although Plato’s chora has been appropriated by various thinkers, including Derrida and Kristeva, as providing a more fertile ground for thinking femininity/maternity, one that in some sense precedes or perhaps gives birth to the form/matter distinction, it is the Aristotelian heritage that asserts itself in Heidegger’s effort to combat the form/matter distinction, an effort that perhaps inadvertently, I am suggesting, adheres to that tradition, despite its attempted departure.
If this organizing principle has been traditionally associated with rationality, logic and the subject, Heidegger’s reorientation of the discourse of rationality, calculative thinking and subjectivity recasts the question of truth so that it is no longer understood in terms of correctness, in terms of a correlation or agreement between the concepts of the mind and external, physical reality. Truth is now to be understood as aletheia, as the play of concealment and unconcealment, as the disclosure of beings in their being. One way in which this disclosure happens is in and through the work of art, in its standing out from the recalcitrant, obdurate self-refusal into which it can also withdraw or recede. In this discourse of truth as aletheia, of the disclosure of being that is wrested from its hiddenness, earth is associated with phusis, as both origin, and organizing principle, a sheltering agent that allows the artist to bring forth and make shine ‘for the very first time’ (PLT 45, H 31) the material that, under the artist’s hand, is used not in the sense of being used up (see PLT 46, H 33), but in such a way that the rock ‘first becomes rock’ (PLT 45, H 31). It comes into itself, comes into its own. And as the ‘rock gleams’ it makes visible in a new way the sky against which the temple forms a silhouette. ‘The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air’ (PLT 41, H 27).
At stake in Heidegger’s polemic against traditional aesthetics, is its tendency to assume a mimetic stance.13 For Heidegger, art is definitively rescued from any straightforward imitative, representative function. If the materiality of artwork can no longer be consigned to irrationality, the alogical, or the object, if the recasting of truth as aletheia has put into question the model of truth conceived in terms of adequation, where the form of ideas is adequate to the material reality of the world they are taken to represent, according to a preconceived idea of correctness, then how must materiality be thought? Heidegger recasts materiality, not in terms of its falling short of form, rationality and subject, but rather in terms of its appearing in the artwork in a way that is covered over, or unattainable when we approach objects from the standpoint of our everyday experience of the world. The form/matter distinction is introduced, in Heidegger’s account, as a response to the inadequacy of the notion of the thing that focuses on the senses, ‘the thing is the aistheton, that which is perceptible by sensations in the senses belonging to sensibility’ (PLT 25, H 10).14 So long as we approach the ‘thingly character of the thing’ by way of the senses we will never succeed, Heidegger suggests, because:
We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises, in the appearance of things – as th[e] thing concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. (PLT 25, H 10)
The work of art disrupts this circuit of signification. Levinas makes much of this point, that is, of the way that colours do not conform to the shapes of objects, the way that art goes beyond the view that he attributes to phenomenology, such that a colour is always the colour of something, of a dress, for instance.15 In art, for Levinas, ‘red reddens’.16 Indeed, it is precisely this quality of art, its ultra-materiality, that gives it a somewhat privileged role in Levinas’s philosophy (though finally art’s meaning will be only recuperable through the ethical authority of Levinas’s revised understanding of philosophy).
Ultimately, for Heidegger, the capacity of the work of art to provide access to tones or sounds apart from how they are presented within the equipmental world view, or outside the ‘situation’ that ‘always prevails’, or independently of ‘the things themselves’ (PLT 25, H 10) is exactly what is at stake in the jutting out of the earth into the world. One of the inadequacies of approaching the work of art as a thing, for him, is that such an approach can only ever subordinate colours to things, understanding them as meaningful within a circuit of significance that is already dominated by the equipmental approach to beings. The work of art differs from this in that it thematizes, makes available to us, unifies, or brings into relief the spirit of an age. In Iain Thomson’s words, in art we find ‘an understanding of being that does not reduce entities either to modern objects to be controlled or to late-modern resources to be optimized’.17 For the Greeks, for example, ‘the temple worked … to unify a coherent and meaningful historical world around itself (by inconspicuously focusing and illuminating its people’s sense of what is and what matters)’ (ibid.).18
What, then, becomes of the masculine and racial associations with rationality and the subject, and femininity with irrationality and the object in the recasting of the form/matter distinction as the ‘setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth’ (PLT 46, H 33)? Do these associations simply fall away, as Heidegger recasts truth not as a question of correctness, but rather as a question of aletheia, as the disclosure of being from its hiddenness? Or are these associations reinstated in Heidegger’s reworking of the question of the origin of the work of art? In what sense is there a move away from the artist as cause in Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’? How successfully does Heidegger accomplish the move he tries to make away from the artist as the origin of the work of art, in the sense of the artist originating, causing or producing the artwork, and towards art as an origin of the work? How far does the fact that the only art that Heidegger considers in this essay (a tendency reiterated elsewhere in his work) originates – at least where the artist is known – from Western, male artists, already prejudge what kind of work qualifies as art for Heidegger? How far does this compromise Heidegger’s claim to move away from the idea of the artist as the decisive origin of art? If only certain types of people are recognized as artists, what becomes of the claim that what matters is not the artist as cause, that rather art is where both the work of art and the artist originate?
If there is a move away from understanding art as a thing, and towards understanding it as an event that happens, an event understood as the unfolding of truth, as aletheia, in which there is a setting forth/setting up of earth and world, what kind of world is set up? If the ‘silent call of the earth’ vibrates in the shoes Van Gogh depicts (PLT 33, H 19), in what ways is the Heideggerian notion of world silently circumscribed by European and masculinist preconceptions of who qualifies as an artist on Heidegger’s world view, and how are those entrusted with the preservation of art set up by Heidegger to constitute a community that excludes of non-Europeans, non-Greeks? Even as Heidegger moves towards embracing the idea of the viewer, audience or spectator of art playing a role in constituting art as art, and thereby moves away from emphasizing artistic intention, or inspired, individualistic genius, as determining the character of art, he reinscribes the kind of falsely universalist assumptions implicated in standard readings of Kant’s sensus communis.19
If for Kant, aesthetic judgements of taste ‘should’ be universal – a ‘should’ that carries a moral force that appears to invoke everyone, but turns out to invoke an exclusive community – Heidegger’s appeal to those who preserve art as art also indulges certain traits of exclusivity.20 While the effort to include those who preserve art – the community that witnesses art, and celebrates it as art – in his understanding of that which constitutes art, might, at first glance, appear to be a progressive move on Heidegger’s part, those entrusted with the preservation of art will turn out to be riven with highly predictable class and gender-bound traits. The community that preserves art will turn out to be a distinctly European community, and the art this community preserves will turn out to be of distinctly European provenance.
If the shoes Van Gogh painted are attributed by Heidegger to a peasant woman, how far is his account shot through with assumptions about the limitations of her perspective, for whom world and earth exist ‘only’ (PLT 33-4, H 19) in e quipment? And why would Heidegger assert this to be the case? Does he assume that a peasant woman who worked in the fields would not have time to go and stand before a painting by Van Gogh, a painting depicting shoes that trudge through the fields, a painting that shows the particularity of a being in its being precisely by abstracting the shoes from the field, distancing them from their unobtrusive reliability, depicting them with no ‘surrounding’ (PLT 33, H 19), suspending the context in which they melt into the invisibility of reliability (see PLT 32, H 18), the environment in which they disappear into their usefulness? The nothingness with which Van Gogh surrounds the shoes he paints, the ‘undefined space’ (PLT 33, H 19), abstracts the shoes from the context in which they serve as useful equipment, where they can be relied upon, and makes their reliability available for thematization and reflection precisely in doing so.
What if the peasant woman took the time to stand before the painting, would she then understand earth and world in a different way from equipmentally?21 In his suggestion that the peasant woman only understands earth and world in an equipmental context, Heidegger qualifies his use of the word ‘only’: ‘World and earth exist for’ the peasant woman that Heidegger imagines to be the wearer of Van Gogh’s shoes, ‘and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus – in the equipment. We say “only” and therewith fall into error; for the reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the earth the freedom of its steady thrust’ (PLT 34, H 19). Who are those who share the peasant woman’s mode of being? Other peasant women? Peasant men? Are they peasants, at any rate, or people of a certain class, those who work the land, perhaps, who, Heidegger might imagine, are too weary, who trudge too ‘slowly’, to be able to progress from the fields into an art gallery, where they might have seen Van Gogh’s shoes, perhaps too taken up with ‘uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread’ (PLT 33, H 18) to do so, perhaps too taken up with ‘the wordless joy of having once more withstood want’ (PLT 33, H 18)? Is there a difference between those who plough the fields, and those who clean city streets, between the rural and the urban poor? Are all these nameless individuals, peasant women, shippers, charwomen, a part of ‘those who have no part’ (DT 9, M 28) in Rancière’s phrase?
Those who live in a ‘simple world’, a world that is understood equipmentally, live in a world that is allowed to function, for Heidegger, as providing a preliminary hold on what the work of art is not. The artwork is not a mere thing, and it is not mere equipment, it is not that which is the type of being for which the matter/form distinction is appropriate. But the simple world in which peasants dwell, a world governed by equipmentality, a world in which peasants do not have, and do not take, the time to see their world from the perspective opened up by art, is not, ultimately, the point. The point, for Heidegger, is to abandon the ‘thingly’ perspective altogether (having benefitted from it in a preliminary way that helps us see that the form/matter distinction is grounded in an equipmental perspective, even if it proves inadequate, ultimately to that perspective).
Are those who dwell in this simple world not imagined by Heidegger to be open to a world of the play of unconcealment and concealment founded by the work of art? If not, why not? Perhaps they are confined to the truth as correctness, to measuring, to rationality as calculation and prediction, perhaps, in the end, they are not allowed to be thinkers and poets, perhaps they are too busy trying to find the energy to make enough money, to produce enough food to sustain themselves, to be able to go back to work the next day.22 Perhaps they do not understand, because they must not understand, because if they understood, there would be no one to clean the museums. They would all be out visiting the museums, looking at paintings, or painting themselves, in their studios (in the unlikely case that they had done enough cleaning to be able to afford studios). If the cleaners and the farmers understood, those whom Heidegger assumes to be entitled to go, as viewers, to the museums, would be no different from those who clean the museums, or provide the food for museum restaurants. And then, where would we be? If they understood, they might challenge the logos according to which there are those who do, and there are those who think, there are those who lack logos (or, like slaves, only have the type of logos that allows them to follow directions), and those who have logos. Those who have logos, set the terms of the debate, deciding what does, and does not, constitute logos. The world of cleaners is a world of ‘those who have no logos’ (DT 22, M 44), so we are given to understand. The way you can tell, is the way that cleaners are invisible to most of the world. You look through them, past, them, around them. You do not say hallo, or see them as people. You do not see them. They are dispensable. Except when they stop cleaning and go off to become artists.
How far is the materiality of art, reworked through the notion of the strife of world and earth, a product of empire, of capital, of its transportability? How far is the provenance, or source of the colours that shine forth in the ‘luster and gleam of the stone’ at issue? Whence came these materials? Who brought them, carried them, quarried them? Did those who quarried the materials with which the temple at Paestum was built see them as ‘mere things’, just as Heidegger imagines the ‘shippers or charwomen in museums’ do? (PLT 19, H 3). What if those who quarried the rocks, those who shipped them, those who fabricated the leather from which the shoes that modelled for Van Gogh’s shoes were made, those who clean the museums in which Van Gogh’s depictions are housed, the peasant woman whom Heidegger imagines to be the wearer of shoes Van Gogh depicts, took the time to see the temple or Van Gogh’s painting? What would happen then? Or perhaps we should ask what does happen when a worker, someone whom Heidegger might consign to the lowest of ranks, goes, on a Sunday afternoon, to visit an art gallery? When, rather than resting up in order to replenish themselves through sleep and food, in order to renew their energy, in order to be able to go to work again the next day, cleaning the floors of the museum, a charwoman writes a poem, or a peasant woman who works in the fields works on a book, paints a painting, goes as a visitor to a museum, what happens then?
Does Heidegger’s distinction between the work and the thing depend upon a distinction between those who see the artwork as a thing (shippers and charwomen, are his examples of those who might see the work of art as a thing), and those who see it as a work (those endowed with the task of preserving the work of art, a community of art lovers, those with the freedom from repetitive tasks of necessity, those who are accustomed to being cooked for, fed and cleaned for by the others, who lack such freedom)? What if t hose who saw the art work as a thing, sometimes also saw it as an artwork? What if they stopped seeing it as a thing? Would it then lose its status as a thing? Or is it rather the case that there is a time and a place, even for art lovers, to see the art work as a thing (perhaps as the curators of an art exhibit are making plans to ship art work), and that this slippage between seeing it as a thing and a work suggests that there is no firm dividing line between everyday things and works of art, as Heidegger would, presumably have us think? Is this slippage ontic or ontological?
Why would Heidegger, having circled around the question of what type of thing a work of art is for most of his essay, finally say that ‘we no longer raise [a] question about the work’s thingly element’, but rather we question ‘in terms of the work’ (PLT 66, H 55)? This seems to suggest that we must learn, in order to properly appreciate art, not to see art as a thing. Never? Then, how would ‘we’ (we lovers of art, we who are privileged, we curators, who facilitate the moving of art from place to place, a we who tends to be specified as male and European and free of undertaking the tasks that are repetitive and necessary for survival) learn to transport it? Unless we employ others (those who are posited as not seeing art as anything other than a thing) to transport it for us, unless we enforce the distinction between us and them, so that we do not have to see the artwork as a thing. ‘We’ employ others to see artwork as a thing, and not as art.
How far does the strife of earth and world Heidegger elaborates facilitate a sheltering and allow a gathering together of only certain mortals, and only specific, non-Eastern gods? If the temple that Heidegger cites as exemplary is a Greek temple, how far is his account mediated by Hegelian preconceptions of Greek religion serving as precursor for Christianity, and how much does it justify treating non-European gods as less holy, non-European mortals as less than human? How far does the strife of earth and world reiterate the Trinitarian, dialectical configuration of the movement of Hegelian Spirit? How far does it repeat the tropes according to which Hegel dismisses non-European art as lacking the proper balance of form and matter, the tropes according to which a sublimity overwhelms and confuses the eye through teaming repetition, becoming a bad infinity, or failing to facilitate transcendence? Of failing to overwhelm us, so that we can then step back and bask in our ability to recapture ourselves, to recover from the destabilizing, disturbing effects of art, to master ourselves again? Even as Heidegger effects a move away from the form/matter distinction, since it is still too redolent of equipmentality on his account, there remain vestiges of the Hegelian and Kantian accounts of art from which he seeks to distance himself in his attempt to overcome metaphysics.
What happens when the Tracey Emins or the Gillian Wearings of this world become artists?23 What is happening now? What happens when childhood abuse takes centre stage, or video installations in small cubicles are designed to maximize our physical discomfort, as we must share a space in proximity with strangers in order to see and hear confessions of other strangers onscreen, sometimes masked, often telling us things we do not necessarily want to hear, sometimes in voices we do not expect to come out of their mouths? What happens to materiality and to invisibility when Guyana-born Ingrid Pollard’s work raises questions about how a pub name or sign on a building sets up a world in a way that invests its British landscape, and the people, the nations, the communities who inhabit it, as contesting one another?24 What happens when the prerogative of naming a pub ‘Black Boy’ is brought into question by an artist who photographs the pub, and exhibits the photograph as part of an experiment, as an invitation to audiences to read or see, or not see, not read, the sign that says ‘Black Boy’ as significant, meaningful, problematic, and as deeply implicated in a colonial system of slavery? What happens to the community entrusted with the preservation of art? Does not this community become a split community, a splintered community, a community of contestation, does it not become more than one community, communities in the plural, communities whose contestation attests to the irony that the very pubs that have been named Black Boy would traditionally not have been places that welcome black faces? Does not dissensus take the place of any unified, idealized notion of a community, ethical or not?
Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality and ontology opened up the possibility of thinking the essence of the work of art, not in terms of an ontological distinction etched in some timeless dividing line differentiating objects of art from other things for all eternity. He thought the essence of the artwork rather as an event, a happening, a granting, a clearing, but also as a withdrawing or refusal of truth: truth as concealment and unconcealment, as aletheia. The truth of artwork is historical. Yet, Heidegger’s views are circumscribed by certain residual, Eurocentric cultural attachments to ideas that remain critically unexamined in his work. While he wants to move away from the conventions of thinking art in relation to genius, to form and matter, and all its attendant distinctions, he remains entrenched in the metaphysical trappings of race, gender and class that confine his attention to taking seriously only certain types of art, only a highly restricted notion of who qualifies as an artist. While he wants to get away from the idea of the artist as cause of the artwork, he remains attached to it through his failure to question as radically as he might the cultural assumptions that remain invisibly embedded in his account of the work of art.
As we have seen, Rancière refuses to completely elide the politicization of art with the identification of a cause. He insists upon the fact that for art to be political in the sense he elaborates, that is, under the heading of dissensus, whereby a political work of art does not tell its viewers or audience what to think, the artist does not impart a message to the public in the sense of communicating an agenda for action, but rather the political work of art retains an indispensable ambiguity. The political work of art, in Rancière’s view, does not call for a particular transformation of the world in line with an intention revealed by the artist through her intention, it does not assemble or identify a community. Rather, it redistributes the sensible, that is, most fundamentally, it displaces the rhythms and patterns according to which we temporalize and spatialize the world. Political art intervenes in the current distribution of the sensible, which is orchestrated and ordained by the political powers that be, and makes available new modes of perceiving the world, new modes of visualizing how things are. New discourses arise to legitimate and sanction these new modes of visibility, discourses no longer circumscribed by scientific norms of time and space. What art does not do, however, is to tell us what to think or show us ho w to see. It merely makes available new possibilities for seeing and hearing, and in so doing, makes available new ways of thinking, doing and being. It mitigates against the permanent sanction of any one, given, transcendental schematization; it multiplies the possibilities for perception by making it possible to interrogate orders of perception that take themselves to be, and pass themselves off as, just the way things are.
In thinking art works as ambiguous in their politicization, Rancière returns to Kant’s aesthetic idea, to the way in which art is judged neither by pure nor by practical reason, but in relation to the free play of imagination and understanding. Radicalizing Kant’s insight that aesthetic judgement involves no determinate concept, Rancière shows how the indeterminate free play of imagination and understanding disrupts and displaces the classical notion of how form shapes matter, and the associated distinctions that typically align themselves with this distinction, including activity and passivity, whereby the active and conscious intention of the artist shapes matter construed as passive material that conforms to the voluntary will of a creator who shapes it according to a preconceived idea of what qualifies as art. In taking up Kant’s insight into the free play of imagination and understanding, his understanding of genius as a kind of not-knowing, and the malleability of form, which is no longer dictated by a pre-existent concept, such that art can precisely contribute to the re-orchestration of conceptuality, how far might Rancière be said to open the way to recalibrate the traditional alignment of femininity and raced others with passive matter and masculinity with active form, even if he does not perform this recalibration himself? Feminist and race theorists can build on his thinking through of the miscount, on his taking seriously those who have been said to have no part, those relegated to the (non-artistic) makers and the doers, as if they had no time to think and to take part in politics, as if they were not qualified to reshape the nation or the state. At the same time, feminist and race theorists can help to develop, complement, supplement and sometimes correct those areas of Rancière’s thinking in which he does not push as far as he might. Indeed, feminist and race theorists have already begun to push in this direction, in ways that are consonant with Rancière’s redistribution of the sensible, which can be seen as a creative extension of Kant’s insight that the aesthetic idea is capable of disturbing and reworking the model of temporality and spatiality that he had tried to contain in the notion of pure forms in his earlier critique.25 Art temporalizes and spatializes in a different way – a thought that also radicalizes Heidegger’s notion Es gibt – it gives/there is.26 While Rancière celebrates feminist political struggles, he has tended to ignore the insights of feminist and race theory, and feminist aesthetics. In the next chapter, I seek to stage a conversation between feminist aesthetics and Rancière.
Rancière alerts us to the extent to which attempts to construe works of art as calls for a unifying community, whether these calls are understood to be ethical or not, remain idealizing at the expense of those who have no part. Instead of seeing art as the embodiment of a lost, or a future community, a community still to come, he sees art as partaking in a redistribution of the sensible, offering different points of view, making available new modes of perception. Art does not bring together, or gather up, the view of things that exist in the cultural, horizonal background, for the most part, inconspicuously informing what we think. Rather it interrupts, disturbs and opens up possibilities for re-envisioning conventional ways of seeing. In doing so, it makes visible the splits, the divisions in communities that are often covered up.
Notes
1 Among many other critics see Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3 Rancière in Abraham Geil, ‘Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 301–310, see esp. p. 305.
4 I take it that the new form autonomy to which Rancière refers is that born of the free play of the faculties of understanding and imagination.
5 See AD 90, 122.
6 Rancière refers to Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), who, in a passage that some readers might find reminiscent of Kant’s concept of the sublime, says, referring to Juno Ludovisi that ‘even as we abandon ourselves in ecstasy to her heavenly grace, her celestial self-sufficiency makes us recoil in terror’ (109).
7 Rancière refers to James Meredith Creed’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, p. 183.
8 I think that in fact the public is not as undifferentiated as Rancière suggests, as I suggest in the next chapter.
9 I make no apology for focusing here, in terms of explicit commentary, solely on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001); ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe B5 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), though my reading is also informed by other key works, especially Being and Time, and the later 1920 lecture courses. Some might argue that if one were to turn to other works, such as On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) one might find a slightly more sympathetic attitude on Heidegger’s part to non-Western art, although I would suggest that Heidegger lapses into the romantic/sentimental register even here, and in doing so does not really appreciate non-Western art for itself. I have chosen to focus here on the form/matter distinction that Heidegger deals with in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, because I think it is the crucial site for understanding Heidegger’s negotiation of the ontology of aesthetics. This essay is rich and important, and still has not been fully excavated. My effort here is to insist that Heidegger’s attempt to convincingly overcome the form/matter distinction (a distinction to which critics and commentators have paid insufficient attention in their readings of the essay) comes adrift. It founders, or reaches an impasse, because Heidegger fails to question other key distinctions that constitute the conceptual architecture informing and supporting the work that the form/matter pair has done in elaborating aesthetic theory.
10 See PLT 26-27, H 11.
11 Even Heideggerian commentators who pick up on these associations, neglect their implications for the masculine/feminine distinction, or for other related distinctions, for example racial distinctions. See, for example, Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 84, whose reading is, in other ways, illuminating.
12 Aristotle associates form with the masculine and matter with the feminine; in Thomas Aquinas’s medieval appropriation of Aristotelian thought, the model of the divine creator becomes fused with the model of adequation, where truth is understood as correctness. Descartes’s metaphysics lines up rationality with truth and essence in a way that sets up the mind/body distinction as aligned in important ways with the form/matter distinction, a distinction that then plays out in such a way as to line up masculine subjects with the formative power of creators, and feminine (non) subjects with the passive substance of materiality, to be shaped and moulded by their masters/husbands/fathers, whose creative processes imitate that of the demiurge.
13 In contrast, Levinas returns to a mimetic conception of the artwork, although he conceptualizes it in a way that differs from Plato’s straightforward understanding of mimesis as falling short of ideal truth, obfuscating the beauty of ideas. (Of course, nothing is, finally straightforward when it comes to gauging Plato’s views on art in the end, if one takes seriously the dramatic form of the dialogues in which he expresses his condemnatory views of tragic poetry; his condemnation of art is enacted within a dramatic dialogue, which itself is poetically/artfully/artistically woven, a conversation, in which some interlocutors contest Socrates’s views; unless we take the rather untenable view that Socrates is simply Plato’s mouthpiece, we must take seriously the dramatic structure of Platonic dialogues, as many have argued).
14 The solution of form and matter (which itself turns out to be misleading according to Heidegger) is introduced as an alternative solution to two previous characterizations of the thing, as the ‘bearer of its characteristic traits’ (PLT 24, H 9), and the [Kantian] view of a thing as ‘nothing but the unity of a manifold of what is given in the senses’ (PLT 25, H 8). The problem with both interpretations is that the ‘thing vanishes’ (PLT 26, H 10-11). In the first interpretation the thing remains ‘at arm’s length from us’, whereas the second interpretation ‘makes it press too hard upon us’ (PLT 26, H 11). The problem with the second interpretation is that ‘we never really perceive a throng of sensations …’ (PLT 25, H 10). Rather we hear noises as always already signifying in a definite, meaningful, familiar context (PLT 25, H 10). Of course, the work of art will disrupt such contexts, and Heidegger’s discussion of the empty space, or nothingness out of which the shoes Van Gogh paints comes into its own here.
15 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr ans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p. 187; Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 161.
16 As Levinas says, ‘the search for new forms from which all art lives, keeps awake the verbs that are on the verge of lapsing into substantives. In painting red reddens’, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 38–9; Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 50.
17 Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, p. 67.
18 Whereas for Heidegger, as for Schelling, art unifies community, for Rancière, art brings to the fore dissensus. Art is significant for Rancière not in so far as it brings us together, harmonizing us, but insofar as it makes available the clash that he thinks through under the heading of the redistribution of the sensible. Art can make visible that which remained invisible. But in doing so it is not restricted to teaching us, it is not merely that which ‘can help us learn’ or ‘understand’ (Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, p. 77). If art can help us see things differently, this different way of seeing is not caught up in pedagogical dogma, it is not a question of the artist knowing something and conveying this superior insight to those who view the art produced from a supposedly elevated perspective. The artwork might, and might not, produce a new way of seeing. The artist leaves it up to the viewer or the audience to look, to see, to gauge the sense (in both senses of the word sens) of what is seen. It is not up to the artist to tell us what to think, to disclose the truth.
19 In contrast, however, taking his cue from Schiller, Rancière will read Kant’s sensus communis as opening on to an egalitarian revision of traditional aesthetics.
20 See Christine. Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007).
21 On those who are construed by some as not having time to do anything but work, see, for example, Rancière, PA 12.
22 On the connection between Heidegger’s thinking about art and his critique of calculative thinking see Beistegui 2005. Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (London: Continuum, 2005).
23 Prominent artist and Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts, Tracey Emin has established a reputation for her controversial works of art. Gillian Wearing, winner of the Turner prize in 1997, uses video, photography and installations to disrupt expectations and displace normative identities.
24 Ingrid Pollard is a British artist whose work explores the theme of race and landscape, using photography to unsettle any easy relationship between the countryside, nationalism and identity.
25 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
26 See Heidegger, On Time and Being. Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambuagh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).