Ranciere - Aesthetics and Politics, Ranciere
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Rancière Talk: Aesthetics and Politics: Rethinking the Link
There are different ways of dealing with art and politics. For a long time the issue had
been set up as a relationship between two separate terms. The question was raised as
follows: must art serve politics or not? Or: how can we assess the political import of
artworks? This led to endless controversies about art for art's sake opposed to engaged
art. Another way of setting the issue was: how do artworks represent social issues and
struggles or matters of identity and difference. This resulted in another kind of endless
job. When you started scrutinizing how 19th century French painters or novelists had
represented class-war matters, you already knew that they did it inadequately because of
their own class position. And when you begin to ferret out hidden representations of
social, sexual or racial difference, you never stop finding new biases, the more so
significant and perverse as they are the more deeply concealed and indiscernible to
everybody's eye. For a while, some concepts offered a mediation, such as culture or
modernity. The strategies of the artists, the contents of their representations or of their
dismissal of representation were referred to the modes of perception and consumption of
the new industrial world of work and leisure that you could call, according to your own
political commitment, either capitalism and commodification or modernity and modern
life. A lot of cultural and social history of art has been written to show how for instance
the impressionist technique of coloured blotches had been fostered by the perception of
the new scenery of the modern town with its shops, lights and windows or the new
pleasures of urban or suburban leisure, cafés-concerts, boating on rivers and so on. So the
issue of the autonomy of art with respect to politics turned out to be the issue of its
autonomy in relation to common culture: did the impressionist blotches testify to a 'truth-
to-medium" strategy of autonomy or did they chart the new conditions of sensory
experience in commodity culture?
Those discussions left the crucial point in the dark: how is it possible that the self-
containment of painting be identified with the representation of popular leisure? More
basically, how is it possible that we see - or read - on a canvas a representation of social
life? How does it make sense to relate a way of painting that makes the strokes of the
brush visible both to an idea of pure painting and to an idea of painting as an expression
of a new kind of social life? In order that we pose these questions, there must already be a
previous knot between a way of painting, a gaze cast on the canvas and a mode of
interpretation of painting as expressing a way of life. The impressionists could paint their
canvases and we can discuss whether they did pure painting, images of Parisian leisure or
both at the same time because there already existed a visibility of painting as both self-
affirmation of art and representation of common life. There must be a previous mapping
of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable allowing us to connect in this or that way
something that we call artistic form and something that we see as political content. Art
and politics are not two terms that would be linked through some form of representation.
They are constituted as such in the same knot of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable,
in the same framing of a common space where some practices appear to be named "arts"
and some matters to be viewed of as "political".
Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it carries on the state of social
and political issues. It is not political owing to the way it represents social structures,
conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with regard
to those functions. It is political as it frames a specific space-time sensorium, as it
redefines on this stage the power of speech or the coordinates of perception, shifts the
places of the actor and the spectator, etc.
Because politics is not the exercise of power or the struggle for power. Politics is first of
all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of
experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and subjects to whom the capacity
is recognized to designate these objects and argue about them. My book Disagreement
was an attempt to show that politics first is the conflict about the very existence of that
sphere of experience, the reality of those common objects and the capacity of those
subjects. A well known Aristotelian sentence says that human beings are political because
they own the power of speech that puts into common the issues of justice and injustice
while animals only have voice to express pleasure or pain. I tried to show that the whole
political problem dealt with distinguishing they who get the power of speech from they to
whom is only recognized the possession of voice. Artisans, Plato says, have no time to be
elsewhere outside of their work. I tried to show that that matter of lacking time was by no
means an empirical matter, that it was the mere naturalization of a symbolical separation.
Politics precisely happens when they who have "no time" to do anything else than their
work take that time that they have not in order to make themselves visible as sharing in a
common world and prove that their mouth indeed emits common speech instead of
merely voicing pleasure or pain. That distribution and re-distribution of times and spaces,
places and identities, that way of framing and re-framing the visible and the invisible, of
telling speech from noise and so on, is what I call the partition of the sensible. Politics
consist in reconfiguring the partition of the sensible, in bringing on the stage new objects
and subjects, in making visible that which was not visible, audible as speaking beings
they who where merely heard as noisy animals. In so far as it sets up such scenes of
dissensus, politics can be told to be an "aesthetic" activity, in a way that has noting to do
with that adornment of power which Benjamin called "aestheticization of politics".
The issue "aesthetics and politics" can thus be rephrased as follows: there is an
"aesthetics of politics" in the sense that I tried to explain. Correspondingly, there is a
"politics of aesthetics". This means that the artistic practices and their forms of visibility
and intelligibility, take part in the partition of the perceptible in so far as they suspend the
ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the overall network of
relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects,the common and the
singular. There is not always politics, though there always are forms of power. Nor is
there always art, though there always are poetry, painting, music, theatre, dance, sculpture
and so on. Plato's Republic is a good case in point. It is sometimes misunderstood as the
"political" proscription of art. But politics itself is withdrawn by the Platonic gesture. The
same partition of the sensible withdraws a political stage by denying to the artisans any
time for doing something else than their own job and an "artistic" stage by closing the
theatre where the poet and the actors would embody another personality than their own.
The same configuration of the space-time of the community prevents for both of them the
possibility of making two things at once, putting the artisan out of politics and the
mimetician out of the city. Democracy and the theatre are two forms of the same partition
of the sensible, two forms of heterogeneity, that are dismissed at the same time to frame
the republic as the "organic life" of the community.
So the "aesthetical knot" is always tied before you can identify art or politics. The present
situation might be another interesting case of this articulation.As we know our present is
very often characterized as a time of desidentification of art. Many art lovers fail to
recognize the identity of art in front of the videos or installations that spawn in the place
where they used to see paintings. But as the same time, it very often happens that you
have to go to museums or art exhibitions to see forms of staging of political issues or
even hear a discussion about politics. It sometimes transpires as though we were not sure
to find art in the galleries and museums but get a better chance to see politics there than
in parliamentary debate. As though the attempts of challenging the museum as a separate
place had the opposite effect to reveal a strong linkage between the specific existence of
places devoted to the exhibition of art and the framing of the political community.
This link, I think is by no means casual. Plato dismissed at once theatre and democracy.
Strange as it may appear, there is perhaps some similar kind of linkage between modern
democracy and the existence of a place dedicated to what seemingly has little to do with
it : not the gathering of a theatrical audience around men acting on the stage, but the
blank space of the museum where the solitude and the passivity of the visitors passing-by
confronts the solitude and the passivity of artworks. To put it differently, the present
situation might show a specific form of a far more general linkage between the autonomy
of art places as such and its seemingly opposite, the political commitment of art, that is
the indetermination of the boundaries of art. To understand this apparent paradox, a little
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