Ranciere - The Politics of Aesthetics, Ranciere
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ARTicles
May 05, 2006
Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics / The Aesthetics of Politics
This is Rancière rearticulating and re-maneuvering his theorization of art and/as politics
I shall start from a little fact borrowed from the actuality of art life . A Belgian
foundation , the Evens Foundation , created a prize called Community art collaboration .
The prize is aimed at supporting artistic projects encouraging " the invention of new
social coherence based on diversity of identities " . Last year , the laureate project was
presented by a French group of artists called Urban Campment . The project , called"I
and us" proposed to create , in a poor and stigmatized suburb of Paris a special place ,
"extremely useless , fragile and non-productive" , a place at remove , available to all but
than can be used only by one person at once .
So a prize destined to art was given to the project of an empty place where nothing
designates the specificity of any art . And a prize aimed at creating new forms of
community was given to a one seater place . Some people would probably see there the
derision of contemporary art and of its political pretensions . I shall take an opposite
way . I think that this little example can lead us to the core of our problem .
The first point that it reminds us is the following . Art is not political owing to the
messages and feelings that it conveys on the state of social and political issues. Nor is it
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 respect to those functions . It is
political insofar as it frames not only works or monuments , but also a specific space-time
sensorium , as this sensorium defines ways of being together or being apart , of being
inside or outside , in front of or in the middle of , etc. It is political as its own practices
shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices , manners of being and
modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense , which means a "sense of
the common" embodied in a common sensorium .
It does so because politics itself is not the exercise of power or 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 of subjects to whom
the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them. 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. It could seem to follow from this that politics is the public discussion on
matters of justice among speaking people who are all able to do it. But there is a
preliminary matter of justice : How do you recognize that the person who is mouthing a
voice in front of you is discussing matters of justice rather than expressing his or her
private pain ? Politics is in fact about that preliminary question : who has the power to
decide about this? In another well-known statement Plato says that artisans have no time
to be elsewhere outside of their work . Obviously this "lack of time" is not an empirical
matter , it is the mere naturalization of a symbolical separation . Politics precisely begins
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 reconfigurating 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 were merely
heard as noisy animals . To the extent that it sets up such scenes of dissensus , politics can
be characterized as an "aesthetic" activity , in a way that has nothing to do with that
adornment of power that 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 take part in the partition of
the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience
and reframe the 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 . Politics and art are not two separate and
permanent realities about which one should ask whether they have to be connected or
not . Each of them is a conditional reality , that exists or not according to a specific
partition of the sensible . 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
platonician 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 theater where the poet and the actors would embody
another personality than their own . The same configuration of the space-time of the
community withdraws for both of them the possibility of making two things at once . It
puts 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 up before you can identify art or politics . The
present situation and notably our "one-seater collective place" might be another
interesting case of this articulation. The idea that art empowers collective life to the
extent that it creates a remote and empty space dedicated to individual meditation is not a
weird invention witnessing the exhaustion of contemporary art . Instead it is in keeping
with the whole logic of a regime of identification of art and with its politics . It is not
difficult to acknowledge in this "one-seater remote place" the last form of a space which
was born at the same time as the concept of aesthetics, which also was the time of the
French Revolution : I mean the blank space of the museum where the solitude and the
passivity of the visitors confronts the solitude and the passivity of the artworks .
Aesthetics is not the science or philosophy of art in general . Aesthetics is a historical
regime of identification of art which was born between the end of the 18 th century and
the beginning of the 19th . The specificity of this historical regime of identification is that
it identifies artworks no more as specific products of definite techniques according to
definite rules but as inhabitants of a specific kind of common space . This is often thought
of as the "autonomy of art" . A well known narrative - the so-called modernist narrative -
has it that aesthetics means the constitution of a sphere of autonomy , where artworks are
isolated in a world of their own , where they only fall under criteria of form, or beauty ,
or "truth to medium" . According to the same narrative, that autonomy would have
collapsed in the last decades of the XXth century because forms of social life and
techniques of reproduction made it definitely impossible to maintain the boundary
between artistic production and technological reproduction , high art and low art,
autonomous artworks and forms of commodity culture . I would argue that this narrative
fully misses the point . The terms that it opposes as characteristic of two ages have been
tied up together since the beginning of the aesthetic regime of art .First , in this regime
the definition of a specific aesthetic sphere does not withdraw the artworks from politics .
On the contrary their politicity is linked with that separateness. But , second , the
autonomy of the aesthetic sphere is not the autonomy of the art works . It was in the
representational regime of art that artworks were defined by the properties and rules of
mimesis distinguishing them from other artefacts. When this regime collapses , artworks
are merely defined by their belonging to a specific sphere. A specific kind of space
qualifies thus objects which can no more be distinguished by the process of their
production . But that sphere has no definite boundaries. The autonomy of art is its
heteronomy as well. That duality makes for two politics of aesthetics . Art is political, in
the aesthetical regime of art , inasmuch as its objects belong to a separate sphere . And it
is political inasmuch as its objects have no specific difference with the objects of the
other spheres .
On the one hand , aesthetics meant the collapse of the system of constraints and
hierarchies that constituted the representational regime of art . It meant the dismissal of
the hierarchies of subject-matters, genres and forms of expression separating objects
worthy or unworthy of entering in the realm of art or separating high genres and low
genres. It implied the infinite openness of the field of art , which ultimately meant the
erasing of the frontier between art and non-art, between artistic creation and anonymous
life . The aesthetic regime of art did not begin - as many people still have it - with the
glorification of the unique genius achieving the unique work of art . On the contrary it
began , in the 18th century with the assertion that the archetype of the poet , Homer, had
never existed , that his poems were not a work of art , not the fulfillment of any artistic
canon , but a patchwork of collected tales that expressed the way of feeling and thinking
of a still infant people . On the one hand aesthetics meant that kind of equality that went
along with the beheading of the King of France and the sovereignty of the people . Now
that kind of equality that ultimately meant the indiscernibility of art and life.
But on the other hand , aesthetics meant that the works of art were grasped as such in a
specific sphere of experience where -in Kantian terms - they were free from the forms of
sensory connection proper either to the objects of knowledge or to the objects of desire .
They were merely "free-appearance" responding to a free-play , meaning a non-
hierarchical relation between the intellectual and the sensory faculties . In his Letters on
the aesthetic education of Man Schiller drew , after Kant , the political consequence of
that de-hierarchisation . The "aesthetic state" defined a sphere of sensory equality, where
the supremacy of active understanding over passive sensibility did not work out any
longer . This meant that it dismissed the partition of the sensible that traditionally gave its
legitimacy to domination by separating two humanities . The power of the high classes
was supposed to be the power of activity over passivity , of understanding over
sensation , of the educated senses over the raw senses , etc. By dismissing that power ,
the aesthetic experience framed an "equality" which would be no more a reversal of
domination . Schiller opposed that sensory "revolution" to the political revolution as it
had been implemented by French Revolution. The latter had failed precisely because the
revolutionary power had played the traditional part of the Understanding - meaning the
state- imposing its law to the matter of sensations - meaning the masses . The only true
revolution would be a revolution overthrowing the power of "active" understanding over
"passive" sensibility , the power of a "class" of intelligence and activity over a class of
passivity and wilderness .
So aesthetics meant equality because it meant the suppression of the boundaries of art .
And it meant equality because it meant the constitution of Art as a separate form of
human experience . The two equalities are opposed and they are tied together . In
Schiller's Letters , the statue of the Greek goddess promises a future of emancipation ,
because the goddess is " idle" and "self-contained " . It promises it owing to its very
separateness and unavailability to our knowledge and desires. Obviously the " extremely
useless , fragile and non-productive" place of Urban Encampment keeps in straight line
with the "idleness and indifference " that characterised Schiller's Greek divinity . But , at
the same time , the statue promises it because its "freedom" - or "indifference" embodies
another freedom or indifference , the freedom of the Greek people that created it . Now
this freedom means the contrary of the first one . It is the freedom of a life that does not
give itself to separate, differentiate forms of existence , the freedom of a people for which
art is the same as religion, which is the same as politics , which is the same as ethics : a
way of being together . As a consequence the separateness of the artwork promises its
contrary : a life which will not know art as a separate practice and field of experience .
The "politics of aesthetics" rests on this originary paradox. That paradoxical linkage of
two opposite equalities could make and did historically make for two main forms of
"politics".
The first form aims at connecting the two equalities . This means transforming the
freedom and equality of the autonomous aesthetic sphere into the form of a collective
existence where they will no more be a matter of form and appearance but will be
embodied in living attitudes , in the materiality of everyday sensory experience . The
common of the community will be woven thus in the fabric of the lived world . This
means that the separateness of aesthetic equality and freedom has to be achieved by its
self-suppression . It has to be achieved in an unseparate form of common life when art
and politics , work and leisure , public and private life are one and the same . Such is the
program of the aesthetic revolution achieving in real life what both political dissensus
and aesthetic enjoyment can only achieve in appearance. This program was first stated
two centuries ago in the oldest systematic program of German idealism , proposing to
replace the dead mechanism of state power by the living body of a people animated by a
philosophy turned into mythology . It was continuously revived , both in the projects of a
revolution conceived as "human revolution" , meaning the self-suppression of politics ,
and of an art suppressing itself as a separate practice , identifying itself with the
elaboration of new forms of life . It animated the "gothic" dreams of Arts and Crafts in
19th century England as well as the technological achievements of the Werkbund or the
Bauhaus in 20th century Germany , the Mallarmean dream of a poetry "preparing the
festivals of the future" as well as the concrete participation of the Suprematist , futurist
and constructivist artists to the Soviet Revolution. It animated the projects of situationist
architecture as well as Guy Debord's derive or Beuys' "social plastic" . I think that it is
still alive in Hardt and Negri's contemporary vision of the franciscan communism of the
multitudes , implemented through the irresistible power of the global network exploding
the boundaries of Empire . In all these cases , politics and art must achieve their self-
suppression to the benefit of a new form of unseparate life .
The second form , on the contrary, disconnects the two equalities . It disconnects the free
and equal space of aesthetic experience from the infinite field of equivalence of art and
life .To the self-suppressing politics of art becoming life , it opposes a politics of the
resistant form . The Schillerian goddess bears promise because she is idle . The social
function of art , Adorno will echo , is to have no function. The egalitarian potential is
enclosed in the dissensuality of the work , in its belonging to an autonomous sphere ,
indifferent to any program of social transformation or any participation in the adornment
of prosaic life . Political avant-gardism and artistic avant-gardism would fit together out
of their very lack of connection . The political act of art is to save the heterogeneous
sensible which is the heart of the autonomy of art and consistently of its power of
emancipation. It is to save it from a twofold threat : either the transformation into a
metapolitical act or the identification to the forms of everyday aestheticized life . Now
this separateness is not the refuge of pure Beauty . On the contrary it makes sense to the
extent that it stages the very relationship of separateness and unseparateness. In Adorno
and Horkheimer's narrative , the autonomous perfection of the work is supposed to
reconcile the reason of Ulysses and the song of the sirens and to keep them irreconcilable
at the same time.
What is at stake in that politics is not so much preserving the boundary between high art
and low or popular art as it is preserving the heterogeneity of two sensory worlds as such.
This is why the postmodernist polemics falls off target when it thinks that the modernist
paradigm collapsed when Rauschenberg put together a copy of Velasquez and a car-key
on the same canvas . To the dismay of his postmodern champions Rauschenberg still
expressed his dedication to the human treasure of high art. The paradigm collapses only if
the boundary separating the two sensory worlds collapses . Adorno once made the
tremendous assertion that we can no more hear - no more stand - some chords of 19th
century salon music , unless , he said , "everything is trickery ". Lyotard would say in
turn that you can not blend figurative and abstract motifs on a canvas ,that the taste which
feels and appreciates this mix-up is no taste. As we know, it appears some day that those
chords can still be heard , that you can still see figurate and abstract motifs blended on the
same canvas , and even make art by merely borrowing artefacts from everyday life and
re-exhibiting them . There is no radical shift from modernity to postmodernity . But there
is a dialectic of the apolitically-political work which leads the second politics of
aesthetics to another kind of self-suppression . It has to reassert the radical heterogeneity
of a sensory experience , at the cost not only of dismissing any political promise but also
of suppressing the autonomy of art itself , of transforming it into sheer ethical testimony.
This shift is most clear in the French aesthetical thought of the 80's . Roland Barthes
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