Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul, Verso Books, London, 2013, 304 pages, £ 14.00 hardback, ISBN 9781781680896.

Jacques Rancière has become the most discussed French philosopher over the last few years. From multiple introductory books and special journal issues to collected volumes, Rancière, whose work was often marginal in the 1970s and '80s, has come to be a major influence over artists and activists, pedagogues and geographers. His political writings are best known for placing at their core an axiom of equality among all, as well as a certain aesthetics of spatiality—every regime is but a policing of the distribution (partage) of the sensible. But while Rancière's political writings have been central to his reception among English-language readers, over the last decade his work has almost completely focused on aesthetics. Aisthesis comes as the culmination of such efforts.

This is not to suggest that Rancière’s work on aesthetics is divorced from any political insight, not least since his writings have always demonstrated the co-implication of aesthetics and politics. In fact, his strong claim at the end of this book’s introductory prelude is that “social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution” (page xvi), a point that, along with his helpful claim that an artist’s greatest failures may be her key successes, may explain the passionate interest in his work by artists. The task is not to see the aesthetic as providing a program for political movements, which he dubs “the action plans of the engineers of the future,” but as marking a cessation of all such regimes and programs. For this reason, Rancière will testify to an “inactivity” at the heart of the modern aesthetic regime, one that highlights a “free activity” not subordinated to particular ends, akin, though he doesn’t mention it, to the désouevrement of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community as well as the “means without ends” of Giorgio Agamben’s 1990s political writings.

Aesthesis is broken up into fourteen “scenes” that amount to a “counter-history of ‘aesthetic modernity’” (page xiii). Modernity is not the marking of the autonomy of different arts and their retreat from everyday life, as in so many theories of “kitsch,” but is the opposite for him. The modern is that which does break with the past, as many theorists have held, namely breaking from the long “representative” regime of arts dating to the Greeks, but it also undoes any neat separation among the arts, between artists and spectators, and between supposedly high and low forms. The first “scene” is dated from Dresden, 1764, and looks to Johann Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art), focusing on a section on the Belvedere Torso, a fragment of a nude male statue whose history was relatively unknown and was simply inscribed with “Apollonios, son of Nestor, Athenian.” Rather than seeing Winckelmann’s overall work as a reordering of history under a soon-to-come archaeology, as has been typical, Rancière takes his reading of the Torso to announce the disinterested gaze of a new regime of aesthetics beyond an era of representation, since the Torso ruptures any particular representation given its fragmentation. As Rancière writes,

Winckelmann’s statue has the perfection of a collectivity that is no longer there, of a body that cannot be actualized. The beautiful inactivity [belle inactivité] of the god of stone was the product of a free activity of a people. From now on, the indifference of the statue alone lends a figure to this free activity [libre activité] (page 18).

This prose, which points to a non-teleology, a non-organicity of art, describes what would be a new aesthetic regime, a new distribution of the sensible on Rancière’s telling, that supersedes and operates often alongside in modernity the previous regimes of representation and the ethical. Rancière is, despite his emphasis on the indifference and inactivity of the aesthetic, the most schematic of writers. Just as his political writings delineate three different appropriations of politics—archi-politics (Plato), para-politics (Aristotle), and metapolitics (Marx)—his genealogy of aesthetics begins in Plato, who not only naturalized class and other societal differences to put politics out of play, but also provided an “ethical regime” of imagery, privileging those arts that educated the community members about their roles within the Platonic distribution.

There is also an isonomy between what Rancière finds in Aristotle’s aesthetics and his parapolitics, which Rancière says “replaces the actors and forms of political conflict into the parts and forms of the policing apparatus” (Rancière 2004, page 72), at once recognizing the conflictual nature of the political while attempting to isolate it through an articulation of power and command over the dēmos, all to make politics less about dissensus than proceduralism. On Rancière’s account, Aristotle provides the West with a “representative regime” that liberated mimēsis from specific ethical norms, while nevertheless isolating its own rules for fabrication, as any reading of Aristotle’s Poetics makes clear. The mimetic regime is a “regime of visibility [that] is at once what renders the arts autonomous and also what links this autonomy to a general order of occupations and ways of doing and making” (page 22), again isonomous with Aristotle’s parapolitics and its long political and aesthetic logic of representation. It would be natural for me to move to his third category announced in such works as The Politics of Aesthetics and Aisthesis, namely the “aesthetic regime,” but it is a category without one: this “regime” is a disruption of the regimes of sensible isomorphic to the democratic in his work, and his real target is a third category of denying the aesthetic and the political, namely Clement Greenberg and his meta-aesthetic analogue to metapolitics. This takes any given politics as a mere appearance of a hidden truth, namely the class struggle, and as always already falling short of a future politics only a given vanguard can elucidate.

Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1971), as it is well known, argued that art must turn in on itself, just as the Marxist turns away from the experiences of everyday life, which could only provide the lie of ideology with its hold over the people. In this way art would have “no other way to thrive,” Rancière writes, “than to turn its attention away from the content of common experience”—labeled kitsch—and to direct it towards the means of its practice, in order “to make its medium into the very subject or art or literature” (page 260). For Greenberg, Rancière goes on, “it was necessary to stop indulging the art of living of the poor. For that is where the root of the evil threatening art lies: in the access of the poor to cultural abilities and aspirations which had never concerned them in the past” (ibid.). Rancière’s scorn for this elitism is as correct as it is important.

Against this view, Rancière views Winckelmann’s The History of Art in Antiquity as marking the beginning, within art, of the disruptive, anonymous inactivity of aesthetic democracy against the above forms of policing. A regime without a regime, it belongs to no specific place or ordering. Thus democracy or aisthesis, as Rancière puts it, has always become “foreign to itself.” In “The Distribution of the Sensible” he writes that “the aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres” (Rancière, 2006: 23).

The remaining thirteen chapters of Aesthesis, which range in contexts from the reception of Stendhals’s Red and Black to the 1879 appearance of English pantomimes in Paris, the newspaper account by Mallarmé of a performance by Loïe Fuller, and the journalism of James Agee, take up artistic practices “high” and “low” and in all manner of genres, all guided by the paradoxical logic through which one testifies to the singularity of what cannot be represented within the work of a given theory. Against those who think of modern art as a “conquest of autonomy” for each of the particular arts, Rancière sees artistic practices as heterogeneous, interlinked, and ever disruptive of the critics’ ability to isolate them under a given set of definitions or rules. In this way, aesthetics is what it is only by its constant relation to what is said to be outside of it.

In several interviews going back a decade, Rancière had argued that he was looking for a new form of writing in which to think the modern and its aesthetics. The fourteen scenes in Aisthesis are a result of these meditations, but also evince his method of reading and writing going back four decades to his archival work on workers' movements. He writes, “[T]he scene is crucial to my method,” since, like Joseph Jacotot’s method outlined in the Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), it “is opposed to the method that first takes a set of general determinations that functions as causes and then illustrates their effects in a certain number of concrete cases” (Rancière and Davis 2013, page 203). “Anti-hierarchical,” Rancière argues that through a “scene” an “‘object’ … teaches us how we can talk about it, how we can treat it … abolishes the difference between the language of the object and the language of its explanation,” and also any mediation central to the writings of structuralists and poststructuralists (ibid.).

The most important scene in Aisthesis, and to my mind one of the best essays on the topic, is the last scene concerning the journalist James Agee. This is not simply because in this last chapter Rancière finally turns to Greenberg’s view of the avant garde, which had been his implicit target all along. Rather, it is also clear that he finds in Agee, as with Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, a kindred spirit attempting a similar writing to what he had provided in the thirteen previous scenes. Agee, who was attempting to write on a family in the deep South of the U.S. without either leftist ideological imperatives or the voyeuristic drama typical of that generation of Depression-era journalists, simply wanted to let the scenes of life passing before him speak for themselves and thus to perform the seemingly impossible journalistic task of leaping over its own shadow to report a passing of events in which he, the writer, is not present, a dream of a writing that erases itself in the face of the pure presence of its signified. Rancière writes:

This way is precisely, says Agee, the only serious attitude, the attitude of the gaze and speech that are not grounded on any authority and do not ground any; the entire state of consciousness that refuses any specialization for itself and must also refuse every right to select what suits its point of view in the surroundings of the destitute share croppers, to concentrate instead on the essential fact that each one of these things is part of an existence that is entirely actual, inevitable and unrepeatable (page 250, my emphasis).

A reverse of the Lacanian subject-supposed-to-know, Agee dreams “that things themselves could express their excess over words,” and aims to provide an “art beyond art” that does not link life to its causes but to “the uncontrollable chain of events that creates a cosmos and a destiny” (page 251). Thus Agee would “go beyond the journalistic routine of representative description … to do justice to the ‘cruel radiance’ of what is here” (page 252).

Before proceeding further, Rancière’s overall work is necessary in light of a recent critical tradition where writers defend forms of republicanism and elitism anathema to revolutionary praxis. Rancière’s critique of the Platonism of much political philosophy—or as political philosophy tout court—is a necessary endeavor when philosophers take it as their ennobled right to dictate to the people the modus operandi of their liberation while depicting them as too addled by consumerism and such to think and act for themselves. This “hatred of democracy,” as Rancière rightly calls it, should be uprooted and denounced wherever it is found. Those to whom we give the labels of proletariat, underclass, and so on, do not just live lives of utter abjection and subjection, but find moments of pride and joy, negotiate times of cowardice and singular decisions, take care of their children and try to create a better world for them when they have children in turn, and find love in others who love them in turn—all of which is simply erased or flattened out in many depictions of the masses.

Rancière’s writings have attempted since his documentary writings on workers movements in the 1970s to describe the “people” with neither patronizing valorization nor armchair denunciation. As Rancière puts it about Agee’s writing (but this is clearly also true to his method), the journalist tried to remain invisible while attuned to the singularity of given communities and individuals. “To see each thing as a consecrated object and as a scar: for James Agee this programme demands description that makes sensible at the same time both the beauty present at the heart of misery and the misery of not being able to perceive this beauty (page 253). In this way, even an instant, as Rancière puts it, can testify to the whole of the world, this time, just this once—and only this once.

Aisthesis is thus the culmination of Rancière’s thinking of history, politics, and aesthetics, working broadly and specifically between two forms of aisthesis: the distribution of the sensible that for him is both the mark of the police order that leaves out the uncounted and the particular aisthesis that is the disruptive power of art invented in modernity. But Rancière’s Aisthesis is also an entrée into reconsidering his method prevalent since his work in the Ignorant School Master: the ignorant writer is meant to tease out history and scenes without a fatal grasp being placed over them, for example, without the philosopher giving to the political actor the telos of his or her actions, the historian rendering history as a well-ordered and thus a misrepresentation of given events, or the aesthetic theorist giving to art its meaning, even if that meaning is to said to be, as in Marxist analyses, a means for the liberation of the people.

To cut to the chase, I think this method of ignorance avoids the very subject position of the author collecting these materials, an “emancipated spectactor” in the most pernicious sense, a point obvious given the scenes collected in Aisthesis, all from the West, all written from the point of view of the male gaze (even when it comes to the dancing of Loïe Fuller, whom we’re told gives up her gender through her dance and whose own writings about herself are ignored), all written as if aesthetic modernity was not only implicated but could only come about in relation to colonialism and post-colonialism (which warrants not a mention on the white pages of Aisthesis), and so on.

How could one write on the disruptiveness of Fuller and not mark her staged disruptions of gender distinctions, and then quote those males who would erase her gender itself? Rancière cites Mallarmé, who implicitly argues against the logic that she is a “woman making graceful gestures,” as he puts it, since she is a “figure: a body that institutes the place of its becoming metaphorical, its fragmentation in a play of metaphorical forms” (page 103). Mallarmé writes: “The dancer is not a woman dancing, for these juxtaposed reasons: that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form: knife, goblet, flower, etc., and that she is not dancing, but suggesting through the miracle of bends and leaps a kind of corporeal writing” (cited at ibid., my emphasis). A miracle indeed. Does not this “becoming metaphor,” leaping ahead and out of any particular content, or even a given facticity of her femininity, no matter how rethought and reworked, erase the gravity of contexts from which her dance performs such leaps and bends—or in fact, double down on those very tropes patriarchy uses to marginalize the feminine? Does this not risk becoming a formalism unsullied by any of the contents and contexts of one’s milieu? And does this not risk making the writer of these scenes not just the ignorant master, but one with clean hands over any political determinations, an ignorant master who can ignore too much?

Here we see all the difference between erasing a given problematic concept, namely gender, and deconstructing it, and we see all the difference between anarchism and post-structuralism. Who else could write on the democratic qualities of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass while not noting that its disruption is precisely of heteronormativity and, in its best places, of various forms of racialism, while also in turn ignoring the homoeroticism of Winklemann’s prose? All politics gets erased from the very texts under consideration, rendering not an equality of the sensible but a denial of what is deeply sensed in each of these texts. The result is a form of idealism, able to think the political only if it is detached from anything that is actually being contested in its spaces, a “disinterest in … represented content,” as he valorizes in Kant. This provides an aesthetics that in the end can only privilege inactivity, a “doing nothing” that “annul[s] hic et nunc the barriers of social hierarchy and the torment of confronting them [!] in the equality of pure sensation, in the uncalculated sharing of the sensible moment” (page 30), while singing a “hymn of life obstinately pursuing its own nonsense” (page 52). In these pages, Rancière privileges the clown, the prisoner awaiting execution, the de-gendered dancer, and so on, all in the name of an inactivity that is but another name for the pure vital force of living, while calling for an indifference to differences that for the author would only be hierarchical and power driven. Indeed they are and have been, but isolating non-hierarchical moments in some sort of eidos of pure inactivity in these descriptions becomes a phenomenological epoché that has to bracket so much away from given contexts, and thus only reinforces what a pretense the “ignorance” and invisibility of the writer were in the first place.

The claim could be made that Rancière’s text should not be challenged for what it does not cover. After all a book cannot cover everything and one finds such type of claims the stuff of mediocre referee reports: please add more on my favored writings on x, y, or z. But I find this unconvincing in this case. Rancière’s claims are not about this or that part of modernity but about what counts as modernity in his own rendering and redistributing of this sensible. He not only removes himself from any subject position—as the ignorant school master of aesthetics—he also removes the subject position of any of those he covers, and he removes what are the principal historical conditions of possibility for modernity, namely racialisms and patriarchy than cannot be disinfected from the very writings he surveys.

I thus find myself in an ironic position: not wishing to reify or continue those very subject positions while also finding it nefarious simply to bypass them on the way to a modern “indifference” fighting against a long-held Western representational order. From mid-century philosophies of engagement, we have moved to the current philosophies of dis-engagement, to inactivity and micro-politics. These are not only found in Rancière but in all sorts of peons, such as Agamben and certain readers of Deleuze. Thus Rancière for his part cites the Stendhal novel in which “Julian Sorel only finds happiness in the prison that precedes his death,” since he is absolved of all engagement in society and is given an existence “without the suffering of past trials and the worries of future calculations,” that is, outside the vagaries of historicity and responsibilities for a future worthy of the name (pages 52-3). In Rancière’s view, the modern aisthesis calls us to “think of nothing except the present moment, enjoying nothing other than the pure feeling of existence” (page 45). One can only read these passages while also thinking of Arendt’s biting remarks about Sartre’s view that one could be truly free in a prison cell. We affirm indistinction only by affirming everything and hence nothing. For this reason, it is clear that for me, more and more, my own response to Rancière’s politics and aesthetics is my own indifference. 

References

Greenberg C (1971) Avant-garde and Kitsch. In: Art and Culture: Critical Essays. New York: Beacon Press.

Rancière J (2004) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. J Rose (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rancière J (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics G Rockhill (trans). London: Continuum.

Rancière J and O Davis (2013) On Aisthesis. In: O Davis (ed) Rancière Now. London: Polity.