So Who is this guy Ranciere?
Tim Brown on French philosopher and art-world darling du jour, Jacques Rancière (Artforum, 2005).
(Image; Portrait of Jacques Rancière, Petitfestival - by Annette Bozorgan, CC BY-SA 3.0. File:Ranciere.jpg Created: 7 August 2009)
After reading a number of articles on Jacques Rancière I selected one - Why Rancière Now? (Tanke, 2010) - for this summary which I present in the form of short snippets.
Introduction; - looking at the current relationship between theoretical discourse and artistic practice.
Baudrillard, Derrida and Deleuze have long been standard reference points within the art world.
Why is Rancière gaining favour?
His works concerns aesthetic issues and an analysis of contemporary art.
Yet another French philosopher and name to pronounce.
Relevant to the intellectual issues raised by works of art, their reception and theoretical discourses that are created around them.
Replaces the default theoretical position of “mourning” which Rancière considers takes two forms - the spectacle and the impossible.
The spectacle derives from Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) critique of commodity capitalism.
The impossible relates to Jean-François Lyotard’s take on the Kantian sublime. Rancière considers that both give art a greatly diminished role and hasten its end. He rejects these positions in attempting to cultivate a theoretical position that will demonstrate how art can be politically active.
For the SI “art” further alienates spectators from life as it could be lived and spectatorship is seen as being passive.
Rancière seeks to reestablish the act of looking as being active. In accordance with his proposal of a aesthetic regime of art and Joseph Jacotot’s theses on equality of intelligences, Rancière shows how viewing can reconfigure the division of labour through implementing practices of equality.
Rancière’s thinking uses a notion of the “regime” which has three forms, corresponding to three distributions of the sensible (le partage du sensible).
There is the ethical regime of images, the representative regime of art and the aesthetic regime of art.
The ethical regime of images emerges from Plato and the representative regime of art from Aristotle.
Le partage can be translated as distribution, allocation, partition, share - it’s one of those words that can have many English meanings.
This concept highlights that politics is aesthetic and aesthetics political inasmuch as both define forms of inclusion and exclusion through what is perceptible.
Any distribution therefore defines in advance, forms of participation through what is visible or invisible, audible or inaudible, said or unsaid.
Rancière denounces Plato’s injunction that labourers be barred from political activity and cites nineteenth century workers’ resistance through artistic an literary expression.
For Rancière, politics involves interventions - reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible - making visible what was invisible and spoken what was unspoken.
Art is political and politics artistic because both contest what limits an individual’s environment.
A distribution of the sensible is also a sharing of the sensible and art embodies the possibility of instituting practices of equality.
Rancière was influenced by the work of Joseph Jacotot who devised a method of pedagogical instruction - universal teaching - that threatened to overthrow educational hierarchies, demonstrating that all intellects were equal.
Rancière adopts the principle of equality which he uses to analyse existing hierarchies and structures.
Returning to the three major distributions of the sensible, the first is the ethical regime of images within which art as such does not exist. This regime is articulated in Plato’s critique of imitation - mimêsis. Philosophers love to sprinkle their text with Greek as if it wasn’t already sufficiently impenetrable.
Platonism allows only the philosopher to practice imitation, to adjudicate between the sensible and to construct fictions. Plato considers only the true arts which preserve the integrity of the community and malicious simulacra.
The representative regime emerges with Aristotle, concentrating on action and great and noble deeds. It defines appropriate and “correct” forms of representation, associating various genres to social hierarchies. This placed “high” subjects above “low” ones - mythological, religious and historical themes were considered superior to the everyday.
Large canvases were used for the representation of such events while scenes related to the life of common people were rendered on a diminutive scale.
The aesthetic regime of the arts is the abolition of the hierarchies of the representative regime. It undermines the rules of representation and brings previously neglected aspects of existence onto the page or canvas. It redefines what can be seen or said. Rancière introduces the idea of a “sensorium” - that anything sensible is capable of captivating the mind and initiating a new way of being. The sensorium overturns the hierarchies that originate from reason’s dominion over the sensible and that manifest in the representative regime.
By its insistence on equality, the sensorium of the aesthetic regime negates any necessary relationship between form and content. Anything can provide subject matter for the arts.
It is when we demand more of art than it can deliver that leads to discourses of mourning. Here Rancière criticises Debord and Lyotard.
He affirms that art has a political function, independent of its explicit content. It instructs its viewers in alternative ways of considering time and space and can call upon us to question what we take for granted.
Art and politics both profit from Rancière’s comparisons - politics can gain impetus from art as an intervention in what is visible and audible. It questions distributions of the sensible and what is excluded.
Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.
By deploying a voice that was considered not to be possessed, one can alter the distribution of hierarchies. Art and literature are often the first places where marginalised subjects gain a voice.
Aesthetic art suspends the oppositions between active and passive, and form and content, thus positing communication between equals.
Art is political at the level of its very existence and in its essence as that which challenges the distribution of roles through reconfiguring our experience of time and space.
Rancière’s work opposes the discourses of mourning that limit in advance what can be done and said.
I hope that there is sufficient coherency within this precis to leave you at least slightly the wiser!
References Bishop, C. (2005). Mum's The Word. Retrieved from https://www.artforum.com/diary/id=9695. Tanke, J. J. (2010). Why Rancière Now? The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44(2), 1-17. University of Illinois Press. Retrieved from Project MUSE database.
Portrait of Jacques Rancière, Petitfestival - by Annette Bozorgan, CC BY-SA 3.0. File:Ranciere.jpg
Created: 7 August 2009