Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics

Lit 281 Michae Hardt 05/09/08

Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Aesthetics

—Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal.

“Political statements and literary locutions,” writes Jacques Ranciere, “produce effects in reality” (39). To conceive of enunciative acts, whether fictional or not, as fundamentally belonging within the domain of empirical reality is one of the aims in The Politics of Aesthetics, a collection of essays which instantiates Ranciere’s attempt to yoke together aesthetics and politics. For indeed the problematic Ranciere locates in the conjunction of the political and the aesthetic lies in the following contradiction: the insistence on the autonomy and singularity of art from other social domains while articulating at the same time the identity of its forms with those shaped by social life itself. It is a paradox which works to expand Ranciere’s aesthetic philosophy to include issues of referentiality and historicity, i.e., the degree to which art corresponds to reality, and most importantly, its ability to produce it. Ranciere explores these questions in The Politics of Aesthetics in order to ground both aesthetic judgment and the practice of art into processes of political subjectivization—i.e., to articulate the kinds of aesthetic negotiations made in relation to what he calls “the distribution of the sensible.”

In proposing the mutual implication of the aesthetic and the political, Ranciere diverges from the aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin and proceeds instead from a Kantian-Foucauldian line of inquiry. Ranciere takes issue with Benjamin’s thesis on art and mechanical production and argues that the politics of aesthetics should not be understood as “the deduction of the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical properties” (31). Rather, aesthetics should be thought in the “Kantian sense—re-examined perhaps by Foucault—as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (13). Ranciere thus takes as one of his premises the lesson we inherit from Kant that aesthetic judgment is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective. For Kant, the moment of aesthetic judgment is singularly subjective: it is an instance, an event, in which the individual feels something—a moment marked not only by the capacity to feel per se, but also at once the power to experience the world and the ability to relate such an experience to oneself and to others. In working toward the articulation of aesthetics and politics, Ranciere supplements Kant’s subjective basis for the aesthetic with something like a Foucauldian analysis of power, what Ranciere would call the distribution of the sensible.

Although Ranciere does not describe it as such, we can understand the distribution of the sensible as a kind of Foucauldian spatialization of power, if power is to be understood as the ways in which the political is fundamentally about “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, [and] around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (13; emphases mine). As such, Ranciere’s category of the sensible can be viewed as an expansion of Kant’s subjective sphere for the aesthetic, insofar as the sensible marks for us a generic analytic category for libidinal energies and affects, that is to say, ways of seeing, feeling, doing, and making, etc. The manner in which the sensible is distributed to whom and where is thus always a political question. What must be rigorously observed is that ways of seeing, saying, and doing (aesthetic acts and judgments) and the structures which make them intelligible are determined at the social level along differential lines of production, transmission, and distribution—or something close to what Foucault would call biopower, i.e., that which discursively gives shape to the morphology of experiential activities and the topography of the socius.

The control and norminalization of the distribution of the sensible, then, is where politics and domination begin. To put it another way, domination is nothing less than the exercise and consolidation of power toward the regulation of the sensible; the struggle of individuals for the control of what can be seen, thought, and known is what we call politics. Thus, where there is domination, a kind of negativity is accorded to the sensible. Conversely, if the distribution of the sensible is not only about what is allowed to be said, seen, or felt, but also about “who can have a share in what is common to the community” (12; emphases mine), the sensible can have a positive, generative aspect. The positivity of the sensible lies in the way its distribution reveals the ways in which social subjects cohere around what is common, which itself lends to the determination of who can or cannot participate.

The category of “the common” is important in Ranciere’s aesthetic philosophy precisely because it marks the points at which intelligibility, communication, and community emerge: “a distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and excluded” (12). It is in this sense that art indexes what is intelligible and possible to a particular community, which in turn gives a community its specific identity. [1] This is where Ranciere’s concept of the sensible, as the determining ground for the aesthetic, comes closest to the idea of “culture.” However, the sensible is not to be understood merely as an effect or expression of a community’s discourse, but indeed its enabling and determining structure. In other words, it is from the standpoint of what is common and, most importantly, from the perspective of what is possible, which allows for that which can be seen, cognized, and acted upon. Insofar as experiential activities qua aesthetic practices disclose forms of visibility, Ranciere argues that the aesthetic regime of politics (as an ethical system of representation) is strictly identical with the regime of democracy.

If the delimitation of what is common determines as much how individuals participate, then the distribution of the sensible involves the interpellation of who can say, do, or make—in a word—subjectivization. In Kant, we have a subject conceived in terms of its apperception of reality, its cognitive encounters and communicative legislations with the world. Ranciere adds to this Kantian subject a political dimension: the individual who feels (aesthetic subject) and the individual who acts (political subject) are always in a relative position of access to that which determines “the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (13). The politicization of subjects therefore begins precisely in the negotiations with this uneven, hierarchical distribution of the sensible as such. As Ranciere writes, “the important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization” (18). The domain of art, taken to the level of the distribution of the sensible, thus becomes for Ranciere a general order in which domination, subjectivization, and collectivization are distinguished and negotiated dialectically toward a democratic relation and practice. In transposing aesthetics to the partitioning of the sensible, Ranciere insists upon the analogy between, on the one hand, the hierarchy of social and political occupations (i.e. the distribution of who can share what is common to the community relative to what they do), and, on the other, the global hierarchical vision of the community to which the aesthetic regime at once participates and contests.

If the distribution of the sensible is what informs the terrain of the visible and what determines subjects and their activities, the practice of making art can therefore be thought as a way of intervening in this general distribution. Through his or her art, the artist’s intervention not only presents what is common to the community, but also contests the very criteria by which the common is thought. It is in this way that aesthetic practices can compete with the partitioning of the sensible, insofar as they offer other potentially radical ways of seeing, doing, and making. On this view, artistic phenomena adhere to a specific regime of representation in which the distinctions between the representable and the unrepresentable are adapted and contested.

To take one of Ranciere’s examples, literature is the “material rearrangements of signs and images,” as well as the re-modification of the “relationships between what is seen and what is said, [and] between what is done and what can be done” (39). Ranciere’s deliberate move from the symbolic-figural to the material is important—and it is here where we encounter Ranciere’s thesis for the aestheticization of politics. The making of fiction, which would involve the logic of description and narrative arrangements, Ranciere writes, “becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world” (37; my emphasis). Aesthetic revolution—or the continual breakdown of the mimetic regime and the increasing aestheticization of life in modernity—undermined the once rigid distinctions between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. What we have, then, is the subversion of the Aristotelian division of poetry and history: writing stories and writing histories fall under the same regime of truth. The equivalence Ranciere sets up functions not as a facile subsumption of the empirical into the fictional, but rather as a means of understanding the interpellation of social subjects as historical agents, a kind of democratization of meaning-making and therefore of making history.

A thinking of aesthetics—both the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics—becomes crucial in the envisioning of any emancipatory politics. The politicization of aesthetics refers to the regime of representation by which forms of visibility define the models of speech and action: social experiences in this sense are the sum total of affective intensities, perceptions, and the abilities of bodies within specific modes of doing and making. The aestheticization of politics, on the other hand, refers to the manner in which resistance (defined by Ranciere as the struggle for the control of the distribution of the sensible) involves a series of negotiations within the terrain of the visibile, that is to say, in the realm of representation. It is in this way that fictional narrative or artistic expression is not simply the derivative description of an event, problem, or ideological struggle, but the very terrain of the struggle itself. It would be too easy and wrong, however, to suggest that the aesthetic dimension of politics calls for a praxis strictly driven by a desire for the recognition of social identities and demands. The point, rather, is to disturb existing orders of the visible and to propose alternative configurations of social experience. To take Ranciere’s redefinition of the avant-garde, it is not limited to the idea of what was or what should have been, the concept of the avant-garde, rather, if it is to have any meaning at all, is about the invention of new forms of the sensible “for a life to come” (29).

[1] This is not to say that all art practice aims to aesthetically represent the common as such; rather, “the common” is a kind of a priori form to which the representative regime of the arts refers and employs as its determining ground. An apt analogy from language theory would be the idea that signification is possible insofar as a community of speakers share a common system of signs and references, even if such a system of intelligibility is never closed or is always in an unstable state of crisis and change.