Two threads twist through Jacques Rancière's work so far: a Western political history of public consensus and dissensus with "perception management" and "policing policy" at its heart; and a history of Euro-American aesthetics that looks back to see a pre-history centered in public ethics that unfolds into the regime of classic representative arts which then unfolds further into our modern "aesthetic regime." Our current place in these histories is a kind of concurrence, visible in Rancière's theory and in the major modes and concerns of contemporary life and art. It is this hinge-point of politics and art that Rancière helps to focus for us; it also helps us see through his claims and beyond.
As we puzzle over how to move forward politically and over the function or place of the aesthetic in doing so, we meet a world we are helping to build through our aesthetic sense. This conundrum has its basis in the way that political frameworks employ a vision that Rancière has rightly named as an aesthetic. He stays right there and urges the continued application of artistic visions as agents of revelation and change. However, if we look closely enough, we can see where his framework has begun to unfold into a larger and stronger one right here at the crossroads of those political and aesthetic histories that he has described. We have already begun to create the next regime even while Rancière is defending his theory of a world where dissensus enters through a feeling perception. His argument for this power of the aesthetic is based on showing how the aesthetic regime was built as a freeing framework within the representative regime. That libertatory quality focuses on feeling perception shared through art works and other visions. The strength of this is certainly its democratic approach to individual visions, but we have by now seen that "democracy" can be a word for policing and self-policing both in terms of "perception management" and through public policy. Rancière's vision can allow us to see the next shift already happening among us in defense against policy and policing.
In Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009) / Malaise dans l'esthetique (2004), he made an effort to define our aesthetic history simply in terms of three classical Greek words: poeisis, mimesis, and aesthesis (7). The shaping of a work (poiesis) to reflect elements of a known world (mimesis) was broken open through the inclusion of feeling perception and its transfer through artistic vision (aesthesis). "Aesthetics is not a discipline," he says, but "a specific regime for the identification of art" that he calls "a new historicity" that constitutes an "undifferentiated public to replace the designated addressees of representative works" (i.e. works in the style of the old representative regime) (8-9). This "public" is also the "public" of "public policy." And within this framework a new focus is placed on individual response within that undifferentiated mass. Art is now defined "less according to criteria of 'ways of doing,' and more in terms of 'ways of sensible being'" as it forms a fresh "challenge to thought" (10-11). We now would have a "paradoxical sensorium that henceforth made it possible to define the things of art" through "the opposition between pure voluntary activity and pure passivity" (12). This complex paradox is further complicated by the way "that a 'human' nature is always simultaneously a 'social' nature" and how the new regime suspended the old "rules by which human nature is accorded with social nature" (i.e. social class) (13-14).
These tensions between the individual and the mass, the activities of art-making and consuming, and the concepts of human nature and social class, all are developed in the aesthetic regime to become parts of its focus. As a new "distribution of the sensible," the aesthetic regime allows us to see and "work with" what we "work in" as a world; i.e. it allows critical stances. Art "is political ... because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space" (23). What's at "stake here does not only concern those objects that fall within the sphere of art, but also the ways in which, today, our world is given to perceiving itself and in which the powers that be assert their legitimacy" (15). This comes through the tension between, on the one hand, the autonomies of the arts and individuals and, on the other, the sense of the common(s) through which these autonomies are shaped. (Harney and Moten's "undercommons" concept has a place in the critique being made here, but just staying within Rancière's framework can unfold in that direction.) The paradox of the aesthetic regime lies in its role "in constituting forms of common life" while reserving an autonomy for its own forms, like "the silent space of the museum in which the solitude and the passivity of passers-by encounters the solitude and passivity of artworks" (26). Aesthetics promotes a new "sensorium" (29) in which the ethical and representative aspects of art's work are subsumed under the suspension of work in that relatively idle moment of appreciation (30-31). Rancière claims this as a "suspension of the supremacy of form over matter and of activity over passivity" in "a revolution of sensible existence itself and no longer only of the forms of State" (32). It changes the state of being instead.
There are two measures to be taken here if we would like to see our state of being and that ways that the State itself finds part of its being in art: one would view this claim up against Terry Eagleton's rather larger claims about The Ideology of the Aesthetic and its way of subsuming such suspensions into its mechanisms of policing and policy, and the other would look at some prominent current artistic claims and their place in assisting the work of realpolitik in our time. First, though, a sharper look at Rancière's concepts is necessary as a groundwork. He has placed his theory in a rather tentative position among those already out there.
To make "the autonomy of a form of sensory experience" into "the germ of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life" (32) looks a lot like a reversion to Romanticism and a hovering at a certain point in political and aesthetic history. Rancière claims it instead as a progressive re-reading of Modernism's stalemate by demonstrating "no conflict between purity and politicization" in this aesthetic "metapolitics" (33). It is at this point in his argument, though, that he reveals the fundamental Romantic paradox in the aesthetic regime: the art work is whole in itself but fleeting in its public moment (34). This reveals "a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly at work" in the aesthetic regime. The "promise of emancipation" is suspended as well, at the edge of "the elimination of art as a separate reality, its transformation into a form of life" (36). Rancière wants to leave us hanging between the contraries of "a type of art that makes politics by eliminating itself as art and a type of art that is political on the proviso that it retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention" (40). He puts this tension under the name of "Adorno's aesthetics," describing an effort to see art as resisting " a two-fold threat: from its transformation into a metapolitical act and from its radical separation from the forms of aestheticized commodities and of the administered world" (40). This makes for an art that is looking two ways at once in order to be resistant. For Rancière, "the metapolitics of the resistant form tends to oscillate between two positions." One is "the struggle to preserve the material difference of art from all the worldly affairs that compromise it." The other is "the ethical task of bearing witness," which he sees as "cancelling out ... both art and politics" (43).
For Rancière, the trick is to avoid establishing a "sublime" position in the sense of "a force that exceeds" the heart of the art's effort (19) or stands as "an irreducible gap between the idea and the sensible" (20) or a force meant to "keep the two equally at a distance in "a new modesty" about art's capacity to transform the world" and "its claims about the singularity of its obects" (21). The malaise in our aesthetic sense may be more fundamental than just keeping the concept of the sublime at bay. For Rancière himself, there is a fundamental tension in the aesthetic regime--its regimen of attempting "to construct new forms of life in common" (44) through "a way of redisposing the objects and images that comprise the common world as it is already given" (21), while at the same time offering "the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life. This is done by holding aesthetic experience of "art" at a distance from that of any other aistheton. This regimen "threatens the aesthetic regime itself," he admits, even as he claims that it is also "what makes it function" (44). This tension, including that "threat" or risk, helps keep our aesthetic sensibilities moving between promise and compromise. This keeps art both somewhat effective and somewhat sublime.
That combination has given us art as we have it, under what Rancière calls "the aesthetic regime" as he provides a general abstract history of its development. How we got to this regimen of relying on an oscillating aesthetic is figured differently by Terry Eagleton. Eagleton's much more detailed exposition of an ideology built with and into the aesthetic approach is very fully historical. It begins with a historically based discussion of social construction at work in the mutual interplay between the mindsets of art and politics. In it, we see the establishment and development of The Aesthetic as a kind of institution like The Bank, The Stock Exchange, or Parliament (Eagleton 31). The bourgeois revolution that opened the space for all of these institutions created "the public sphere" where a certain kind of "social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities" (36-37). Eagleton's chapter on this period in Europe, the late 17th into the early 18th century, is called "The Law of the Heart." It explains how bourgeois democracy used this new vision to implant a new social bond. Eagleton explains how "the aesthetic" means "introjection of abstract resason by the life of the senses" (42). Eagleton sharply insists that "in the aesthetic it is as though it is we who freely fashion the laws to which we subject ourselves" (43). This established the ideal that has become reactionary in our time (60). It works both ways, for us and against us, even without coercions from anywhere except our "sympathies." We police ourselves by it.
Eagleton summarizes a very important dialectical concept for us:
The very emergence of the aesthetic marks in this sense a certain crisis of traditional reason, and a potentially liberating or utopian trend of thought. By the end of the eighteenth century, such appeals to feeling will have become identified as dangerously radical. There is in the aesthetic an ideal of compassionate community, of altruism and natural affection, which along with a faith in the self-delighting individual represents an affront to ruling class rationalism. On the other hand, it might be claimed that such a movement comes eventually to represent a devastating loss for the political left. (60)
This loss is written into the structure of a thought that compromises its every promise always already from the start. Karl Marx, in both Eagleton's book and Rancière's book on art's discontents, is seen as a sort of political aesthetician who is trying to help us move into position to break the deadlock of the bourgeois hold on our aesthetics. Rancière sums up Marx's claim for us as the possibility of "aesthetic man: namely, productive man, the one who at once produces the objects and the social relations in which they are produced" (38) in a society that can finally "render ideas sensible" (37). Eagleton goes strangely further, taking Marx all the way back before his time to be a new kind of Shaftesbury, through whom the old emerging bourgeois aesthetic might speak again with some sense of revolution. He sums up that stance from Marx/Shaftesbury as saying: "To live well is to live in the free, many-sided realization of one's capacities, in reciprocal interaction with the similar self-expression of others" (226). This is the bourgeois dream, and it has had a troubling history. "We have seen," Eagleton reminds us, "some of the difficulties of this doctrine; but it remains the single most creative aspect of the aesthetic tradition" (226). In the common life, Marx would have us find "that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom" as he expressed it in Das Kapital. Eagleton uses this quote to turn back toward art: "If art matters, it is as a type of that which has its end entirely in itself, and this is most politically charged in its autonomy" (226).
This sounds very much like Rancière's two extreme for the aesthetic dialectic: autonomous art's forms and art's transformation into common life. Eagleton echoes Rancière's emphasis on the risks of impossibility at either extreme as he adds a caution to his assessment of Marx's aesthetic framework. Eagleton's chapter on "The Marxist Sublime" stops to remind us that Marx did not dive into the full aestheticization that would claim full autonomy or instant transformation. His analysis of "what conditions are necessary" to open the possibility of such happiness requires first the work of thought.
Eagleton wraps it up for us by focusing on "contradictions" and unlocking the closed loop between the impossibilities:
That final aestheticization of human existence which we call communism cannot be prematurely anticipated by a reason which surrenders itself wholly to the ludic and poetic, to image and intuition. Instead, a rigorously analytical rationality is needed, to help unlock the contradictions which prevent us from attaining the condition in which instrumentalism may lose its unwelcome dominance. It may well be that in some future social order theory, instrumental thought, calculative reason will no longer play a central role in human life, but will have been transformed out of recognition. To prefigure such an order now, by (for example) the deconstruction of theory and poetry, may thus be a valuable proleptic gesture. But if an aesthetic experience is to be achieved for all, thought in general must not be prematurely aestheticized. (227)
The process requires critical thinking. This is where the aesthetic regime starts to unfold into something at least slightly "post-aesthetic." It still incorporates the aesthetic; it does not leave behind that double-bind of impossibilities. However, there was "always already" an urge toward critical thinking there in the aesthetic stance. Focus on that element may only seem to make this simply obvious; it could possibly just leave us standing with Rancière, claiming that aesthetics still has this area covered. The difference, though, could come right where Marx suggested it would: in the recognition of a fresh critical element that would "unlock the contradictions which prevent us from attaining the condition in which instrumentalism may lose its unwelcome dominance." Noesis, taken with aestheis, poesis, and mimesis, is the fourth corner that sets up the dialectical tensions between the instrumentalities in each element. As part of a Greimasian Square, it can be looked upon as working with each of the others in cooperations and negations that both emphasize and undercut those instrumentalities. Nothing is left simply doing what it's supposed to; each effort has a delightful duplicity.
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