Rancière's claim is expanded upon in a book of academic essays entitled Aesthetic Revolutions. Editor Ales Erjavec claims that the arts are moved by tensions between representation and transformation and between an avant-garde of "pure art" and one that is "politicized"in seeking "transformation both of life itself and of the community." This turns a couple of Rancière's concepts into a simplification that misses the subtleties of the history and tensions proposed in his co-ordinated works. Erjavec calls the transformative force the "aesthetic avant-garde, putting the focus of aisthesis on the shifts art may bring to the feeling -perception of life and community. He quotes Rancière on this being a "redistribution of the sensible" (3). All well and good, but one element is missing from these revolutions. We must measure their success in terms of revolt, in and out of the art world; their failure may be in not creating an on-going space for critical thinking. They collapse life and community into the aesthetic.
Erjavec uses Rancière's sense of representational and aesthetic regimes in a way that twists their meaning out of place by bringing them to bear on a difference within the aesthetic regime. Erjavec's use of the long-standing term"aesthetic revolution" is also bent a bit to fit his needs. He makes claims for a general cultural effect of art, and even "cultural revolution," stemming from these so-called "revolutions" that shape "new timelines in the history of art" (5). This effect is seen mostly in the way we frame things and tell their story. However, people in the streets, the offices, and the neighborhoods generally see that as an academic by-way.
How do we measure the cultural effect of art works if not by looking carefully at the intersections of change, the State, and the culture at large? Erjavec included a provocative article by Professor Tyrus Miller of UC Santa Cruz that provides us with an occasion for investigating this idea using the fairly familiar sense we have of The Sixties. Miller's piece is called "Aesthetic Revolution in the United States during the 1960s."
It is easy to say that The Sixties changed our culture indelibly; it is less easy to show it (and how it may have happened) beyond question.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Aesthetic Revolutions: Gathering at the Greimasian Square
Noesis helps create the double-doubled logical framework called a Greimasian Square, where no one element dominates but each helps give the others definition. The most famous examples of this thinking include Molière's joking about the definitions of poetry and prose in The Bourgeois Gentleman. There poetry is what it is by also being what prose is not and vice versa. One side of that square shows each of those alliances (+) while each corner is linked in opposition to the the pair on the other side:
poetry<---------------->prose
+ +
+ +
+ +
not-prose<----------->not-poetry
When I use poetry, I am using it as "not-prose" and also in opposition to "prose" and "not-poetry." The Gentleman's understanding brings out the humor in such logical alliances and differences.
With the four "-esises" as elements of art, we have a more complex set; however, it works on the same principles and even has potential for humor in it that can be used as a logical tool.
making / poiesis<---------->aesthesis / expressing
+ +
(OBJECT) + + (MIND)
+ +
imitating / mimesis<------>noesis / critiquing
On the one side, we have the old alliance of poiesis and mimesis in what Rancière calls the "representative regime." These are the elements of an objective art that presents a world-view of myths and morés. On the other side are the elements of the subjective: aesthesis as the expression of feeling perception, and noesis as the critical thinking of the subject. On the other two sides, there are also linkages within the oppositions: poiesis and aesthesis are the artist's inner elements, chosen form and chosen expression; mimesis and noesis complementarily refer outwardly to the artist's world, imitating or critiquing its ways. Diagonally, we also have linking oppositions: poiesis and noesis as the bonded pair of making and critiquing, and aestheis and mimesis bonded as the extremes of self-expression and world-imitation where they temper each other.
We recognize this last bonded opposition as the dialectic that keeps artists in "the aesthetic regime" from merely returning to the representative or merely fully expressing their own feeling perception. We can recognize in the other bond the call to use shaping or form in conjunction with critical thinking (and humor, as in Molière, to keep the art from settling in its shapes and to keep it reaching beyond mere critique that might be closed down into idées reçues only ever temporarily new. It is the introduction of full focus on this interplay between elements in the form and content of an artwork that allows that work to both deliver on its promise of engagement and to keep its autonomously creative distance by using those doubled tensions.
In Rancière's simple abstract history, we see how societies have created representations of their "known" world by shaping works (poiesis) in conformation to mimesis of one sort or another. The "art" there is in the balance between form and imitation. Aesthetic art arose from that practice through the artist's position in the tension between those two basic elements. It added a third that created a more dynamic interplay between the experience of feeling perception brought to the work by the artist and how the artist used poiesis and mimesis to deliver it. For the audience also, an experience of feeling perception came to be the heart of the work. There would be, in that feeling perception, some critique of the standards of poiesis and mimesis; the field of aesthetics certainly included that kind of education through the work and its reception. However, this element was doomed to be enfolded in feeling-perception and generally identified with an individual or small group. This "matter of taste" then is played right back into the bourgeois world of opinion and other doxa. In that world, heterodoxy only proves orthodoxy's dominance. Aesthetics are anyone's game there, orthodox or not. Everywhere that a seemingly new aesthetics or poetics might arise, it would threaten to change the old and then, at best, the new would shift into being the new old or, as usual, the new would become "alternative" and the old would still sell from another bin in the aesthetical shop. Rancière's claims on behalf of an aesthtics that hovers or oscillates between autonomy and engagement leaves us stuck in this place.
poetry<---------------->prose
+ +
+ +
+ +
not-prose<----------->not-poetry
When I use poetry, I am using it as "not-prose" and also in opposition to "prose" and "not-poetry." The Gentleman's understanding brings out the humor in such logical alliances and differences.
With the four "-esises" as elements of art, we have a more complex set; however, it works on the same principles and even has potential for humor in it that can be used as a logical tool.
making / poiesis<---------->aesthesis / expressing
+ +
(OBJECT) + + (MIND)
+ +
imitating / mimesis<------>noesis / critiquing
On the one side, we have the old alliance of poiesis and mimesis in what Rancière calls the "representative regime." These are the elements of an objective art that presents a world-view of myths and morés. On the other side are the elements of the subjective: aesthesis as the expression of feeling perception, and noesis as the critical thinking of the subject. On the other two sides, there are also linkages within the oppositions: poiesis and aesthesis are the artist's inner elements, chosen form and chosen expression; mimesis and noesis complementarily refer outwardly to the artist's world, imitating or critiquing its ways. Diagonally, we also have linking oppositions: poiesis and noesis as the bonded pair of making and critiquing, and aestheis and mimesis bonded as the extremes of self-expression and world-imitation where they temper each other.
We recognize this last bonded opposition as the dialectic that keeps artists in "the aesthetic regime" from merely returning to the representative or merely fully expressing their own feeling perception. We can recognize in the other bond the call to use shaping or form in conjunction with critical thinking (and humor, as in Molière, to keep the art from settling in its shapes and to keep it reaching beyond mere critique that might be closed down into idées reçues only ever temporarily new. It is the introduction of full focus on this interplay between elements in the form and content of an artwork that allows that work to both deliver on its promise of engagement and to keep its autonomously creative distance by using those doubled tensions.
In Rancière's simple abstract history, we see how societies have created representations of their "known" world by shaping works (poiesis) in conformation to mimesis of one sort or another. The "art" there is in the balance between form and imitation. Aesthetic art arose from that practice through the artist's position in the tension between those two basic elements. It added a third that created a more dynamic interplay between the experience of feeling perception brought to the work by the artist and how the artist used poiesis and mimesis to deliver it. For the audience also, an experience of feeling perception came to be the heart of the work. There would be, in that feeling perception, some critique of the standards of poiesis and mimesis; the field of aesthetics certainly included that kind of education through the work and its reception. However, this element was doomed to be enfolded in feeling-perception and generally identified with an individual or small group. This "matter of taste" then is played right back into the bourgeois world of opinion and other doxa. In that world, heterodoxy only proves orthodoxy's dominance. Aesthetics are anyone's game there, orthodox or not. Everywhere that a seemingly new aesthetics or poetics might arise, it would threaten to change the old and then, at best, the new would shift into being the new old or, as usual, the new would become "alternative" and the old would still sell from another bin in the aesthetical shop. Rancière's claims on behalf of an aesthtics that hovers or oscillates between autonomy and engagement leaves us stuck in this place.
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