The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics

Politics, for Rancière, is to be examined through the concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’:

“the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” (page 12)

This distributive (and therefore more straightforwardly political?) aspect of this concept can be understood in two ways:

“[An] apportionment of parts and positions […] based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.” For example, after Aristotle, “a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed” (page 12)
“…another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens.” For example, again following Aristotle, a slave can understand the language of their master but does not ‘possess’ it. Less dramatically, after Plato, “…the distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.” (page 12)

The sense-able and aesthetic dimension then follows from this:

“There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the age of the masses’…. aesthetics can be understood […] as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.” (page 13)

Put simply: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” (page 13)

How is it then, that artists engage with this form of aesthetics?

‘Artistic practices’ and their interventions are ‘secondary’ to this ‘primary aesthetics’ they are “‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.” (page 13) Again following Plato, Rancèire divides this practice into three approaches or ‘forms’: the written, theatrical and choreographic.

Writing and theatre are “two major forms of existence and of the sensible effectivity of language […as well as] structure-giving forms for the regime of the arts in general.” (page 13)

The theatre, or ‘stage’ “which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces.” (page 13)
Writing similarly, ‘steals away’ “to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space.” (page 13)

However, these two forms are “prejudicially linked from the outset to a certain regime of politics, a regime based on the indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation of partitions of space and time.” (page 14) In other words, these ‘figures of community’ are dependent on various forms of political institutionalisation (democracy, the law, etc). In contrast:

The choreographic, is offered as a third ‘good’ “form of the community that sings and dances its own proper unity.” (page 14) That is to say, there is an alignment between regimes of aesthetics and politics(?).

These are not a definitive list of ‘artistic practices’ or ‘aesthetic regimes’ but are rather:

“…three ways in which discursive and bodily practices suggest forms of community […] three ways of distributing the sensible that structure the manner in which the arts can be perceived and thought of as forms of art and as forms that inscribe a sense of community: the surface of ‘depicted’ [mute] signs, the split reality of the theatre, the rhythm of a dancing chorus.” (page 14) It is through the contingent development, ‘intermingling’ and recontextualisation of these practices of distribution that new forms, sensibilities and ‘ways of living’ can be produced.

An example?

Rancèire gives the specific example of “the type of painting that is poorly named abstract”, which he equates (after Plato) with the “‘anti-representative revolution’ [already present in] the flat surface of the page” and in the “ways in which typography, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced.” (page 16) He writes that while “modernist discourse presents the revolution of pictorial abstraction as painting’s discovery of its own proper medium’: the two-dimensional surface […] A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible.” (page 15)

The ‘interface’ created between ‘mediums’ through this new ‘surface’ (i.e. connections forged between ‘poems and their typography’, ‘theatre and design’, etc) links “the artist who abolishes figurative representation to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life.” (page 16) This ‘interface’ is political in how it revokes a twofold politics inherent in the logic of representation:

“On the one hand, this logic separated the world of artistic imitations from the world of vital concerns and politicosocial grandeur.” (page 17)
“On the other hand, its hierarchical organization - in particular the primacy of living speech/action over depicted images – formed an analogy with the socio-political order.” (page 17)

The result being:

“With the triumph of the novels page over the theatrical stage, the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the elevation of artisans’ art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art into the décor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of s was overturned.” (page 17)

To conclude, for ‘aesthetics and politics’:

“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.” (page 18)

For ‘the arts’:

“The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible.” (page 19)

Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity

Rancière is not keen on the concepts of modernity or the avant-garde. For him they confuse or conflate two things:

The “historicity specific to a regime of the arts in general…”
“…the decisions to break with the past or anticipate the future that take place within this regime.”

Before elaborating on this however, Rancière provides a distinction between ‘three major regimes of identification’ within the western tradition of art, as a way of situating the issue: (1) ‘ethical regime of images’; (2) ‘poetic or representative regime of the arts’; (3) ‘aesthetic regime of the arts’. They can be described as follows:

For the ethical regime of images, ‘art’ is subsumed under a concept of ‘images’ and such images are themselves the object of a twofold question:
1. A question of their ‘origins’ and therefore their ‘truth content’. We can think of this through the problem of representations of the divine, or (again, after Plato) ‘the simulacra of painting, poems, and the stage’ (i.e. reality vs. appearance).
2. A question of their end or purpose, their uses and effects. In other words, how such ‘imitative’ images, are used distributively to educate and organise communities.
In this regime, “…it is a matter of knowing in what way images’ mode of being affects the ethos, the mode of being of individuals and communities. This question prevents ‘art’ from individualizing itself as such.” (page 21)
For the poetic or representative regime of the arts, the substance of ‘the arts’ is identified in the poiēsis/mimēsis couplet*.* This is ultimately a regime that makes ‘fine art’, ‘art’ and hierarchies within art visible to a community, articulating what is and isn’t art. (See Joe Blakey’s glossary)
- It is poetic insofar as it identifies the arts within a “classification of ways of doing and making […] as well as means of assessing imitations”.
- It is representative insofar as it is the “notion of representation or mimēsis that organizes these ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging.”
Finally, the aesthetic regime of the arts, stands in contrast to the representative regime – it is “aesthetic because the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making, but it is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products.” ‘Aesthetics’ does not mean a theory of sensibility or taste, but is rather “the mode of being of the objects of art…” (art is whatever art is). This seems(?) similar to the processes of defamiliarization made explicit through Dadaist art (readymades, etc), now generalised into “a form of thought that has become foreign to itself…” In short: “The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity.” (page 23)(Again, see Joe Blakey’s glossary)

On Art and Work

This complex intellectual equation can be simplified substantially if one realizes that what he is doing is combining, in a clever way, art history with labor history. (http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp)