aesthetics and politics [rethinking the link]

7/31/2019 Aesthetics and Politics [Rethinking the Link]

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Rancière Talk: Aesthetics and Politics: Rethinking the Link

There are different ways of dealing with art and politics. For a long time the issue had

been set up as a relationship between two separate terms. The question was raised as

follows: must art serve politics or not? Or: how can we assess the political import of

artworks? This led to endless controversies about art for art's sake opposed to engaged

art. Another way of setting the issue was: how do artworks represent social issues and

struggles or matters of identity and difference. This resulted in another kind of endless

job. When you started scrutinizing how 19th century French painters or novelists had

represented class-war matters, you already knew that they did it inadequately because of

their own class position. And when you begin to ferret out hidden representations of

social, sexual or racial difference, you never stop finding new biases, the more so

significant and perverse as they are the more deeply concealed and indiscernible to

everybody's eye. For a while, some concepts offered a mediation, such as culture or

modernity. The strategies of the artists, the contents of their representations or of their

dismissal of representation were referred to the modes of perception and consumption of

the new industrial world of work and leisure that you could call, according to your own

political commitment, either capitalism and commodification or modernity and modern

life. A lot of cultural and social history of art has been written to show how for instance

the impressionist technique of coloured blotches had been fostered by the perception of

the new scenery of the modern town with its shops, lights and windows or the new

pleasures of urban or suburban leisure, cafés-concerts, boating on rivers and so on. So the

issue of the autonomy of art with respect to politics turned out to be the issue of its



autonomy in relation to common culture: did the impressionist blotches testify to a 'truth-

to-medium" strategy of autonomy or did they chart the new conditions of sensory

experience in commodity culture?

Those discussions left the crucial point in the dark: how is it possible that the self-

containment of painting be identified with the representation of popular leisure? More

basically, how is it possible that we see - or read - on a canvas a representation of social

life? How does it make sense to relate a way of painting that makes the strokes of the

brush visible both to an idea of pure painting and to an idea of painting as an expression

of a new kind of social life? In order that we pose these questions, there must already be a

previous knot between a way of painting, a gaze cast on the canvas and a mode of

interpretation of painting as expressing a way of life. The impressionists could paint their

canvases and we can discuss whether they did pure painting, images of Parisian leisure or

both at the same time because there already existed a visibility of painting as both self-

affirmation of art and representation of common life. There must be a previous mapping

of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable allowing us to connect in this or that way

something that we call artistic form and something that we see as political content. Art

and politics are not two terms that would be linked through some form of representation.

They are constituted as such in the same knot of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable,

in the same framing of a common space where some practices appear to be named "arts"

and some matters to be viewed of as "political".

Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it carries on the state of social

and political issues. It is not political owing to the way it represents social structures,



conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with regard

to those functions. It is political as it frames a specific space-time sensorium, as it

redefines on this stage the power of speech or the coordinates of perception, shifts the

places of the actor and the spectator, etc.

Because politics is not the exercise of power or the struggle for power. Politics is first of

all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of

experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and subjects to whom the capacity

is recognized to designate these objects and argue about them. My book Disagreement

was an attempt to show that politics first is the conflict about the very existence of that

sphere of experience, the reality of those common objects and the capacity of those

subjects. A well known Aristotelian sentence says that human beings are political because

they own the power of speech that puts into common the issues of justice and injustice

while animals only have voice to express pleasure or pain. I tried to show that the whole

political problem dealt with distinguishing they who get the power of speech from they to

whom is only recognized the possession of voice. Artisans, Plato says, have no time to be

elsewhere outside of their work. I tried to show that that matter of lacking time was by no

means an empirical matter, that it was the mere naturalization of a symbolical separation.

Politics precisely happens when they who have "no time" to do anything else than their

work take that time that they have not in order to make themselves visible as sharing in a

common world and prove that their mouth indeed emits common speech instead of

merely voicing pleasure or pain. That distribution and re-distribution of times and spaces,

places and identities, that way of framing and re-framing the visible and the invisible, of



telling speech from noise and so on, is what I call the partition of the sensible. Politics

consist in reconfiguring the partition of the sensible, in bringing on the stage new objects

and subjects, in making visible that which was not visible, audible as speaking beings

they who where merely heard as noisy animals. In so far as it sets up such scenes of

dissensus, politics can be told to be an "aesthetic" activity, in a way that has noting to do

with that adornment of power which Benjamin called "aestheticization of politics".

The issue "aesthetics and politics" can thus be rephrased as follows: there is an

"aesthetics of politics" in the sense that I tried to explain. Correspondingly, there is a

"politics of aesthetics". This means that the artistic practices and their forms of visibility

and intelligibility, take part in the partition of the perceptible in so far as they suspend the

ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the overall network of

relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects,the common and the

singular. There is not always politics, though there always are forms of power. Nor is

there always art, though there always are poetry, painting, music, theatre, dance, sculpture

and so on. Plato's Republic is a good case in point. It is sometimes misunderstood as the

"political" proscription of art. But politics itself is withdrawn by the Platonic gesture. The

same partition of the sensible withdraws a political stage by denying to the artisans any

time for doing something else than their own job and an "artistic" stage by closing the

theatre where the poet and the actors would embody another personality than their own.

The same configuration of the space-time of the community prevents for both of them the

possibility of making two things at once, putting the artisan out of politics and the

mimetician out of the city. Democracy and the theatre are two forms of the same partition



of the sensible, two forms of heterogeneity, that are dismissed at the same time to frame

the republic as the "organic life" of the community.

So the "aesthetical knot" is always tied before you can identify art or politics. The present

situation might be another interesting case of this articulation.As we know our present is

very often characterized as a time of desidentification of art. Many art lovers fail to

recognize the identity of art in front of the videos or installations that spawn in the place

where they used to see paintings. But as the same time, it very often happens that you

have to go to museums or art exhibitions to see forms of staging of political issues or

even hear a discussion about politics. It sometimes transpires as though we were not sure

to find art in the galleries and museums but get a better chance to see politics there than

in parliamentary debate. As though the attempts of challenging the museum as a separate

place had the opposite effect to reveal a strong linkage between the specific existence of

places devoted to the exhibition of art and the framing of the political community.

This link, I think is by no means casual. Plato dismissed at once theatre and democracy.

Strange as it may appear, there is perhaps some similar kind of linkage between modern

democracy and the existence of a place dedicated to what seemingly has little to do with

it : not the gathering of a theatrical audience around men acting on the stage, but the

blank space of the museum where the solitude and the passivity of the visitors passing-by

confronts the solitude and the passivity of artworks. To put it differently, the present

situation might show a specific form of a far more general linkage between the autonomy

of art places as such and its seemingly opposite, the political commitment of art, that is

the indetermination of the boundaries of art. To understand this apparent paradox, a little



journey backwards may prove useful, to look at a kind of primal scene of the museum

which is, at the same time a primal scene of revolution.

At the end of the 15th of his Letters on the aesthetic education of Man, Schiller takes us

in front of a Greek statue, known as the Juno Ludovisi. The statue is as he says "self-

contained" - an expression which would be strongly revived at the time of Clement

Greenberg. But precisely this "self-containment" soon proves to be a little more

complicated than the modernist paradigm would make it appear. It is no matter of

demonstrating the specificity of a medium or materials. The "medium" which is involved

here is not the material on which the artistic will works. It is the sensorium that links two

forms of suspension. First the self-containment of the statue expresses the main

characteristic of divinity: her "idleness and indifference", her getting free from any kind

of care and will, free from the task of achieving any aims. Second the spectator in front of

that "free-appearance" feels a state that Schiller characterizes as "free-play", meaning the

suspension of the very opposition of activity and passivity, form and matter, aims and

means. To sum it up, the "player" is "doing nothing" in front of this idle goddess and the

very work of the sculptor is taken within that circle of "inactivity".

Now, as well-known, Schiller, in the same letter, makes this strange statement that this

"free-play", this suspension of activity, is the very "humanity" of Man and that this

apparently paradoxical statement is capable of bearing "the whole edifice of the art of the

beautiful and the still more difficult art of living". I think that this statement has to be

reinvestigated, far beyond the usual interpretations that see in it an irenic dream of

humanity reconciled by the cult of Beauty and the artistic education of the lower classes.



Such a reinvestigation has to grapple with the heart of the paradox, which, I think, is not

the paradoxical statement of a single thinker but a contradiction constitutive of a whole

regime of identification of art and of its "politics". The paradox can be summarized as

follows: there is a specific aesthetic experience that is an experience of suspension, of

withdrawal of power. And this experience of suspension is the principle of two seemingly

contradictory things: an edifice of art as such, the autonomization of a "self-contained"

sphere of art and the identification of that power of "self-containment" with the framing

of a new form of collective life". Understanding this constitutive paradox may help us to

get away from some stereotypes about modernity, its "unachievement" or collapse, or

passage to postmodernity.

The first point to understand is as follows: there is art, in general, to the extent that there

is a specific regime of identification. I call a regime of identification of art an articulation

between three things: modes of production of objects or of interrelation of actions; forms

of visibility of these manners of making and doing ; and manners of conceptualizing

these practices and these modes of visibility. These modes of conceptualization are not

simply added interpretations. They are conditions of possibility of what artistic practices

can produce and what aesthetic gazes can see. The same statue of the goddess may be art

or not be art as it falls under different regimes of identification. There is first a regime in

which it is perceived as an image of divinity. Its perception and the judgment about it are

thus subsumed under the following questions: is it allowed to make images of the

divinity? Is the divinity portrayed a true divinity? If she is, is she portrayed as she should

be? In such a regime, there is no art, as we have it, but only images that are appreciated in



representation. It gets it thanks to its belonging to a specific sensorium. The property

"being a work of art" is no more referred to a distinction among modes of doing. It is

referred to a distinction among the modes of being. The statue is a "free-appearance ",

meaning a a sensory form which is heterogeneous, with respect to other forms of

experience. It is apprehended in a specific experience, suspending the ordinary

connections between appearance and reality, form and matter, activity and passivity,

thought and sensation.

Why does this experience bear a new form of collective life? Because "free play " and

"free-appearance" frame a specific sensorium by breaking through the partition of the

sensible that shaped the traditional forms of domination. Free play is opposed to work, as

free-appearance is opposed to the appearance referred to a reality. But those categories,

work, play, appearance are categories of a partition of the sensible, I mean categories that

frame in the very fabric of sensory experience the issues of domination, hierarchy or

equality. In the platonician republic the impossibility of free-appearance for the

mimetician came along with the impossibility of play for the artisan. Appearance could

no more go without a "reality" than work could come along with the purposelessness of

play. More generally the legitimacy of domination lay on the "fact" of a sensory partition

of different humanities. Feeling and tasting, Voltaire stated, do not mean the same thing

for the cultivated people and for common people. And the power of the high classes was

the power of the educated senses over the raw senses, the power of activity over

passivity, understanding over sensation, form over matter, etc.



Free play and free appearance thus show up as the dismissal of that partition of the

sensible. This is how Schiller interpreted Kant's "free-play" of the faculties by politicizing

it: the power of "form" over "matter" was the power of the State over the masses. It was

the power of the class of intelligence over the class of sensation, of the men of culture

over the men of nature. The aesthetic experience was the dismissal of that power. It

framed an "equality" which would be no more a reversal of domination but the

destruction of the very partition of the sensible sustaining domination in general. As we

know, he opposed that sensory "revolution" to the political revolution as it had been

implemented by French Revolution. The latter had failed precisely because the

revolutionary power had plaid the traditional part of the Understanding - meaning the

state - imposing its law to the matter of sensations - meaning the masses. By so doing it

was still in line with the old partition of the sensible where the culture of the elite had to

rule over the wilderness of the common people. The only true revolution would be a

revolution overthrowing the power of "active" understanding over "passive" sensibility,

the power of a "class" of intelligence and activity over a class of sensitivity and

wilderness. This is what was entailed in the aesthetic experience of suspension of the

opposites: a revolution of sensory existence itself instead of a revolution in the forms of

government.

Art is "political", in the aesthetic regime of art, insofar as it is identified within an

autonomous form of experience. This regime sets the relationship between the forms of

identification of art and the forms of the political community in a way that dismisses in

advance any opposition between an autonomous and a heteronomous art, art for art’s sake



and art committed to politics, art in the museum and art in the street. Because the

"aesthetic autonomy" is not, as the "modernist" paradigm has it, the autonomy of the

work of art as such. It is the autonomy of a form of experience. And this autonomous

form of experience appears as the principle of the self-formation of a new humanity.

There is no conflict opposing the "purity" of art and its "politicization". On the contrary,

it is thanks to its very purity that the materiality of aesthetic experience can be posed as

the material anticipation of a new form of community. If the creators of the pure forms of

so-called abstract painting could become constructors of the new Soviet life, it is not due

to their subjection to an ideology came from the outside. For the non-figurative purity of

that painting - the flatness gained over the illusion of the third dimension did not mean

the self-containment of the art of painting within the accomplishment of the potentials of

its own materials. Much more it asserted the egalitarian power of the surface, as an

interface where fine art and applied art, functional art and symbolic art would fuse, where

the geometry of the ornament became the symbol of interior life and the purity of the line

the instrument for building a new setting of life, liable to become the setting of a new life.

Abstract painting was part of a whole vision of a new man, living in new buildings

among newly designed objects. That's why the pure poets and the social engineers could

share in the same project. In 1897 Mallarmé writes his Throw of Dice and he wants the

disposition of the lines and the sizes of the characters on the printed page to match the

form of the idea. Some years after Peter Behrens designs the lamps and the kettles, the

trademark and the catalogues of the German General Company of Electricity. What have

they in common? I would answer: a certain idea of design. The poet wants to replace the



representational subject matter of old poetry with the design of a general form, making

the poem like a choreography or like the unfolding of a fan. He calls these general forms

types. The engineer/designer wants to create objects whose form would fit their use and

advertisements giving an exact information about those objects instead of commercial

embellishments. He also calls these forms types. He thinks of himself as an artist

inasmuch as he attempts to create a culture of everyday life, fitting the progress of

industrial production and artistic design instead of the routine of commerce and petty-

bourgeois consumption. His types are symbols of common life. So are Mallarmé's types

as well. They are part of the project of building, over the level of monetary economy, the

level of a symbolic economy, displaying a collective "justice" or "magnificence", a

celebration of the human abode, standing in for the forlorn ceremonies of religion and

monarchy. Far from each other as the symbolist poet and the functionalist engineer may

seem, they share the idea of art forms as forms of collective education. Both industrial

production and artistic creation are committed to do something else that(n) what they do,

to create not only objects but a new sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible.

There is no conflict between purity and politicization. But there is a conflict in the

"purity" of art, in the very conception of that materiality of art which foreshadows a new

configuration of the common. Mallarmé still is a good case in point: on the one hand, the

spatialization of art makes the poem a self-contained block of heterogeneous sensible, set

apart from what he calls the "space identical to itself" and the "uniform drip of ink" of the

newspaper. On the other hand it is a vanishing performance, alike the fireworks of

Bastille Day or it is a ritual of the community, similar to Greek theatre or the catholic



mass. On the one hand the power of a new community is enclosed in the solid volume of

the work, on the other it is ephemerally drawn in the gesture that designs a new common

space.

This means that the contradiction lies at the very heart of the aesthetic experience. The

Schillerian scenario can still help us to understand it. On the one hand the free appearance

is the power of a heterogeneous sensible. The statue, like the goddess, stands in front of

the subject, idle - which means indifferent to any will, to any combination of ends and

means. She is self-contained, which means, unavailable to our knowledge, our aims, our

desires. And it is only thanks to that strangeness, that unavailability that she bears the

promise of a future humanity. The subject of the aesthetic experience is promised the

possession of a new world by that statue that he cannot possess in any way. And the

"aesthetic education" that must replace the political revolution is the education by that

strangeness of the free appearance and by that experience of dispossession and passivity.

But, on the other hand, the autonomy of the statue means the autonomy of the way of life

that she expresses. Free-appearance is such because it is the expression of a free

community. But the very meaning of that freedom comes to be overturned. A free,

autonomous community is a community whose lived experience does not rend itself into

separate spheres of activity, of a community where art and life, art and politics, life and

politics are not severed one from another. According to that logic, the Greek statue is art

for us because it was not for the sculptor. And the free-appearance promises a community

that will be free to the extent that it will no more know those separations, it will no more

know of art as a separate sphere of activity.



So the statue promises a new world because it is captured in a specific partition of the

sensible. But that partition itself may be interpreted in opposite ways. On the one hand

the statue promises a new community because it is art and it frames a specific sphere of

experience. On the other hand, it makes the promise because it is no art, because it

expresses a way of dwelling in a common space, a form of life that knows no separations

between different spheres of activity. The aesthetic education thus is the process which

transforms the free appearance into a lived reality and the aesthetic free play into an

agency of the living community.

The politics of art in this regime rests on this founding paradox: the autonomy of

aesthetic experience is an experience of heteronomy as well. We don't need to figure out

some pathetic end of "modernity" or cheerful outburst of postmodernity. There is no

dramatic breakthrough but an original contradiction. From the very outset of the aesthetic

regime, art is art in so far as it is no-art. The solitude of the work bears a political

promise. The accomplishment of the promise is the suppression of art and politics as

separate activities. From this point on, the aesthetic self-formation divides itself into two

"politics": a politics of accomplishment and a politics of unaccomplishment. On the one

hand, the program of the aesthetic revolution where art becomes a form of life, thereby

suppressing its difference as art, and suppressing politics as well. On the other, the

resistant figure of the artwork that holds in store the political promise, thanks to the very

separation from the outside and the inner contradiction that prevents it to be

accomplished.



The first plot, the plot of the aesthetic revolution intends to transform the aesthetic

suspension into the principle of a free world. It opposes to the political revolution a

revolution in sensory experience itself, the framing of a community of feeling. This

scenario was first set out in the little draft associated with Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin,

known as the "oldest system-program of German Idealism". This scenario opposes to the

"dead mechanism" of the State the living power of living thought. But this sheer

opposition of life and death makes politics vanish. It dismisses the "aesthetics of

politics", the practice of political dissensus. It replaces it with the framing of a consensual

community: not a community where anybody agrees with everybody, but a community

achieved as a community of feeling. The task of the "aesthetic education" assumed by the

"oldest program" is to make ideas sensory, to make out of them the equivalent of the

ancient mythology: a living tissue of experience and belief shared by the elite and the

common people. This is ultimately the program of a metapolitics that purports to achieve

in the realm of sensory experience what politics can only do in the realm of form and

appearance.

As we know this scenario did not stay on the mere stage of philosophy and poetry.

Though Marx could never read the draft, he exactly transposed it, forty years after, when

he framed the scenario of the no more political but "human revolution" - that revolution

aimed at achieving philosophy by suppressing it and giving men the real possession of

that which he had only known in the dream of appearance. By so doing, he shaped the

new enduring identification of the aesthetic subject; the producer, producing both the

objects and the social relations in which the former were produced. It is on the ground of



that identification that the Marxist avant-garde and the - suprematist, constructivist and

even symbolist - artistic avant-garde could meet in the 1920's and make agreement on a

common program: the suppression of both political dissensus and aesthetic heterogeneity

in the edification of new forms of life and the buildings of a new life.

This scenario is too easily equated with the disastrous plot of utopia and totalitarianism.

But the project of "art becoming life" cannot be reduced to the program of the

constructivist engineers or futurist artists in Soviet Revolution. It shaped a wider and

more enduring tradition, reaching back at least to the artists of Arts and Crafts, carried on

by the engineers of The Werkbund and the Bauhaus or l'Art nouveau through to the

situationists architects and even to the more modest contemporary proposals of the so-

called "relational art". But even the symbolist poets shared in this program of an art,

suppressing its singularity to frame the sensible forms of a community that would be no

more the "formal" community of democracy. This is no matter of "fascination" for the

song of totalitarian sirens. This comes as a direct consequence of the founding

contradiction of the metapolitics grounded in the very status of the aesthetic work,

stemming from the original linkage between the singularity of the idle appearance and the

activity transforming the appearance into reality. The aesthetic metapolitics can achieve

the promise of living truth that it finds in the aesthetic suspension only by invalidating

that suspension, transforming the aesthetic form into a form of life. That form of life itself

can take on different shapes. It may be the soviet edification that Malevitch in 1918

opposes to the "old Greek ladies". Or it may be the play and the urban "derive" that Guy

Debord opposes to the totality of a life alienated in the spectacle. Anyway the politics of



the "free form" asks it to accomplish itself, to suppress that sensory heterogeneity which

bore the aesthetic promise.

That suppression of form in act is precisely what is rejected by the alternative politics of

aesthetics, the politics of the resisting form. In this scenario, the politicity of the form is

maintained by providing it to take any part outside of its own realm, may it be as partisan

commitment or aestheticization of prosaic life. The Schillerian goddess bears the promise

because it is idle. The social function of art, Adorno will echo, is to have no social

function. The egalitarian promise is enclosed in the self-sufficiency, in the indifference of

the work towards either any program of social transformation or any participation in the

adornment of prosaic life. Perhaps the conservatives understood it before the

revolutionaries. That's why, for instance, in the 1850's, the work on nothing, the work

resting on itself of Flaubert was immediately perceived by the literary and political

conservatives a strong manifestation of democracy. The work which wants nothing, the

work deprived of any "point de vue", which gives no message and does not care neither

for democracy nor for anti-democracy, this work proves to be egalitarian out of this very

indifference, suspending any kind of preference or hierarchy. Later generations would

argue that it is subversive thanks to the way it sets the sensorium of art away from the

sensorium of everyday aestheticized life.

That idea of a politicity entailed by the "indifference" of the work would be appropriated

by the political avant-gardist tradition. That tradition would have political avant-gardism

and artistic avant-gardism fit together out of their very absence of connection. Its

program can be summed up as follows: let us save the heterogeneous sensible which is



the heart of the autonomy of art and consistently of its power of emancipation, save it

from a twofold threat: the transformation into a metapolitical act or the identification to

the forms of everyday aestheticized life. That twofold polemics is best summoned in the

adornian aesthetics. The political potential of the work lies in its separation from

commodity culture and the administrated world. But this potential cannot consist only in

that external separation. It also lies in the contradiction inherent in that solitude. The

autonomy of Schönberg's music, as conceptualized by Adorno, is a double heteronomy:

in order to denounce the capitalist division of labour, it has to take that division yet

further, to be more technical, more inhuman than the products of capitalist mass

production. But this inhumanity in turn makes the blotch of what has been repressed

appear and disrupt the perfect technical arrangement of the work. The promise of

emancipation can be kept only by sweeping aside any kind of reconciliation, any kind of

"agreement" inside the work and in its relation to the outside. This view of the politicity

of art has a dreadful consequence. It sets the "political-apolitical" difference of the

aesthetical promise as a difference to be experienced in the most sensory way. There is an

extraordinary pathos in the tone of the passage in the Philosophy of New Music where

Adorno states that some chords of 19th century salon music are no longer audible unless,

he says, "everything be trickery". If those chords are still available, if they can still be

heard with pleasure by our ears, the promise of art is proved a lie, which also means that

the historical path to emancipation is lost.

As we know, it appears some day that they still can be heard. As it appears some day then

you can still see figurative motifs on a canvas or make art by merely borrowing and re-



exhibiting items from ordinary life. This, I would assume, is no radical shift from

modernity to postmodernity. Modernity and postmodernity are only restrictive

interpretations of the more complicated logic of the aesthetic regime of art. There is no

historical shift onto a radically new regime of art. But there is a dialectic of the

"apolitically-political" work that draws it to a limit. That limit, I think, is clearly

perceptible in the lyotardian "aesthetic of the sublime" which is both the accomplishment

and the entire reversal of the adornian dialectic. In a sense, Lyotard is still in keeping with

Adorno or Greenberg when he goes to war against trans-avant-gardism. I quote from the

essay: Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable, included in The Inhuman: "Mixing

on the same surface neo- or hyperrealist motifs and abstract, lyrical or conceptual motifs

means that everything is equivalent because everything is good for consumption. This is

an attempt to establish and have approved a new taste. This taste is no taste (...) To the

extent that this postmodernism, via critics, museum and gallery directors and collectors,

puts strong pressure on the artist, it consists in aligning research in painting with a de

facto state of "culture" and in deresponsibilizing the artists with respect to the question of

the unpresentable. Now in my view this question is the only one worthy of what is at

stake in life and thought in the coming century ". This sounds entirely adornian. But the

emphasis on the heterogeneous sensible is entirely overturned in the lyotardian

interpretation. That heterogeneity turns out to be the pure inscription of the power of the

Other. The avant-garde has to draw indefinitely the border separating art from commodity

culture, to inscribe indefinitely the link of art to the "heterogeneous sensible". But it has

to do it in order to invalidate indefinitely the "trickery" of the aesthetic promise itself, to



denounce both the promises of revolutionary avant-gardism and the entropy of

commodity estheticization. The avant-garde is endowed with the paradoxical duty of

bearing witness to an immemorial dependence of human thought that makes any promise

of emancipation a trickery. So this scenario just alike its opposite comes to a self-

invalidation: no more in the archipolitics of the sensible community but in the

identification of the "autonomous artwork" to the ethical task of testimony. The politics

of the resistant form eventually comes down to another kind of desidentification of art, of

identification of art and life.

My purpose, in sketching out these two forms of self-contradiction, was not at all to join

the mourning or cheerful choir singing the "crisis of modernity". Rather it was an attempt

to get away from those simplistic categories. I also wanted to stress the inner tension that

dwells in the heart of the seemingly simple project of a "critical" art that would give the

"consciousness" of the forms of domination and make the spectator become an actor of a

process of social and political transformation. The hitch of the project is that "politics"

has its own aesthetics, its own way of "making people conscious" and reframe the issues

of domination and rebellion, by inventing new plots, reframing the visibility of "political"

matters, putting new objects on the stage. On the other hand, aesthetics has its own

politics, its two opposite politics, so that the project of a "critical art" is from the outset

dragged between the two opposite logics: the logic according which art has to suppress

itself in order to become life and the logic according which it does politics only at the

cost of not doing it. The tension within the critical model has been well exemplified by

the brechtian model whose legacy is still at play in so many contemporary projects. This



model has to come to terms with a very simple contradiction: the work that "makes

people understand" by disclosing the reality under the appearance dismisses that

"strangeness" or uncanny of the resistant appearance that bears witness to the

arbitrariness or the unbearable of a world. In so far as it invites us to decipher the signs of

capitalism and commodification behind everyday things and behaviours it locates itself

within the closure of a system where the transformation of things into signs is redoubled

by the excess of interpretation that takes yet further the becoming-sign of every thing. So

a critical art must be an art that both gives the spectator both the intelligence of what he

or she did not understand and the power of refusal, attached to the spectacle of the

unconceivable. It must be a kind of third way, a negotiation between the two politics of

aesthetics. That negotiation must keep something of the tension that withdraws the power

of aesthetic sensuousness from the other spheres of experience and something of the

tension that pushes aesthetic experience toward the reconfiguration of collective life. It

borrows from the zones of indiscernibility of art and life the connections that provoke

political intelligibility. And it borrows from the separateness of art works the sense of

sensory strangeness that enhances political energies. The main procedure of critical or

political art consists thus in setting out the encounter and possibly the clash between

heterogeneous elements. This is for instance what Brecht did when he blended the

scholastic forms of political teaching with the enjoyments of the musical and the cabaret

and staged allegories of Nazi power discussing in verse about matters of cauliflowers.

The clash of the heterogeneous elements is supposed to provoke a break in our

perception. On the one hand it is aimed at disclosing some secret of power and violence.



work its ephemeral re-arrangement of the window display of his cousin’s pork butchery

( The Belly of Paris). Fifty years after Zola, Aragon in turn would see a fantasy of

German mermaids in the window of an old-fashioned umbrella-shop in the Passage de

l’Opéra ( Le Paysan de Paris). And Benjamin would identify in that phantasmagoria the

“dialectic at work in the things”. Our contemporary exhibitions of recycled commodities

or commercial videos still thrive on the same process.

This poetics of exchanges between art and non-art was the way in which the resistant

otherness of the aesthetic work and the active appropriation of the common world could

meet. Indeed that poetics went through various forms. In Zola’s novels, the permeability

between art and commodity was emplotted in an epics of modern life and modern beauty.

In the 1920’s the surrealists made him serve the attempt of recognizing in everyday life

the absolute power of dream, overcoming the prose of bourgeois rationality. In the 60’s

Marcel Broodthaers put into play in order to emphasize the commodification of art. In the

70’s Martha Rosler’s photomontages used it to demonstrate both the violence of the

Vietnamese war hidden between the idyll of American consumption and the violence of

the commodity sustaining the violence of war. That critical function is stilled posted in

the agendas of art. A significant amount of exhibitions presents us with reduplications of

commodities and commercial videos, assuming that those artefacts offer a radical critique

of commodification and force us to cast a new gaze on the world of commodities, media

and ads which surrounds us. I wonder how many people still give full credence to that

power. Though still posted on our agendas, the critical claim is increasingly shifting onto

two different attitudes.



The first attitude brings the critical pretension back to the undecidability of a game. It

plays on the very indiscernibility of its operation and sets forth the vanishing character of

the difference severing the subjection to commodified imagery from its ironic

denunciation. That double play was obvious in the case of the exhibition first presented in

Minneapolis under the pop title Let’s entertain, then repackaged in Paris as Beyond the

Spectacle. This last title plaid on three levels: first the pop anti-high culture provocation;

second, Guy Debord’s critique of the “spectacle”, meaning the triumph of alienated life;

third, the identification of “entertainment” with Debord’s concept of “play”, viewed as an

activity opposed to the passivity of the “spectacle”.

The second attitude tends to come back from the critical disclosure of the relations of

power hidden behind the images and the self-critique of art to a new attempt to set forth,

in a positive way, the potential of common history enclosed in the images and objects of

our world. Rather than denouncing the boundary between elite museums and popular

culture, it presents the anonymous visitor with sets of items that witness to a common

history and emphasize the kinship between the art of the collector and the art of the rag-

picker, between the gestures of artistic invention and the multiplicity of inventions at play

in the arts of living and arts of doing of anybody. The so-called “relational aesthetics” has

it that art creates no more objects but ephemeral situations and encounters, inducing new

behaviours and new forms of social relationships. It is part of a more general shift from

critical art to a new consensual idea of “art in our life”. For instance, the Guggenheim

Museum in New York recently presented an exhibition called Moving Pictures. Its

purpose was to show how the extensive use of reproducible media in contemporary art



was rooted in the critical art practices of the 60’s and the 70’s, questioning both social

and sexual stereotypes and artistic autonomy. Nevertheless the videos, photographs,

installations and video-installations displayed around the rotunda illustrated a significant

shift from that straight line. Instead of critique, they enhanced a half-realistic half-

symbolist sense of the strangeness of the everyday life and the common people. That shift

was over-stressed by the video installation of Bill Viola located at the top of the museum

and entitled Going forth by day. Those five video- projections, embracing the cycles of

Birth, Life, Death and Resurrection along with the cycles of Fire, Air, Earth and Water,

brought us back to the great symbolist and expressionist frescoes of Human Destiny. It

transpires as though the three politics of Aesthetics (shaping the forms of a new life,

preserving the power of the heterogeneous sensible and exchanging the signs of art and

the signs of life ) were fused into a new kind of indiscernibility.

This undecidability can be referred to a global situation in which concerns with

Humanity and attempts to “restore the social link” are increasingly prevailing over

political concerns. But it is also consistent with the whole logic of the aesthetic regime. In

this regime the identification of art forms as such involve political – I would rather say

meta-political – potentials whose full actualization cannot be achieved without

suppressing either art or politics or even both of them. Aesthetics promises a political

accomplishment that it cannot satisfy and it thrives on that ambiguity. As the awareness

of that ambiguity grows, it enhances two attitudes: one of melancholy with respect to the

failure of the promise, another of play with its very uncertainty. But, just as art becomes

aware of the limits of its power, it is pushed toward a new political commitment by the



weakening of politics itself. It transpires as though the narrowing of the public space and

the lack of political invention gave to the performances and installations of the artists a

new capacity of framing scenes of dissensus. How far they can contribute to the

reconstruction of a political space instead of working as mere substitutes is still at issue

to-day.

Jacques Rancière

Berkeley, September 2002

aesthetics and politics [rethinking the link]

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