Aleksandar Jevremović

Aesthetics and Politics, Nathan Taylor

December 13, 2019

Written Response

Rancière’s Aesthetics as Politics

The goal of this written response is to offer an analysis of Rancière’s essay “Aesthetics as politics”. I have,
therefore, limited myself only to the core concepts of this relatively dense text. I begin my exposition with the
discussion about the Rancière’s diagnosis of the state of contemporary art and two of its forms. Then, after
the short presentation of the purpose of Rancière’s project, I turn myself to the definitions of concepts ‘art’
and ‘politics’, as well as the logical relation between the two. The rest of the essay deals with the conclusions
he draws from that relation.

Rancière opens his essay with the diagnose of the current state of the art as post-utopian (PU). This PU state
marks the definite break with the radical (utopian) artistic project of transforming the very core of society.
He, however, does not go into detail about the nature of this project. In the PU state of affairs two general
conditions can be recognized: 1) First is the one preferred by philosophers and art historians and it rests on
the reference to the Kantian notion of the sublime. In this case sublime can be understood in two ways: a) “as
a presence at the heart of the sensible of a force that exceeds it” or b) “as an irreducible gap between the idea
and the sensible”. 2) The second condition is, on the other hand, preferred by the artists and the art world in
general. This kind of art - unlike the first kind - doesn’t aim at founding a new common world, but rather
“redisposing the objects and the images that comprise the common world as it is already given. This art is the
art of creating situations. In the following, I will call the first type of art sublime and the second relational. A
paradigmatic example of the former is the painting by an American artist Barnett Newman called Vir
heroicus sublimis (1950, Oil on Canvas, MOMA) and of the later work of French artist Pierre Huyghe.

Despite the differences between the two forms, they are still both PU forms and have, therefore, a common
denominator. They are both forms of “framing of a space of presentation by which the things of art are
identified as such” (p. 23). Moreover, they both challenge those spaces, each in its own way. In the case of
sublime art, the space-time is challenged by the conflict between two different regimes of sensibility. In the
case of relational art places themselves are reconfigured and the creation of situations disturbs the perception
process by reversing the role of spectator and actor. Rancière again doesn’t go into detail about the nature of
the concept of space, although he does signal that it can be both material and symbolic (conceptual).

After the diagnose of the contemporary art world in terms of sublime and relational art, Rancière defines the
goal of his work. As the title of his essay “Aesthetics as politics” already suggests, he sees some kind of parallel
structure between the realm of art and realm of politics. As he himself puts it, it is his aim to “reconstitute
the logic of the ‘aesthetic’ relation between art and politics” (p. 22) , where logic can’t mean anything else
than that common structure. As it was demonstrated in the previous paragraph, he has already defined art as
‘framing of spaces’. In order to establish structural connection between arts and politics, he needs a definition
of politics as well.

This is, naturally, his next move. He defines politics not as struggle or exercise of power, but “configuration of
a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as
pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designing these objects” (p. 24). This
definition is significant at least for two reasons. Firstly, it makes the notion of ‘space’ clearer than the
definition of art. Secondly, it establishes a clear logical connection between the practices of art and politics, as
both have something to do with the (re)configuration of spaces.

The political state can always be described in terms of this configuration of spaces. Political change,
consequentially, is the change in this configuration, i.e. reconfiguration. This is a phenomenon Rancière calls
“distribution of spaces” (p. 25). Distribution of spaces is a theoretical concept that plays an important role in
his political theory. According to Woodward’s article on IEP, for Rancière “political relationships generally,
don’t only operate on the conceptual or cognitive level, but on the sensory level” (Woodward, 2018: 7). This
sensory (non-cognitive) principle of organization is the source of many social inequalities. Because of the
sensory nature of this principle, it is natural that the relation between art and politics plays an important role
in Rancière’s philosophy. Woodward also points out that Rancière’s politics is a “non-utopian ideal of
democratic emancipation, understood as the constant process of intervening in the current order to broaden
spaces of participation and to open potentials of inclusion and participation where these are closed to parts
of the community through the existing distribution of the sensible” (Woodward, 2018: 7). This quote, I
believe, explains the nature of both utopian and post-utopian project I referred to at the beginning of this
essay.

Therefore, as it follows from their definitions, the relationship between art and politics is “in the way in which
the practices and forms of visibility of art themselves intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its
reconfiguration, in which they distribute spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the
singular” (p. 25). Post-utopian art doesn’t aim at the instant democratic emancipation of the society as the
utopian project does. It is a “constant process of intervening in the current order to broaden spaces of
participation and to open potentials of inclusion and participation where there are closed to parts of the
community through the existing distribution of the sensible”. This is the essential democratic dimension of
aesthetics.

After he has established both the definition of political and the art, as well as the relationship between the
two, Rancière addresses the question of autonomy. Autonomy is, in this case, understood as a relation of
subordination (either of aesthetics to politics or vice versa). Interesting enough, he doesn’t think that this
relation is applicable to the realms of art and politics. I believe that he sees the relation of aesthetics and
politics not as a relation between master and slave, but rather as a relation between the two branches
originating from the same tree. Instead of imposing the contradicting principles on each other, they originate
from the same underlying principle.

This underlying principle Rancière identifies as an “aesthetic regime of art”. For him, the two do not
“constitute separate realities […] they are two forms of distribution of the sensible, both of which are
dependent on a specific regime of identification” (p. 26). The regime of identification is the core concept of
Rancière’s aesthetics. He doesn’t believe in the continuous narrative of (art) history. Instead, he conceives the
history (of art) as a series of radically distinct, discontinuous episodes. These episodes he calls regimes of
identification. Regimes are the general frameworks shared by the given society - they constitute the common
in a community. It is, however, unclear to me whether these regimes are purely conceptual, merely sensory or
some kind of complicated interplay between the two. I think it would be interesting to compare them to
Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm’.

The history (of western civilization) can be reconstructed through three such episodes: (I) ethical regime
(classical world), (II) representational/mimetic regime (renaissance) and (III) aesthetic regime. Sublime and
relational art emerge from the aesthetic regime. Interestingly, different regimes render different objects as
artwork or the same objects as different kinds of artworks. He illustrates this on the examples of Plato’s
Republic and Schiller’s Juno.