JACQUES RANCIÈRE

The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible

Continuum, London, New York, 2010, 116 pp.

As Steve Corcoran puts it in his introduction to another work of Jacques Rancière 1, this
author’s conceptual framework assumes that genuine artistic or political manifestations always
involve forms of innovation that tear bodies from their assigned places and free speech and
expression from all reduction to functionality. An attentive reader will be delighted to discover
how the analysis of interferences between politics and the aesthetic sphere is carried even
further, while their common denominator becomes the very object of Rancière’s scientific and
philosophical inquiry.

Initially, “The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible” had the structure of an
interview – the questions conceived by two young philosophers (Muriel Combes and Bernard
Aspe) were answered by Jacques Rancière in five separate chapters within “The Distribution of
the Sensible” section.

In the first chapter (“The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics”), the author
describes the theoretical junctions that relate his concept of distribution of the sensible to the
aesthetic and the political practice, as well as the mechanisms of this particular distribution.
Here is where the scholar explains that, with regard to what we call art, it is in fact possible to
distinguish, within the Western tradition, three major regimes of identification: an ethical
regime of images (concerned with the origin, the truth content, the end or the purpose of a
work of art), a poetic – or representative – regime of arts identifying the artistic substance in
the dichotomy poiesis/mimesis, and an aesthetic regime of arts, “the only one that strictly
identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy. Yet, it does
so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated
with art from other ways of doing and making” (pp. 20-23).

The following chapter covers the subject of “Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the
Notion of Modernity” by outlining the double meaning of some terms related to the history of
arts (such as modernity, avant-garde or post-modernity) which carry at the same time a
political connotation. Rancière expresses once again his discontent regarding the lack of
scientific accuracy that is to be found in the common understanding of these words and the
vagueness of such chronologies. For example, as he anticipated in the previous chapter: “the
concept of modernity is today the source of all jumbled miscellany that arbitrarily sweeps
together such figures as Hölderlin, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Malevich, or Duchamp into a vast
whirlwind where Cartesian science gets mixed up with revolutionary parricide” (p. 11).

1
Jacques RANCIÈRE, “Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics”, Continuum, New York, London, 2010, p. 1.

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“Mechanical Arts and the Promotion of the Anonymous” is the title of the third chapter which
explains how the emergence of photography and cinematography (recognized as something
more than only instruments of recording and transmission, and perceived as mechanical arts)
managed to transform the anonymous and the masses into subject matters of art, offered them
visibility, and unveiled their specific beauty. This particular determinism that relates arts to
technological and historical conditions leads to a twofold conclusion, formulated by Rancière
as it follows: “on the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic
revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour
acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or
cinematic.”(p. 33)

The fourth chapter raises a challenging question: “Is History a Form of Fiction?” As an answer,
the author will provide the reader with several necessary distinctions, vital in understanding
what sets apart, for example, history from narrative arts, historicity from literarity, fictional
rationality from social reality or even the logic of the fiction from the logic of the facts. The
finishing touches added to this theoretical tour de force are brought by a small introduction to
the definitional capabilities and the connotative properties of the word utopia, so often
differently translated in the languages of arts and politics.

Finally, the last chapter of this section, entitled “On Art and Work”, discusses the artistic
behavior (and the amount of work it implies) as an attempt to reconfigure the landscape of the
sensible, to “recompose the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing and saying” (p.
45).

The later development of the volume enriched it with a second section, comprising another
interview of Jacques Rancière - this time, taken by Gabriel Rockhill, the editor and the
translator of the English edition of the volume. Under the title “The Janus-Face of Politicized
Art” the reader encounters a sum of inspiring argumentations and explicitations with regard to
the historical, hermeneutic and methodological perspectives that may be adopted in discussing
matters related to politicized art of any kind.

The architecture of the volume is completed by a challenging “Afterword” by Slavoj Žižek

which, along with the “Translator’s Preface” and the “Translator’s Introduction” authored by
Gabriel Rockhill, takes a brief insight into Rancière’s fields of academic interest and a
chronology of his other contributions to politics, philosophy, historiography, arts and, of
course, his privileged objects of study: the problem of bridging the gap between the Politics of
Perception and the Distribution of the Sensible. An extensive bibliography and a glossary of
technical terms are attached to the end of the volume, providing other helpful instruments for a
more accurate understanding of Rancièrian terminology and flow of ideas.

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To understand such charming, yet labyrinth-like reasoning, one should depart from a recurrent
statement in this book: “Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct fictions, that is to
say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what
is said, between what is done and what can be done” (p. 39). Without getting any deeper into
semiotic analysis, one can safely infer that both political statements and aesthetical forms of
expression (what is generally put under an umbrella term, art) produce effects in reality, since
they define not only models of speech or action, but also regimes of sensible intensity. This
concept of sensible intensity brings into discussion more Rancièrian terminology, namely the
glamorous theory of a “distribution of the sensible”. This particular term, coined by the author
himself, is understood as the system of divisions and boundaries that define, among other
things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetical-political regime.

In other words, politics and aesthetics both posses, among their multiple functions, the ability
to reconfigure the map of the sensible by interfering with the functionality of gestures and
rhythms adapted to the natural cycles of production, reproduction and submission. By applying
this reasoning to the field of literature in particular, Rancière draws an inspiring conclusion:
“man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his
natural purpose by the power of words” (p. 39).

However, it must be kept in mind the fact that, despite all analytical efforts to determine it,
there is still no known criterion for establishing an appropriate correlation between the politics
of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics. As the author explains, this has nothing to do with
the claim made by some people that art and politics should not be mixed - they intermix in any
case: politics has its aesthetics and aesthetics has its politics, but there is no formula for an
appropriate correlation. The interdisciplinary research agenda mastered by Jacques Rancière
has generated, nevertheless, another significant observation: “it is up to the various forms of
politics to appropriate, for their own proper use, the mode of presentation or the means of
establishing explanatory sequences produced by artistic practices rather than the other way
around” (p. 65).