Still from Jacques Rivette's Le Pont du nord (1988).
Rancière’s main political idea is that a democratic politics emerges from the presupposition of equality. Equality is a starting point, not a goal or destination. This idea is articulated to various degrees in all of Rancière’s books. It finds its most polemical expression in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, published in 1998, though it is argued with equal force in the lesser-known book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where Rancière considers the pedagogical ideas of the post-revolutionary philosopher of education Joseph Jacotot. More recently his work has turned to the relation between aesthetics and politics. In texts such as The Politics of Aesthetics and The Future of the Image, Rancière attempts to shift the parameters of criticism away from traditional forms of critique which, in their tendency to demystify, situate the critic in a position of authority in relation to his or her object. His latest book, Aisthesis, attempts to reimagine aesthetic experience as a fundamentally democratic process that is accessible to all.
This interview took place in Rancière’s hotel room on the Gray’s Inn Road in North London. The room was cramped and unadorned, the paint was peeling off the bare walls in large swaths, and there was only one chair, so that Rancière was forced to sit on his unmade bed. He spoke quickly and nervously, his words barely able to keep up with the movements of his thought.
When I started work on the subject there was a very influential book, La Distinction {1979}, by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which put forward the idea that aesthetic judgement had always been determined by a dominant class which defined aesthetic concepts such as taste. In other words, there was a disjunction between the aesthetic and the popular. But I felt the contrary might be the case. At first the idea of aesthetic judgement had an egalitarian capacity. What is important in Immanuel Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgement – of judgement without a concept – and what is entailed in Friedrich Schiller’s idea of the aesthetic education of man, is that the capacity for aesthetic judgement does not belong to a particular class or group of people but is a capacity that is widely shared. That is the first point.
The second point is that, against the so-called modernist tradition, where you find a distinction between high art and popular art, autonomous art and everyday experience, it seemed to me that what we really find in the history of modern art, or what I call the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, is a blurring of the boundaries between the artistic and the non-artistic.
This is related to my former writing on workers’ emancipation. I attempted in that to avoid the usual empirical approach, in which a narrative is produced about the struggles of workers which becomes the object of theory. Instead I looked at the narratives produced by workers and considered them as being in some way already theoretical. Producing these narratives was a way for workers to take a view of their own lives and to reconstruct their own lives. They constitute an attempt to emphasise, rephrase and translate an experience, to grasp the very flesh of experience. Likewise, the purpose of the ‘scene’ is to focus on the construction of a network, the construction of modes of perception and forms of intelligibility that transform an object or performance into a sensible event called art.
What I saw as a basic feature of the aesthetic regime is a break with that organic and hierarchical model. For me it starts with the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who wrote about the ‘Torso del Belvedere’, a mutilated statue of Hercules with no head or limbs. It is a work that cannot be judged with respect to ideas of organicity and perfection. It is deprived of all the elements which might decide and anticipate the effects of its viewing. Yet for Winckelmann it was the epitome of Greek beauty. So the disruption of the organic model also disrupts the causal chain, and with it nineteenth-century models of rationality, or perhaps modern rationality more generally. Such a work disrupts the view of art as a totality that you can grasp in its infrastructure and in its effects. The causal relation is interrupted.
There is something here that is comparable to the experience of suspension, inaction, or reverie. And all this forms an important part of that emblematic image of the worker who stops the labour of his hand in order to look out through the window and take an aesthetic view from the place in which he works. There is also a relation here to nineteenth-century literature, which attempted to produce a total picture of society, but whose plots often lead nowhere. In a sense they are about the failure of action.
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