Ranciere’s Redistributions

Abstract

Ranciere’s Redistributions William Vaughan (bio) The last few years have seen a biblio-blitz of new translations of the work of Jacques Ranciere.1 In addition to his own works, Ranciere has now been the subject of a variety of scholarly appraisals.2 The subject of this review is one of his more recent works entitled: Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013).3 The title of the book comes from Ranciere’s distinction, following Schiller, of the difference between the production of art (poiesis) and its ‘reception’ by a passive sensibility (aesthesis). In a series of earlier works Ranciere calls the circumstances in which these relate as manifesting three various regimes of art: the ethical, representative, and aesthetic. In typical circumstances prior to the modern understanding of art, both poiesis and aesthesis were combined in such a way so as to give each a systematic integrity. This was an ethical regime, in which the network of relationships between poiesis and aesthesis manifested a certain ethos, a transcendent way of being, that informed all that came after, including the education of the audience and the social organization of the art event. This mode included consideration of the accuracy of the conveyance of certain symbols in relation to that transcendence. In an ethical regime, images are considered only with regard to a truth or communal meaning outside of the art itself, which fills the gap between them. In a representative regime, transcendence gives way to historically-conditioned frameworks, and the aesthetic representation matches the hierarchical social status of the represented subject within those frameworks. Certain practices are outlined in advance as being appropriate according to background conventions, and artworks can more or less be lined up with those socio-political structures. The power of Ranciere’s classifications emerges with his delineation of the third regime, the aesthetic regime, which at once nullifies and reconstructs existing ethical and representational formats. In the aesthetic regime there is no art per se, no unity or coherence to what can transcendentally or conventionally be called art; instead there is only [End Page 100] the singularity or particularity of events affirming a strange consistency. The aesthetic regime thus is paradoxical in that it is the non-identity of art that takes precedence. That a urinal suddenly gets exhibited in a museum reverses existing polarities. The zone within which programmatic declarations of what art essentially is becomes displaced. The aesthetic regime asserts itself in gestures such as this in the setting up of a world within which things are called art. Ranciere’s regime-distinctions have proven a fruitful way of capturing and clarifying the vagaries of aesthetic movements in their full social reality. In this sense is Ranciere’s a continuation of the many French legacies of Kantian aesthetics. One would have thought that the French would have thrown off the old Königsberger by now. After all, was it not Foucault who taught us that reason is simply not the disembodied enterprise the early modern philosophers believed? Rather, it is embedded in culture and society; it is entangled in power and interest; it has a historical variability to its categories and criteria. Foucault’s emphasis on micro-structures of power seemed to indicate that the very idea of pure reason is an indefensible abstraction from concrete social practices, and would require our having to get at those practices from within. This in turn calls for archaeological or genealogical modes of socio-historical inquiry that go beyond the traditional bounds of philosophical analysis as the mere generation of theories. Thus Kant’s aesthetics continue to inform conceptual analyses, and Foucault’s own late acknowledgement that his work as well had been fundamentally Kantian,4only confirmed this trajectory, to be variously seen in later French thinkers from Deleuze to Nancy, and from Bourdieu to Derrida. In the broadest philosophical terms, we could say these French thinkers are taking the Kantian insight into the categorical structuring of experience and investigating the historical differences between categorical systems. Speaking loosely, their Kantianism takes the form of inquiry into quasi-transcendental ‘historical a priori’ features, the unconscious matrices governing the space of possible statements that occur...