Rancière against the Cuts

Abstract

This article seeks to challenge and in so doing recalibrate Jacques Rancière's political aesthetics, the motivation to do so springing from the recognition that his theory has disciplinary effects. The author objects specifically to the way that artistic commitment is traduced and, ultimately, excluded from his formula of art-politics, and attempts to stretch Rancière's definition of aesthetic experience so as to accommodate the art practice of Agitprop. His claim is that any of the materials or actions produced by a genuinely egalitarian activist group can be strategically read as exhibiting aesthetic properties. Perhaps counter-intuitively the definition of egalitarian politics is also drawn from Rancière. The author therefore uses one part of his philosophical system to expose the unnecessary restrictiveness of another. Examples are drawn from the collective practice of Arts against Cuts which formed part of the broad UK anti-austerity activism of winter and spring 2010/2011.