Documentation:Rancière

Jacques Rancière (1940-) is one of the most important and original contemporary French philosophers, especially in the fields of politics and aesthetics. He believed that what we can and cannot perceive shapes not only our art, but also our politics, tying art and politics together as versions and causes of each other.

Overview

Jacques Rancière is best known as one of the co-authors with Louis Althusser of Reading Capital (1965), though Rancière's views concerning the intellectual equality of all classes of people later led to a break from Althusser, as Rancière disagreed with his elitist ideal of leaders and experts interpreting and leading culture from a space outside and above ideology by drawing on supposedly 'scientific' Marxist truth. Rancière accused Althusser’s hierarchical distinction between science and ideology of discounting the spontaneous popular student uprisings in Paris 1968, and of supporting a 'politics of order'.

Rancière’s views on the equal intelligence of all also extended to his theories on education, in which collective educational exercise, without the overbearing presence of a teacher, form the building blocks from which knowledge is constructed, and can facilitate intellectual growth in virtually unlimited directions. The poor and disenfranchised, through being encouraged to see themselves as their teachers' equal, should feel able to teach themselves, free from the reliance of the rigid opinions and structures of experts for intellectual emancipation.

Distribution of the Sensible

Rancière’s version of equality translates into an opposition between 'consensus', a managerial set of implicit rules and conventions, which maintain the existing boundaries between what we can do and think politically and forms that are excluded, and 'desensus', where the excluded 'part which has no part', which does not do not fit into the domineering managerial agreements, seeks to establish its identity as recognized and legitimate.

This ever-changing conflict is founded on the distribution of the sensible, in which roles and modes of participation in a common social world are determined by establishing possible modes of perception. The three dominating patterns form a historical progression, however they still coexist in the same pieces of art with varying levels of prominence. They are:

1. The ethical regime of images – formulated by Plato, in which the arts are judged by ethical standards of truth and accuracy. ‘Untruthful’ art, which does not lend support to the principles of the community, is therefore dangerous ethically, and should be banished.

2. The representative regime of art – formulated by Aristotle, who saw value in artistic representation. Art follows its own logic and rules, with its 'proper' consensus adhering to societal norms of taste, relativism, and plausibility. Art's narrative enforcement of the logic of propriety and of cause and effect allow it to act as a window to society.

3. The aesthetic regime of art – In the nineteenth century, art gradually became more singular and autonomous, and no longer about about representing something else. Art's value now centred on its own aesthetic language and expression rather than about representation of preexisting structures or societal ethics. The hierarchical order between different artistic styles was also broken down. This differentiation of the form, language, and visual images of art and of politics (away from mere representation) shapes the way that the social world sees and understands itself. This goes beyond Louis Althusser's concept of rigid ideology, and gives voice to an egalitarian politics of democratic emancipation.

Politics and aesthetics shape each other, as different views (from all societal backgrounds) will result from reading art's substantial différance in different ways. Art's capacity to go in any direction undermines the constrictive hierarchies that limit political thought and aesthetic imagination.