May 08, 2006
16 Beaver's Monday Night
Discussion on Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics
16 Beaver's Monday Night -- 05.08.06 -- Discussion on Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics; Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor; When: Monday Night 05.08.2006 @ 7:30 PM; Who: Open and Free To All
A translation of Jacques Rancière's "the politics of aesthetics" into English was completed in 2004. Since that time, these texts have been in wider circulation and discussion. We have posted below two talks he has given on the subject in the last years which elaborate the positions outlined in the book. In addition to that we have a link below to a text Brian Holmes wrote some years back connecting to Rancière's writings as they pertain to aesthetics and politics. We would like to take a moment to create a forum for discussing these ideas and to connect to some of the ongoing discussions we have been having at 16Beaver.
Check back online before Monday's event, because we hope to be updating the page with some additional texts or resources.
Aesthetics and Politics: rethinking the link: There are different ways of dealing with art and politics. For a long time the issue had been set up as a relationship between two separate terms. The question was raised as follows: must art serve politics or not? Or: how can we assess the political import of artworks? This led to endless controversies about art for art's sake opposed to engaged art. Another way of setting the issue was: how do artworks represent social issues and struggles or matters of identity and difference. This resulted in another kind of endless job. When you started scrutinizing how 19th century French painters or novelists had represented class-war matters, you already knew that they did it inadequately because of their own class position. And when you begin to ferret out hidden representations of social, sexual or racial difference, you never stop finding new biases, the more so significant and perverse as they are the more deeply concealed and indiscernible to everybody's eye. For a while, some concepts offered a mediation, such as culture or modernity. The strategies of the artists, the contents of their representations or of their dismissal of representation were referred to the modes of perception and consumption of the new industrial world of work and leisure that you could call, according to your own political commitment, either capitalism and commodification or modernity and modern life. A lot of cultural and social history of art has been written to show how for instance the impressionist technique of coloured blotches had been fostered by the perception of the new scenery of the modern town with its shops, lights and windows or the new pleasures of urban or suburban leisure, cafés-concerts, boating on rivers and so on. So the issue of the autonomy of art with respect to politics turned out to be the issue of its autonomy in relation to common culture: did the impressionist blotches testify to a 'truth-to-medium" strategy of autonomy or did they chart the new conditions of sensory experience in commodity culture?
"The politics of aesthetics": I shall start from a little fact borrowed from the actuality of art life. A Belgian foundation, the Evens Foundation, created a prize called Community art collaboration. The prize is aimed at supporting artistic projects encouraging " the invention of new social coherence based on diversity of identities ". Last year , the laureate project was presented by a French group of artists called Urban Campment. The project , called"I and us" proposed to create, in a poor and stigmatized suburb of Paris a special place, "extremely useless, fragile and non-productive", a place at remove available to all but than can be used only by one person at once. So a prize destined to art was given to the project of an empty place where nothing designates the specificity of any art. And a prize aimed at creating new forms of community was given to a one seater place. Some people would probably see there the derision of contemporary art and of its political pretensions. I shall take an opposite way. I think that this little example can lead us to the core of our problem. The first point that it reminds us is the following. Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it conveys on the state of social and political issues. Nor is it political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with respect to those functions. It is political insofar as it frames not only works or monuments, but also a specific space-time sensorium, as this sensorium defines ways of being together or being apart, of being inside or outside, in front of or in the middle of, etc. It is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a "sense of the common" embodied in a common sensorium.
Hierglyphs of the Future: Jacques Rancière and the Aesthetics of Quality by Brian Holmes: We're not a surplus, we're a plus. The slogan appeared at the demonstrations of the French jobless movement in the mid-90s in journals, on banners, and on tracts printed by the political art group, Ne pas plier. It knitted the critical force and the subjective claims of the movement into a single phrase. To be "a surplus" (laid off, redundant) was to be reduced to silence in a society that subtracted the jobless from the public accounts, that made them into a kind of residue—invisible, inconceivable except as a statistic under a negative sign. Excluded, in short: cut out of a system based on the status of the salaried employee. Until they finally came together to turn the tables, reverse the signs, and claim a new name on a stage they had created, by occupying unemployment offices in a nation-wide protest during the winter of 1997-98. The people with nothing erupted onto the public scene. "We're a plus," they said, intruding through the TV cameras into the country's living rooms. Which also meant, "We'll drink champagne on Christmas eve."
A way to grasp the aesthetic language of the French social movements in the 90s—and of the transnational movements now emerging—is through the work of Jacques Rancière and his writings on the politics of equality. In Disagreement (published originally in 1995), he confronted the philosophy of government with the scandal of the political.1 Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.
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Posted by jo at May 8, 2006 11:30 AM
