Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Bloomsbury Academic (2013), Edition: Reprint, 144 pages
Description
The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming aesthetics from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Ranciere reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common- the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Ranciere's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age. Available now in the Bloomsbury Revelations series 10 years after its original publication, The Politics of Aesthetics includes an afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member stillatim
Late twentieth century French philosophy is a very puzzling beast, particularly for non-Europeans. Anglophones often denounce it as fashionable nonsense on the one hand--and other Anglophones then complain that these denouncers just don't get it, which is true. In fact, this latter group argues,
Because, at least as I understand it, French philosophy is neither a fashion industry, nor a wonderful attempt to revolutionize thought. It is a response to an incredibly specific set of historical and intellectual circumstances, that are more or less unique to France:
i) The French Communist Party, which was both powerful (insofar as it had a lot of members) and powerless (it's possible that the party never stood up to anyone in the twentieth century, rolling over for anyone, whether the French government, the USSR, or capitalism itself). It was also intellectually moribund.
ii) 1968: most recent French philosophy is a response to May 1968 and the problems it raises for social thought. Most importantly, the key questions are not "What is true?" or "What is just?", as in the arid desert of analytic philosophy, but "How can there be a revolution?", "Why, given the state of the world, is there not a revolution?", and "What would a legitimate revolution look like?"
iii) Structuralism, which in the U.S. really was an intellectual fashion, but in France somehow became *the* dominant mode of thought. The problems with structuralism are fairly obvious, viz., it ignores historical change, and it ignores agency/contingency. So structuralism simply cannot answer the revolutionary questions listed above.
iv) French intellectual history also plays an important role. The odd anglo philosopher might pop his (always a man, since this is real, pointless, my-cock-is-bigger-than-yours territory) head up and make a big deal about the Death of God or something. And then nobody cares. But in France, serious thinkers are almost always deeply opposed to any possibility of the transcendent, because the French church has, historically, been ultra-reactionary, and the left has been anti-clericalist. (This leads, of course, to some people wondering if this is really the right approach, and so you get phenomenologists explicitly turning to religion). Also: Descartes, not Locke; that is, rationalism, not empiricism.
With that out of the way, I knew nothing about Ranciere before reading this little book, and now I feel little need to learn more about him. He fits very nicely into this history of French philosophy: he's reacting against Althusser (an arch-structuralist, and arch-communist), trying to explain what a 'real' revolution would look like, and to explain why there hasn't been one.
STRUCTURALISM: I'm tempted to say that his work is *just* a response to structuralism. As he puts it, "what I try to do really is to target certain topic that both create some kind of discourse of political impotence and, on the other hand, either generate an idea that art cannot do anything or what you have to do is reproduce this stereotypical criticism of the commodity and consumption," (78). This is in the context of garbage art that just reproduces commodification, which is a fair point. But it's obvious that Ranciere's understanding of Marx is entirely structuralist, which means he doesn't actually understand commodities. So his rejection of ideology-critique (see below) is a rejection of a bad form of ideology critique, and has nothing to do with better forms of it (i.e., Frankfurt school). I'm not sure he knows that, though.
REVOLUTION: A real revolution, on his understanding, will involve a change in what it is possible to sense and therefore understand. Where Kant puts forward an unchanging set of conditions for the possibility of knowledge, Ranciere suggests that the conditions change and can be changed; when they are changed, the kinds of knowledge possible will also change. This is very much like Badiou, except where Badiou feels the need to use set theoretical language to make his point, Ranciere feels the need to use the language of aesthetics to make his, while fudging the lines between politics and aesthetics: "Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct 'fictions', that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done," (35).
THE LACK OF REVOLUTION: There hasn't been a real revolution because the dominant mode of politics doesn't allow for it. This comes out in Zizek's afterword, which somewhat confusingly doesn't come at the end of the book. Again, like Badiou, Ranciere likes to schematize things; here, he posits three kinds of politics, roughly, communitarian, liberal, and Marxist. All of them deny the possibility of a real revolution in various ways. Today, Zizek suggests (possibly describing Ranciere, it's impossible to tell, as is Zizek's wont) we live post-politics, which is even worse. So our first revolutionary act must be an assertion of the importance of politics once again.
Along the way, Ranciere makes some nice points: he describes how postmodernism quickly becomes nihilistic (24), and tries to move past the idea that artworks and 'real' life can be separated off easily. Instead, the work of art functions in material reality just as, say, an apple functions in material reality. See: Deleuze.
On the other hand, he takes the worst tendencies of French philosophy (and no, I do not mean the silly jargon-mongering) to absurd lengths. I've mentioned his rejection of ideology critique. There are plenty of reasons not to reject ideology critique entirely, including the fact that it seems fairly clear that people act against their own interests, that people don't vote for emancipatory parties, nor act emancipatorily, nor seem to have too much of a problem with massive oppression. Given all this, why would you want to get rid of ideology critique?
Because, Ranciere suggests, "where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established," (46). In other words, one should not set oneself up as having a better understanding of the world than the illiterate field worker in Kansas, because that would be undemocratic. The fact that the actually existing world *is* very much undemocratic--which is why there are illiterate field workers in Kansas--has no purchase here. The fairly glaring problem with Ranciere's argument (and those like it) is that just acting *as if* human beings were genuinely equal does nothing to promote the creation of actual equality. Or, as Propagandhi put it, "And yes, I recognize the irony: the system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. That's exactly why privileged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream, until everyone has everything they need." Which is very different from pretending that privilege has no effects on human behavior.
This is not democratic thought; it's the dei- and reification of democracy. Zizek notes something similar, though in a far friendlier way (71), when he points out that the options for French philosophy appear to be a rejection of politics, on the one hand, or a rejection of economics, on the other: either you can be a pure soul making only perfectly democratic claims, like Ranciere; or you can sell out and pay attention to poverty and commodification, on the other. This is a false dichotomy. Economic injustice makes it almost impossible for people to support revolution, because why would a Kansan field worker support a revolution? They won't see that they have anything to gain, and will see that they have almost nothing left to lose--but that almost nothing tends to be their family, and their life.
It's pretty petty after these objections, but I'm also heartily sick of French philosophers 'interpreting' French literature to make it revolutionary, when it is *SO BLEEDING OBVIOUSLY* not revolutionary. No, Jacques Ranciere, Balzac, Flaubert, Mallarme etc... are not revolutionaries. Yes, they are wonderful writers. That is the progressive aspect of their work: that it's really freaking good, even though everything in the world tries to force us to make things that are crappy for the sake of a dollar. But of course, that would be a sell out to the economic point of view.
If you care after all of that, know that this is a quick read, that Ranciere's writing is as horrific as you'd expect, as is that of the editors and translators; that putting Zizek at the end of all this horrific writing explains his popularity (because it's like putting a chapter from any moderately comprehensible novelist in the middle of a book by Kant), and that after the revolution nobody will print books in sans serif font. WHY? THE PAIN! THE PAIN!
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French philosophy is a wonderful attempt to revolutionize thought. And then the first group suggests that this latter group is simply following a trend that has no real content. This is also true. Because, at least as I understand it, French philosophy is neither a fashion industry, nor a wonderful attempt to revolutionize thought. It is a response to an incredibly specific set of historical and intellectual circumstances, that are more or less unique to France:
i) The French Communist Party, which was both powerful (insofar as it had a lot of members) and powerless (it's possible that the party never stood up to anyone in the twentieth century, rolling over for anyone, whether the French government, the USSR, or capitalism itself). It was also intellectually moribund.
ii) 1968: most recent French philosophy is a response to May 1968 and the problems it raises for social thought. Most importantly, the key questions are not "What is true?" or "What is just?", as in the arid desert of analytic philosophy, but "How can there be a revolution?", "Why, given the state of the world, is there not a revolution?", and "What would a legitimate revolution look like?"
iii) Structuralism, which in the U.S. really was an intellectual fashion, but in France somehow became *the* dominant mode of thought. The problems with structuralism are fairly obvious, viz., it ignores historical change, and it ignores agency/contingency. So structuralism simply cannot answer the revolutionary questions listed above.
iv) French intellectual history also plays an important role. The odd anglo philosopher might pop his (always a man, since this is real, pointless, my-cock-is-bigger-than-yours territory) head up and make a big deal about the Death of God or something. And then nobody cares. But in France, serious thinkers are almost always deeply opposed to any possibility of the transcendent, because the French church has, historically, been ultra-reactionary, and the left has been anti-clericalist. (This leads, of course, to some people wondering if this is really the right approach, and so you get phenomenologists explicitly turning to religion). Also: Descartes, not Locke; that is, rationalism, not empiricism.
With that out of the way, I knew nothing about Ranciere before reading this little book, and now I feel little need to learn more about him. He fits very nicely into this history of French philosophy: he's reacting against Althusser (an arch-structuralist, and arch-communist), trying to explain what a 'real' revolution would look like, and to explain why there hasn't been one.
STRUCTURALISM: I'm tempted to say that his work is *just* a response to structuralism. As he puts it, "what I try to do really is to target certain topic that both create some kind of discourse of political impotence and, on the other hand, either generate an idea that art cannot do anything or what you have to do is reproduce this stereotypical criticism of the commodity and consumption," (78). This is in the context of garbage art that just reproduces commodification, which is a fair point. But it's obvious that Ranciere's understanding of Marx is entirely structuralist, which means he doesn't actually understand commodities. So his rejection of ideology-critique (see below) is a rejection of a bad form of ideology critique, and has nothing to do with better forms of it (i.e., Frankfurt school). I'm not sure he knows that, though.
REVOLUTION: A real revolution, on his understanding, will involve a change in what it is possible to sense and therefore understand. Where Kant puts forward an unchanging set of conditions for the possibility of knowledge, Ranciere suggests that the conditions change and can be changed; when they are changed, the kinds of knowledge possible will also change. This is very much like Badiou, except where Badiou feels the need to use set theoretical language to make his point, Ranciere feels the need to use the language of aesthetics to make his, while fudging the lines between politics and aesthetics: "Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct 'fictions', that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done," (35).
THE LACK OF REVOLUTION: There hasn't been a real revolution because the dominant mode of politics doesn't allow for it. This comes out in Zizek's afterword, which somewhat confusingly doesn't come at the end of the book. Again, like Badiou, Ranciere likes to schematize things; here, he posits three kinds of politics, roughly, communitarian, liberal, and Marxist. All of them deny the possibility of a real revolution in various ways. Today, Zizek suggests (possibly describing Ranciere, it's impossible to tell, as is Zizek's wont) we live post-politics, which is even worse. So our first revolutionary act must be an assertion of the importance of politics once again.
Along the way, Ranciere makes some nice points: he describes how postmodernism quickly becomes nihilistic (24), and tries to move past the idea that artworks and 'real' life can be separated off easily. Instead, the work of art functions in material reality just as, say, an apple functions in material reality. See: Deleuze.
On the other hand, he takes the worst tendencies of French philosophy (and no, I do not mean the silly jargon-mongering) to absurd lengths. I've mentioned his rejection of ideology critique. There are plenty of reasons not to reject ideology critique entirely, including the fact that it seems fairly clear that people act against their own interests, that people don't vote for emancipatory parties, nor act emancipatorily, nor seem to have too much of a problem with massive oppression. Given all this, why would you want to get rid of ideology critique?
Because, Ranciere suggests, "where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established," (46). In other words, one should not set oneself up as having a better understanding of the world than the illiterate field worker in Kansas, because that would be undemocratic. The fact that the actually existing world *is* very much undemocratic--which is why there are illiterate field workers in Kansas--has no purchase here. The fairly glaring problem with Ranciere's argument (and those like it) is that just acting *as if* human beings were genuinely equal does nothing to promote the creation of actual equality. Or, as Propagandhi put it, "And yes, I recognize the irony: the system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. That's exactly why privileged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream, until everyone has everything they need." Which is very different from pretending that privilege has no effects on human behavior.
This is not democratic thought; it's the dei- and reification of democracy. Zizek notes something similar, though in a far friendlier way (71), when he points out that the options for French philosophy appear to be a rejection of politics, on the one hand, or a rejection of economics, on the other: either you can be a pure soul making only perfectly democratic claims, like Ranciere; or you can sell out and pay attention to poverty and commodification, on the other. This is a false dichotomy. Economic injustice makes it almost impossible for people to support revolution, because why would a Kansan field worker support a revolution? They won't see that they have anything to gain, and will see that they have almost nothing left to lose--but that almost nothing tends to be their family, and their life.
It's pretty petty after these objections, but I'm also heartily sick of French philosophers 'interpreting' French literature to make it revolutionary, when it is *SO BLEEDING OBVIOUSLY* not revolutionary. No, Jacques Ranciere, Balzac, Flaubert, Mallarme etc... are not revolutionaries. Yes, they are wonderful writers. That is the progressive aspect of their work: that it's really freaking good, even though everything in the world tries to force us to make things that are crappy for the sake of a dollar. But of course, that would be a sell out to the economic point of view.
If you care after all of that, know that this is a quick read, that Ranciere's writing is as horrific as you'd expect, as is that of the editors and translators; that putting Zizek at the end of all this horrific writing explains his popularity (because it's like putting a chapter from any moderately comprehensible novelist in the middle of a book by Kant), and that after the revolution nobody will print books in sans serif font. WHY? THE PAIN! THE PAIN!
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Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2004
Physical description
144 p.; 8.5 inches
ISBN
1780935358 / 9781780935355