The Silent Revolution
Gabriel Rockhill
Paris Center for Critical Studies
Passage à l'envers
Jacques Rancière's circuitous response to the question "what is literature?" in the introduction to La Parole muette is in many ways indicative of the historical methodology operative in his most recent work on art and politics. The concept of literature, he claims, is at once absolutely self evident and radically undetermined. Rather than invoking this paradox as a Heideggerian justification for investigating the essential question of our age, Rancière uses it as a vehicle for analyzing the intellectual constructs at work in the various attempts to isolate the nature of literature. The empirical approach, for example, accepts the self-evidence of the historical conventions that establish a well-circumscribed catalogue of literary works. This positivistic attitude is countered by a theoretical definition that posits the existence of a literary essence irreducible to the simple bibliographical delimitations inherent in textual classification. Instead of searching for a passage between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of speculation, Rancière is interested in the historical conditions that render such a choice possible. In other words, he refuses to give a straightforward answer to the question "what is literature?" in order to resituate the question itself in its historical context and examine the various factors that determine possible responses.
One of the guiding presuppositions at work in the attempt to define literature is that aesthetic history can and should be divided between works of art and the philosophic reflection on the nature of aesthetics. In order to thwart this erroneous assumption, Rancière painstakingly demonstrates that these domains are in fact coextensive and that it is impossible to separate theoretical claims from artistic practice. In the introduction to La Parole muette, he provides a brief analysis of this relationship in terms of the dispute between John Searle and Gérard Genette. On the one hand, he agrees with Genette's claim that the literary status of a play like Britannicus is not simply due to the pleasure it produces and that literature cannot be reduced to Searle's notion of arbitrary aesthetic judgment. However, he refuses to accept Genette's counter-claim that Britannicus is a literary work because of its specific genre. According to Rancière, such a conclusion would have been incomprehensible for
In spite of appearances, Rancière is not simply reiterating the importance of the hermeneutic distance separating classical tragedy from modern times. While it is true that he brazenly discredits universal definitions of literature by situating them in their historical context, his own methodology aims neither at the fusion of horizons nor at the conclusion that insurmountable epistemic limits forever divide the past. On the contrary, he analyzes the ambiguous status of literature in contemporary discourse in order to elucidate the artistic and conceptual constructs that determine the space of possible statements regarding the nature of literary works. If literature is for him neither a conventional category of classification nor the written incarnation of a literary essence, it is because this very choice is itself predetermined by systems of perception, action, and thought that he refers to as artistic regimes.1 Thus, when Rancière finally provides his own working definition of literature, he carefully sidesteps the wearisome debates on the nature of literarity and the precise limits of genre classification. Strictly speaking, literature refers to the historic mode of visibility that produces a split between two possible forms of writing and their corresponding theoretical formulations: the consecration of the incomparable essence of literary creation and the demystification of the metaphysics of art in the name of either positivistic criteria of classification or arbitrary aesthetic judgment. The paradox inherent in the contemporary idea of literature is thereby explained in terms of the unique system of perception and thought introduced by the "aesthetic regime of arts."
Rancière's examination of the historical underpinnings of the question "what is literature?" ultimately aims at specifying the conditions that predetermine its ambiguous response. He then integrates this entire matrix of questions and responses within the historical relationship between the representative and aesthetic regimes of art. This allows him to demonstrate that the paradoxical [End Page 55] notion of literature is in fact a constitutive element of the silent revolution in the meaning of the term "literature" between the belles-lettres tradition and the modern epoch introduced by Romanticism. It is in part because this revolution can be consecrated as an absolute or fall into silent oblivion that literature functions as a homonym in contemporary discourse. All said and done, the only valid response to the question "what is literature?" thus consists in a genealogy of the historical conditions that produced both the question and its contradictory response.
Historical Trio of Art and Politics
A tacit accord exists between the aesthetic regime of arts and Rancière's own historical and hermeneutic methodology. Rather than searching for the hidden meaning behind appearances, he elucidates the conditions that produce both appearances and the reality that they either conceal or disclose. The interpretive lenses of the ethical regime of images and the representative regime of art both rely on a dichotomous structure that presupposes a split between representation and its external support. In the case of the ethical regime, images and words refer back to an original archetype, whereas the representative regime assumes that appearances are symptomatic of hidden meanings (L'Inconscient esthétique 57-59; Les Mots de l'histoire 116-117, 135-136). The exteriority presupposed in both cases is one of the elements put into question by the aesthetic regime of arts. Referring to Vico's landmark interpretation of Homer as one of the founding moments of this regime, Rancière claims that his hermeneutic procedure consisted in isolating the immanent conditions that produced Homeric poetry (L'Inconscient esthétique 27-31). Vico decided to read Homer as a witness to a particular state of language and thought within which his own discourse was embedded. Far from celebrating the work of an innovative lyricist as did the Aristotelians, Vico considered Homer a poet only insofar as his conscious contribution was irremediably fused with unconscious influences and his voluntary decisions were wed to the involuntary developments of his historical epoch. In the terms Rancière uses to describe the aesthetic regime of arts, logos became indiscernible from pathos.
In much the same way, Rancière's genealogy of aesthetic forms avoids establishing a normative paragon of artistic production or elucidating the secret meaning concealed within works of art. He is primarily interested in the modes of perception, action, and thought that are immanent in specific forms of artistic practice. It is for this reason that Rancière's distinction between two meanings of the term "aesthetics" is of the utmost importance for understanding his work ("Literature, Politics, Aesthetics" 11-12). In its broad sense, aesthetics refers to [End Page 56] the partition of the sensible that acts as the immanent set of conditions for artistic production as well as the system of perception and thought that makes an object or action visible as art. This general definition has the advantage of extending the aesthetic partition of the sensible beyond the field of art in the traditional sense to include the coordinates of perception and action in the domain of politics. In order to understand this unique attempt to elaborate an aesthetics of the political, it is necessary to begin by analyzing aesthetics in the restricted sense, i.e. one of the three regimes of art akin to the three hermeneutic paradigms touched upon above.
Although Rancière carefully avoids overly systematic accounts of the main characteristics of the three regimes of art, certain salient features are readily visible. The ethical regime is based on the distribution of images—not to be confused with art in the contemporary sense—and their arrangement with regard to the ethos of the community (Le Partage du sensible 26-28). This distribution, at least in the exemplary case of Plato's Republic, is organized around two primary reference points: the origin of images (the model copied) and their destination (the purpose they serve in the community). The representative regime of arts emerges out of Aristotle's critique of Plato and establishes a series of axioms that were eventually codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin with, the principle of fiction posits that the essence of a poem is not to be found in its metric regularity but can be strictly defined as the fictional imitation of actions, which presupposes a specific space and time for fiction. The principle of "genericity" organizes artistic production in a hierarchy of genres that corresponds to the hierarchy of possible subjects. The principle of appropriateness serves to adapt forms of expression and action to the subject matter represented and to the proper genre. Finally, the principle of performative discourse privileges the act of speaking and the pedagogical ideal of efficacious rhetoric. These four axioms by no means exhaust the representative regime of arts, and they themselves are in fact dependent upon an entire logic of the sensible ranging from the ubiquity of binary oppositions and hierarchical systems of organization to the omnipresence of cause and effect relationships. However, the advantage of the four principles that Rancière outlines in the first chapter of La Parole muette is that they provide precise reference points for understanding the transformation ushered in by the aesthetic regime of arts: the primacy of language supplants the principle of fiction; the equality of represented subjects replaces the hierarchical distribution of genres; the indifference of style with regard to content undermines the principle of appropriate discourse; and the model of writing supersedes the ideal of speech as act. As is the case with the ethical and representative regimes, the changes introduced by the aesthetic regime of arts should not be understood [End Page 57] in terms of simple historical alterations in the nature of artistic production. In moving from one regime to another, the entire partition of the sensible is at stake, i.e. the "system of relations between doing, seeing, saying and sensing" ("What Aesthetics Can Mean" 19).
This is one of the reasons why parallels can be seen between the three regimes of art and the three forms of political philosophy that Rancière outlines in chapter four of La Mésentente. Hasty assimilations are undoubtedly doomed to failure, but the historical reference points and dominant logic of each regime are immediately identifiable. To begin with, Platonic archi-politics is the attempt to found a community on the integral manifestation of its logos in sensible form. The spirit of the law in the republic is infused into the ethos of its citizens and incorporated as a living nomos that saturates the entire community. Everyone has a designated place and an assigned role. The principle of sophrosune supplants the freedom of the demos and serves to regulate the activities of individual citizens in relation to their role in the organization of the communal body. Given Rancière's definition of politics (la politique) as the polemical intervention of absolute equality in the system of perception and discourse established by the "police," archi-politics eradicates la politique in the name of la police (Aux Bords du politique 164-186; La Mésentente 51-54, 93-131). Aristotelian para-politics commits the same error in the opposite direction. Instead of simply replacing politics with the police, it purports to incorporate the former within the latter by translating egalitarian anarchy into the constitutional order. The demos, or the people who have no part in the partition of the sensible, are mimetically transformed into one of the parties of political litigation. Such a conversion, as natural as it may seem to modern theories of sovereignty and the para-political tradition of social contract theory, conceals the fact that the equality of the demos can never be adequately accounted for within the police order. This inherent falsity of para-politics constitutes the deep truth of meta-politics: an absolute wrong undermines every attempt at instituting political justice and equality. As a science of suspicion whose only access to truth is through the veil of ideological falsity, Marxist meta-politics repeatedly denounces the distance separating social reality from the dubious pretenses of rights and representation. It thereby oscillates between a nihilism that condemns the speciousness of all politics and a radicalism of "true politics"—the communal incarnation of the truth of social reality—that is strictly homologous with Platonic archi-politics. This epistemological construct is also one of the dominant features of contemporary liberalism. However, the identification of politics with the management of capital is no longer, for liberal democracies, the shameful secret hidden beneath the mask of ideology; it is the truth that legitimates the consensual system of post-politics. [End Page 58]
Archi-politics, para-politics, and meta-politics all identify la politique with la police. The three forms of political philosophy thereby abolish the central antagonism between absolute equality and the police order that characterizes Rancière's understanding of politics. The Marxist meta-political notion of class provides a poignant illustration of this operation. To begin with, Rancière explains that the concept of class acts as a homonym that hesitates between two extremes. In the police order, "the proletariat" refers to a group of individuals whose origin or occupation bestows upon them a collective identity. In the realm of politics, the same term acts as a mode of subjectivization that interrupts social categories and breaks the established molds of classification. Marxist meta-politics transforms this radical antagonism between politics and the police into an opposition, within the police order, between the false forms of political representation and the true embodiment of social reality.
For Rancière, political categories such as "the proletariat," "women," "minorities" or "the demos" refer to an unmanageable excess, a "suspensive existence" with regard to the body politic. They are not the true social reality behind ideological appearances. Strictly speaking, they are democratic subjects demonstrating their virtual power of "declassification" by instituting polemical communities where the wrongs of the police order are at stake. This is one of the reasons why politics is not, for Rancière, a specific sector of activity found in certain places and at particular times, carried out by select individuals. Politics exists whenever the account of parts and shares within society is disturbed by the intrusion of those who have no part in the established order. In his discussion of democratic subjectivization, Rancière often makes reference to the paradoxical slogan on a well-known poster from May 1968: "We are all German Jews!" In a certain sense, all of the terms used to refer to those who have no part in the communal partition of the sensible are equivalent insofar as they refer to a paradoxical excess that cannot be contained within regulatory categories.2 The universal presupposition of subjectivization—absolute equality—does not, however, amount to a simple distribution of rights and responsibilities within society. In fact, the very notion of "social equality" is contradictory because equality can only be actualized in polemical communities that are relentlessly transformed by political subjects. Equality, it might be said, is an activity rather than a state of being, an intermittent process of actualization rather than a goal to be attained once and for all.
If aesthetics is understood in its broad sense as a partition of the sensible rather than a sum of artistic practices, then the realm of "the political" (le politique) is fundamentally aesthetic in nature. It is the meeting ground between a police partition of the sensible and the democratic incursion of equality that disrupts the perceptual categories of a community. In partitioning the sensible, political [End Page 59] systems decide who or what has a part in the community, how these parts are distributed, and who remains unaccounted for. The task of politics (la politique) consists, in part, in producing communal forums for dispute by demonstrating the gap between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable, the audible and the inaudible. While Rancière avoids systematizing the three political and aesthetic regimes outlined above, he nonetheless delineates three distinct partitions of the sensible: a hierarchical distribution founded on the ethos of the community, a representative regime of appropriate and adequate forms, and an ambiguous realm that vacillates between nihilism and the glorious incarnation of truth. However, it would be a grave mistake to conclude from the loose outline of these regimes that Rancière is postulating a totalizing logic that aims at systematizing cultural history. Fortunately, his work has overcome the French pathological fear of Hegel—a fear that often verges on a form of Angst induced by the specter of metaphysics, forever unidentifiable at the very moment of its identification—without falling prey to the trite impulse of a return to Hegel. All said and done, Rancière avoids establishing an abstract, tripartite system of art and politics by analyzing the three regimes of art as immanent constellations that only exist in relationship to one another through historically specific forms.
Aesthetic Genealogy
In a recent interview, Rancière has candidly admitted his indebtedness to Michel Foucault: "The genealogy of the concept of literature that I have attempted in La Parole muette, or in my current work on the systems of art, could be expressed in terms close to Foucault's concept of episteme" ("Literature, Politics, Aesthetics" 13). However, he is quick to add that he is not concerned with establishing the limits of thought for a particular era and that he is "much more sensitive to crossings-over, repetitions, or anachronisms in historical experience" ("Literature, Politics, Aesthetics" 13). The question of historical methodology, moreover, is ultimately tied for Rancière to the polemical role played by equality, a concept that has little theoretical pertinence for Foucault. Given that one of the common reference points that they both share is the set of methodological changes introduced by the
Elucidating Foucault's relationship to his immediate predecessors in historiography would require a long and detailed study extending well beyond the scope of the present article. It is, however, worth emphasizing that the choice between historical continuity and discontinuity is misleading. It is absurd—not to mention ideologically dubious—to affirm that Foucault either entirely accepted [End Page 60] or categorically rejected the methodology of the
Foucault's own intellectual jabs and feints make it difficult to isolate one fixed historical method, or even three methodological formulas that would correspond to each of the supposed periods of his corpus (archeology, genealogy, and problematization). Whether he is referring to his historical studies as experiments, calling his delimitations provisory, qualifying his historical claims, refining his notion of discontinuity, referring to himself as a journalist or reformulating the basic stakes of his entire project in terms of his present concerns, Foucault's critical reflection on his own theoretical enterprise often leaves his reader with the impression that this is in fact the only constant in his work. To take one example among many, in the introduction to L'Archéologie du savoir he begins by making reference to a set of methodological characteristics readily identifiable with certain tenets of the Annales School: the quantification of the past, the extension of history beyond the restricted domain of politics, the multiplication of levels of historical analysis, the use of the notion of mentalités to transpose the history of ideas outside the domain of individual consciousness, and the expansion of historical epochs beyond the short duration of political events. At almost the same time that these developments were occurring in the historical sciences, Foucault asserts that a separate group of thinkers (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Guéroult, and Serres) were studying ruptures and discontinuities that undermined the mythological model of continuous development in the history of ideas. Although Foucault is often presented as an advocate of historical discontinuity and is hastily integrated into the latter tradition, he affirms in L'Archéologie du savoir that these two methodological changes emerged out of the same fundamental problem of historical documentation. They both shared [End Page 61] the common enemy of memorial history, whose aim in interpreting documents was to reconstruct the past by resuscitating its mummified voices for the ear of humanity's collective consciousness. They were also allies in reversing this tendency and transforming documents into "monuments," i.e. sets of documentary mass that could be organized into relational networks and anchored in precise historical laws. Thus, Foucault actually situates the crucial theme of discontinuity within the continuous series of monumental history that unites the
The manner in which Foucault divides history into individual series and then parcels out diverse strata within them is crucial to the notion of an episteme. Perhaps the most wide-spread understanding of this term is that it refers to totalizing systems of discursive order that break down and reassemble themselves at epochal moments in history. Although Foucault occasionally tends in this direction, his use of serial history presents a very different image of epistemes. Organized as they are in chronological series, they do not simply constitute periodic blocks that purport to encompass the sum total of discursive activity at a given point in time. The establishment of temporal sequences—such as the Renaissance, Classicism, and the Modern Age—is in fact dependent on isolating individual strands and series within the total field of discursive production. In Les Mots et les choses, for example, Foucault concentrates primarily on the parallel trajectories of three unique strands within the general series later defined as the human sciences: the analysis of wealth, natural history, and general grammar that become political economy, biology, and philology in the Modern Age. Given these parameters, nothing excludes the possibility of additional strands and series that would not abide by the same historical laws. In fact, Foucault clearly delineates literature as a "counter-discourse" whose internal logic opposes the modern epistemic order of the human sciences. The chronological schema remains roughly the same since literature in its modern sense was born upon the ashes of the belles-lettres tradition around the turn of the nineteenth century. However, modern literature discards the classical paradigm of representation in order to revive the brute being of language buried since the Renaissance. Liberated with modern times from the law of an initial discourse, literature folds back [End Page 62] upon itself as an intransitive language whose only law is to affirm its own glorious being. As Foucault mentions on numerous occasions, the unique status of literary language is incompatible with the existence of man. Thus, instead of corroborating the famous historical thesis on the birth of man, literature acts as an anachronistic counter-discourse that contradicts what many consider to be Foucault's central thesis on the Modern Age (Dits et écrits 233-261, 338-437, 498-584; Les Mots et les choses 57-59, 312-314; Raymond Roussel).
The position that Rancière takes with regard to his predecessors in historiography is indicative of his rejection of certain features of Foucault's archeology of knowledge. To begin with, he fully accepts the importance of situating "new history" in its context and understanding it as a specific mode of discourse that emerged in the Modern Age with the dawn of the human and social sciences. As a novel discipline, new history was inseparably connected to the unique conjunction of three developments in the nineteenth century: the rapid expansion of scientific rationality, the emergence of modern literature, and the various waves of democratic revolution that swept across
Rancière's "poetics of knowledge" consists in analyzing the discursive procedures by which a particular form of knowledge attempts to establish itself as a mode of truth within the parameters set by its historical framework. In the case of new history, Rancière studies the methods employed by its main proponents to mitigate the contradictory nature of its discursive contract. However, the dominant feature of new history is precisely the impossibility of definitively eradicating its double contradiction. As a discipline unique to the Modern Age, new history is unavoidably trapped between science and literature on the one hand, and between representation and democratic excess on the other. Therefore, history as a discipline is not a unified discursive series but rather a conjunction of contradictory forces. The idea of a serial history of disciplines that are organized into discourses and counter-discourses remains foreign to Rancière's historiography insofar as disciplines such as new history are [End Page 63] simultaneously both a discourse and their own counter-discourse. Furthermore, since new history is in the grips of a contradiction that saturates the art, literature, and politics of the nineteenth century, the cultural and intellectual developments of the Modern Age cannot be reduced to a single, homogenous epistemic formation.
Rancière's implicit refusal of the disciplinary units and epistemic consistency necessary for serial history is inseparable from his explicit rejection of chronological sequences. Indeed, one of the starkest contrasts between epistemes and regimes is apparent at the level of historical delimitation. Despite the numerous provisos and qualifications, the end of the eighteenth century nonetheless remains a fundamental turning point for Foucault, especially in his early work. Rancière, on the other hand, avoids conflating his three regimes of art with precise historical epochs. Although the aesthetic regime is unique to what Rancière loosely refers to as the modern era, the ethical and representative regimes date at least since the Greeks. This does not mean that each regime comes into existence as a fully constituted set of rules that then endlessly repeats itself through history. On the contrary, a regime is a malleable system of action, perception, and thought that takes on historically specific forms and cannot exist in complete isolation from the other regimes that share its historical context. One of the reasons for this is that, regardless of the apparent order of succession in their overall logic, each regime is made up of autonomous elements that have their own unique historicity. Thus, an individual regime functions neither as a historical epoch nor as a unified aesthetic framework that transcendentally determines the limits of possible action and thought. Many cultural, intellectual, and political forms are in fact hybrids made up of autonomous components from different regimes or conflicting elements within a single regime. For Rancière, the specificity of the Modern Age—strictly speaking a misnomer—is not to be found in its epistemic order or in the struggle between fully elaborated aesthetic constructs. The "age" of democratic revolution is caught in an irresolvable tension between diverse elements from the representative and aesthetic regimes of art, and these elements function independently of chronological sequences such as classicism and modernism.
The paradigm proposed by Rancière has the advantage of almost entirely sidestepping the belabored debates on historic continuity and discontinuity. The founding presupposition of these disputes is that history itself is made up of unified temporal series that either remain constant or undergo a transformation that then establishes a new sequence. These series do not have to correspond to the sum total of activity for a particular epoch, but they purport to isolate a precise domain at a given point in time. The portrait of literary history that [End Page 64] Foucault outlines in his early work is a perfect example. As a distinct discursive series, modern literature is given its birthright by a radical event that is usually situated at the turn of the nineteenth century with the writings of Sade and Hölderlin. Within this chronological sequence, Foucault establishes a chain of exemplary cases that renew, through the course of history, the inaugural transgression of literary language: Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Roussel, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot, etc. "La littérature" is thereby condensed into a well-circumscribed dimension of history and identified with an extremely specific cultural heritage. Foucault combines the event-based delimitation of a horizontal series or chronological sequence with a delineation of historical space that reduces literature to a limited set of authors and a particular geographic region for each moment on the historical time-line. The result of this operation has the unfortunate consequence of compressing the historical space of literary production into a consistent series that masks significant aspects of European cultural history. Rancière's account, on the other hand, attempts to broaden the spectrum of analysis in both directions. Given his dismissal of facile chronological delimitations, he returns to Plato, Aristotle, Cervantes, Vico, Voltaire, and many others to chart the emergence and transformation of diverse elements that will have an influence on "modern" literature. He also argues that if the nineteenth century did in fact introduce a novel configuration of aesthetic forms, then the much-ignored literary significance of social realism has to be taken into account as one of the forerunners in this process. This indicates his concern with salvaging the depth of historical space and resuscitating the voices of authors such as Hugo and Balzac that post-war French theory has largely disregarded. If the diversity of cultural production at any given moment in time is taken into account, it is de facto impossible to reduce the silent revolution of literature to a dramatic event that introduces a new chronological sequence in history.
Rancière's innovative historical methodology also allows him to critically assess the relevancy of the almost endless speculation on the nature of modernism and postmodernism (Le Partage du sensible 26-45). In addition to rejecting naïve claims to historical "beginnings" and "ends," he judiciously exorcizes two mythical paradigms of artistic modernity. The first reduces the developments of the aesthetic regime of arts to an anti-mimetic revolution in which individual artistic forms affirm their uniqueness by exploring the power inherent in their specific medium: pigment and two-dimensional space for painting, intransitive language for literature, and non-expressive systems of sound for music. The second paradigm, as equally deficient and widespread as the first, identifies forms specific to the aesthetic regime of arts with the concrete manifestation of the modern destiny of humanity. Referring to this historical model as [End Page 65] "modernitarisme," Rancière details a few of the diverse guises under which it has operated: Schiller's aesthetic state; the system of idealism outlined in an early rough draft by Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling; the Surrealist investment in the authenticity of artistic revolution after the disappointment of political insurgency; and the Heideggerian thesis that explains the failure of modernism in terms of the fatal destiny of the forgetting of being. According to Rancière, the crisis of art identified with the postmodern era is itself proof that aesthetic modernity—if this term has any precise historical meaning—has not been adequately accounted for by these two models. If it had been, then they would have been able to explain: the breakdown of the evolutionary trajectory outlined by numerous modernist projects and the return of the repressed (i.e. figurative painting and perspective in contrast to the modernist explosion of two-dimensional abstraction, curved space and ornamentation in the face of architectural functionalism, etc.), the emergence of new forms of three-dimensional artistic expression that have invaded the exhibition-space underlying modernism (video art, pop art, installation, performance, etc.), the production of hybrid forms that disregard the borders of recognizable genres of artistic practice as well as the socio-historical delimitation inherent in the notion of the avant-garde or modernist innovation. The introduction of the term "postmodernism" partially reveals the insufficiencies inherent in the modernist attachment to the notion of a proper domain of art subdivided into a determined set of distinct practices that each evolves according to an internal teleology. Rancière's rejection of this model does not, however, fall prey to the temptation to establish postmodernism as a separate historical epoch. The fact that the inadequacies of the two paradigms of modernism outlined above have become more visible over the last fifty years simply proves that they gravely miscalculated the potential of the aesthetic regime of arts.
The concept of modernism is not only ineffective as a historical description of a distinct epoch and as a category of aesthetic production, but it also tends to obscure the relationship between art and politics by confusing two distinct notions of the avant-garde. The strategic conception of avant-gardism maintains that a renegade group of iconoclasts surpasses the mass of institutionalized artists and cuts a swath for innovation by interpreting the signs of its own tradition. The aesthetic conception of the avant-garde, which is the only one that makes sense in regard to the aesthetic regime of arts, is oriented towards the future and founded on the artistic anticipation of a world in which politics would be transformed into a total life program. Rather than being defined in relationship to the time-honored past that it is trying to overcome, the avant-garde is here understood as the attempt to invent tangible forms and material figures for a life to come. Each of these two conceptions is rooted in a different idea of political [End Page 66] subjectivity: the archi-political concept of a party that embodies the essential conditions for historical change and the meta-political notion of a global subjectivity that prepares for the material manifestation of a virtual community. The modernist vision of the relationship between art and politics is thus related to the historical confusion between an archi-political and a meta-political notion of the avant-garde. Rancière, although he is interested in charting the transformations of these two notions of avant-gardism, clearly disagrees with the link they establish between aesthetics and politics. The central question that remains, therefore, concerns the precise modality of the historical conjunction between politics (la politique) and the aesthetic regime of arts.
Immanence and Homonymy
Although Rancière rejects the idea of an event-based sea change separating the Classical and Modern Ages, the aesthetic regime of arts nonetheless introduces an unprecedented partition of the sensible. From Michelet's use of mute witnesses and the anonymous mass of historical documentation to Balzac's convocation of the silent language of things, Rancière carefully charts a silent revolution in the structure of signification whereby the muted multitude takes on a voice of its own. The exteriority of meaning inherent in the logic of the ethical and representative regimes is thereby replaced by a horizontal plane of signification where meaning saturates the immanence of things themselves rather than transcending them. This aesthetic reconfiguration of the sensible parallels the political revolutions of the nineteenth century and the various attempts to open up the governmental order to the anonymous voices of the people. However, there is an inevitable risk in both cases that the act of incorporating these voices will actually eradicate their "impropriety" by reducing them to categories of social division or by silencing them in order to speak in their name. The silent revolution of immanent meaning thereby remains inseparable from a second major characteristic of the aesthetic regime of arts: the indiscernibility of opposites and the ambiguous nature of homonyms. The voices that interrupt the aesthetico-political order risk being heard at the expense of being silenced since their recognition by the established system of the sensible often causes a nearly imperceptible transformation. Thus, the aesthetic regime of arts replaces the depth of living speech and embodied words with a plane of immanence where the voices of the muted masses interrupt the partition of the sensible by constantly hesitating at the border of silence. This hesitation is indicative of a unique figure of thought, action, and perception whose inherent contradiction dominates the aesthetic regime of arts. The proper-improper (le propre-impropre or l'impropriété propre), as demos or democratic literarity, quietly disturbs the ordered partition [End Page 67] of the sensible by introducing the impropriety of a homonym (Aux Bords du politique 128-147).
As Rancière is well aware, the immanence of meaning and the indiscernibility of opposites are two of the prevailing themes in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, including his work with Félix Guattari. Without seeking a term-for-term correspondence, an apparent theoretical proximity is readily discernible. In addition to Deleuze's well-known conceptualization of the plane of immanence and the role of indiscernibility in his work on film and painting, it is worth highlighting Rancière's appropriation of the notions of territorialization and deterritorialization, their shared preoccupation with the Proustian notion of literature as a foreign language, and their common interest in registers of the sensible that elude representation. In order to provide a concrete example of this proximity, let us take the case of Deleuze's landmark publication on Foucault in 1986. In this work, Deleuze describes Foucault's archeology of knowledge as a historical investigation of the stratified matrix of the sayable and the visible in which the primacy of discourse only serves to emphasize the inalienable autonomy of the non-discursive domain of the visible. With the publication of Surveiller et punir, Foucault sought to definitively overcome the risks of a rigid dualism by interpreting each of these domains as multiplicities. Moreover, he added to the archeology of the sensible an analysis of the heterogeneous forces that disturb the stratification of the sayable and the visible by interrupting them from the outside (le dehors). What Deleuze calls "relations of force" constitute a third form of multiplicity that is in a state of constant transformation and becoming, a power that deterritorializes the archive of the sensible order. In his later work, Foucault explored the manner in which the outside folds in upon itself to create zones of subjectivization. Just as the internal constitution of the self remains an operation of the outside, a duplication of the dehors that preserves its radical difference, the actualization of forces in the stratification of the sensible is an act of simultaneous integration and differentiation. In both cases, the singularities of the outside are duplicated by an act of differential repetition. This is where Deleuze locates Foucault's logic as it has been actualized through the course of his œuvre: the concepts of knowledge, power, and the self designate a three-fold problematization of thought organized around four diagrammatic zones (the stratified zone of the sayable and the visible, the strategic zone of relations of force, the subjective zone of the fold, and the outside of radical singularities).
Based on this brief outline, a theoretical proximity between Deleuze's Foucault and Rancière's historical methodology is apparent in the following set of themes: historical archives of the visible and the sayable that stratify the [End Page 68] formless singularities of the outside, forces that interrupt the partition of the sensible by deterritorializing the order of perception, and modes of subjectivization by which the outside is simultaneously integrated and preserved qua outside. For readers seeking a facile interpretive lens, it appears that Rancière's conceptual framework is a differential repetition of Deleuze's Foucault. However, the reason for enumerating these characteristics is not to enter into banal debates over whether Rancière is Deleuzian or to establish theoretical slogans that reduce their relationship to commodified catch words. With regard to our current concerns, Rancière's critical assessment of the conceptual machinery put in place by Deleuze provides a unique opportunity for specifying the role of immanence and the contradictions of indiscernibility in the work of both thinkers.
Historically, Rancière situates Deleuze in the logical trajectory of the aesthetic regime of arts and identifies his anti-representationalism with the accomplishment of the "destiny" of aesthetics ("Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?"). In criticizing representative constructs such as narration, illustration, and figuration, Deleuze defines works of art as heterogeneous elements that introduce a contradictory zone in which the sensible surpasses its own limits and manifests a particular mode of thought. This heteroclite form of the sensible is essential to the framework of the aesthetic regime of arts insofar as it participates in the contradictory identification between thought and the sensible, logos and pathos, the conscious and the unconscious. Francis Bacon's method of de-figuration, as analyzed by Deleuze, is therefore structurally equivalent to Flaubert's systematic dismantling of the grammatical and semantic edifice of traditional narrative. The goal in both cases is to render the power of a work of art identical with the pure power of the sensible qua idea, thereby cleansing it of its representational qualities. However, Rancière repeatedly demonstrates the paradoxical nature of this enterprise, especially in the field of literature: books cannot be written with the purified substance of the sensible, and modern literature—the same could, in theory, be said of Bacon—inevitably has recourse to representational constructs, fabricating fables that purport to produce an effect analogous to the effect of the pure sensible.
If Rancière inscribes Deleuze's writings on art and literature within the destiny of the aesthetic regime, it is because Deleuze attempts in vain to eradicate this paradox by freeing aesthetics from the constraints of representation. His insistence on the purity of the sensible ultimately condemns his work to a series of selective interpretations whose final goal is to illustrate the existence of a purity that has been repeatedly disproven by history. According to Rancière, Deleuze's clear-cut distinction between representation and the pure sensible transcends the specificity of the works he analyzes and masks their internal contradictions, [End Page 69] as is the case for example with his repeated efforts to cleanse Proust's writing of organic models ("Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?"). This attempt to isolate the inorganic material of art attests to a fundamental misapprehension of the logic of the aesthetic regime and its paradoxical relationship to the representative regime of arts (La Chair des mots 179-203). Furthermore, Deleuze's purified aesthetics is founded on a performative contradiction that serves as additional proof that the sensible cannot elude the fables of representation. Rather than concentrating on the material dimensions of the works he studies, Deleuze focuses almost exclusively on representative elements such as character and plot. In analyzing the power of indetermination and metamorphosis, he provides examples of their symbolic manifestation in the stories of Gregor Samsa and Bartleby instead of demonstrating their materialization in words. Even his repeated references to literature as a foreign language rely on referential descriptions rather than material transformations of language itself. The evocation of Gregor's "painful whimpering," for example, describes a change in the sensible without integrating it into the substance of language.3 In Rancière's recent criticisms of Deleuze's contribution to film theory, he demonstrates that the same contradiction plagues his attempt to differentiate between the movement-image and the time-image (La Fable cinématographique 145-163). Lacking any clearly identifiable correlate in the realm of the sensible, Deleuze distinguishes between these two types of images with regard to the allegorical content he reads into them, depending on the perspective that he privileges (either the natural philosophy of the movement-image or the philosophy of mind identified with the time-image). In his analysis of film, as with literature, Deleuze inevitably relies on allegorical fables and symbolic forms of representation. For Rancière, there are two reasons for this performative contradiction. The first is quite simple: what he is looking for does not exist. The second reason is that Deleuze's philosophic project is based on a clear distinction between the register of representation and the anti-representational logic of difference. He is unable to accept what Rancière refers to as the contradictory relationship between the representative and aesthetic regimes of art.
At the risk of oversimplification, it might be said that the initial signs of a conceptual proximity between Rancière and Deleuze are everywhere countered by a practical distance. Although the theoretical motifs of immanence and indiscernibility are essential for understanding Rancière's conception of the aesthetic regime of arts, he is less interested in establishing a transcendental logic of immanence read allegorically through particular works than in studying the sensible logic immanent in the works themselves and their general context. This historical sensitivity and his rejection of illustrative hermeneutics unmistakably [End Page 70] distinguishes him from Deleuze's use of history as a rhizomatic plane of immanence founded on a bivalent economy of representation and difference. Refusing to accept the transcendental distinction between these two registers, Rancière purports to demonstrate both the empirical falsity of Deleuze's abstract logic and his inability to accept the fundamental contradiction of modern times.
Silent Contradictions
One of the reasons for situating Rancière's work in relationship to two of his prominent predecessors has been to outline the unique position he holds within his immediate historical context. Rancière's relationship to Deleuze's theoretical framework and Foucault's historical methodology also reveals a tension inherent in his own project that might be described as a constant hesitation between two extremes. For the sake of argument, let us begin by the first of these two extremes since its general characteristics are by no means foreign to post-war French thought. Like a number of his contemporaries, Rancière acknowledges an indebtedness to the neo-Kantian tradition and, more specifically, to the historical transcendentalism that Deleuze and many others have highlighted as an essential feature of Foucault's work (Le Partage du sensible 13). This tendency is further confirmed by his implicit suggestion that the three regimes of art constitute the sum total of possible partitions of the sensible. They are identified with three essential moments in history—Plato, Aristotle, and the Romantics—as if the internal logic of this historical trio was sufficient for explaining the totality of intellectual and cultural developments since the Greeks. All said and done, the geographic, historical, and disciplinary limits of these regimes remain largely undetermined. While it can be presumed that they are valid essentially for the Western European tradition, Rancière rarely restricts them to a specific cultural heritage. He also implies that the chronological gulf separating the Greeks from the Renaissance was dominated by the ethical and representative regimes, though few studies to date have demonstrated this. Finally, Rancière suggests that the three regimes of art have no disciplinary limit and that they span the totality of theoretical and cultural production at any given moment in history. As regards the Modern Age, for example, he makes numerous references to fields other than literature, philosophy, and film, but has yet to publish a sustained discussion of areas such as music, architecture, and modern science.
The question of exemplarity and historical transformation can be added to the general problem of delimitation. If Rancière is indeed postulating his regimes as transcendental historical conditions, then he needs to explain why the works he has chosen give privileged access to these conditions and are not simply a convenient sampling of examples that conform to a predetermined model. [End Page 71] Regarding historical change, it remains unclear why the only fundamental transformation since the Greeks, i.e. a transformation that has given birth to a new partition of the sensible, occurred approximately at the end of the eighteenth century. Rancière occasionally suggests that the development of regimes has its source in their internal logic or their historical "destiny," but this type of explanation risks eradicating the social dynamic of history in the name of an idealist evolution of aesthetic forms.
Whatever the response to this problem might be, the question of historical transformation cannot be separated from Rancière's postulation of absolute equality as a universal in politics. Although he claims that his understanding of aesthetics is thoroughly historical in nature, the contradictions surrounding his notion of equality bear a striking resemblance to the contradictions that dominate the aesthetic regime of arts. In fact, democratic literarity appears to function as a historical element of universal value loosely equivalent to the artistic manifestation of equality.4 If this is indeed the case, then the politics of equality and democratic literarity not only share the trans-historical value of equality, but the contradictory task of working toward this impossible ideal constitutes one of the salient features of modern art and politics. This normative dimension to Rancière's historical descriptions explains why his analyses tend to gravitate around a unique system of values, but the pragmatic justification of this strategy is rarely made explicit. Furthermore, it remains uncertain whether the logic of contradiction, as one of the dominant ideological coordinates in post-Hegelian thought, is sufficient for explaining the totality of activity in the social sphere or isolating the specificity of modern art and politics.
These historical and methodological complications are counteracted by an opposite tendency in Rancière's work. Rather than insisting on a unique formula throughout diverse historical formations like Deleuze, or postulating historical a priori à la Foucault, Rancière focuses on the particular combination of aesthetic elements within bodies of work when compared to the plurality of possible amalgamations.5 In this regard, his regimes of art act as immanent conditions that only exist in actual historical configurations. In other words, the individual components that make up a particular regime do not transcend history as an abstract set of totalizing principles. Strictly speaking, they are indiscernible from the works they inhabit. This tendency of analyzing cultural particulars as coextensive with artistic regimes has the advantage of overcoming almost all of the problems raised above. Since the three regimes of art are immanent in all of the material that Rancière has studied, and certain forms have shown a propensity for repetition, it is probable but not necessary that these regimes extend beyond the geographic, historical, and disciplinary limits of his general field of research. [End Page 72] In principle, it is also possible that other partitions of the sensible exist in the cultural domains, historical time periods, and traditions that have thus far escaped Rancière's analysis.
The problems of exemplarity and historical change are resolved in much the same way. Since his particular case studies are not individual instantiations of general rules, they do not serve as examples of transcendental historical principles. On the contrary, any axioms that he establishes are immanent in specific works and practices. Even if certain elements are prone to repetition, they never remain untainted by the particular configurations within which they appear. As immanent causes, they determine their effects only insofar as they are simultaneously determined by them. Furthermore, since Rancière avoids postulating a transcendental set of historical laws or even an exhaustive list of immanent axioms,6 artistic regimes remain open to change and to the production of novel aesthetic forms. It is partially for this reason that the end of the eighteenth century does not constitute a historical rupture and that no single cause sparked the onset of the Modern Age. This is not to say that it is impossible to establish patterns within the history of artistic regimes, only that these patterns are always manifest in particular forms and never exist in a pure, abstract state. Finally, as regards the question of normativity, it mustn't be forgotten that Rancière has forsaken the naïve ideal of objective history without falling prey to absolute relativism. His writings are strategically anchored in their own historical context, and the apparent universality of their normative dimension is inseparable from his attempts to intervene in the current partition of the sensible. The supposed transcendental value of equality and democratic literarity is in fact immanent in a particular historical struggle.7 If equality is the "only universal," as Rancière is fond of saying, its universal status is derived neither from human nature, nor from any other founding principle. It is strictly speaking a polemical universal presupposed by disturbances in the police order. In other words, it is a relational universal that only exists in concrete acts of struggle rather than an abstractuniversal resting on an a priori foundation. This is as much the case for Rancière's own writings on equality as for the works he has studied.
The relationship between these two methodological tendencies creates a visible tension within Rancière's work. His inclination toward historical transcendentalism is relentlessly undermined by a historiography of immanence founded on the analysis of specific aesthetico-political formations. His affirmation of the universal value of egalitarian excess is repeatedly translated into militant histories that intervene in the field of cultural particulars. In short, his regimes of art are themselves homonyms that hesitate between two extremes: transcendental conditions of possibility and immanent conditions of probability. The first of [End Page 73] these two tendencies reveals an apparent proximity to the hermeneutic paradigm of symptomatology that Rancière outlines most notably in L'Inconscient esthétique. According to this paradigm, the exegesis of individual works is premised on organizing them into a general system of operations whose every detail can be explained in terms of a series of "deep conditions." In the case of history, this amounts to isolating the fundamental structures that not only explain the totality of historical phenomena but also elucidate the mistakes inherent in all of the merely apparent truths of history (such as the two models of aesthetic modernity or the three forms of political philosophy). The second tendency in Rancière's work does not, however, reproduce the opposite hermeneutic paradigm, which consists in privileging the existence of radical singularities that escape rational explanation. On the contrary, it introduces a significant shift in historical logic that displaces the longstanding opposition between rational explanation via causal necessity and the sublime confrontation with the unrepresentable, absolutism and relativism, universality and particularity, generality and specificity, logos and pathos. By constructing a relational logic of immanence that abandons the hierarchical system of appearance and truth, Rancière outlines a novel methodology for cultural and intellectual history that escapes the age-old struggle between transcendental historical claims and the appeal to the absolute specificity of individual elements. Instead of viewing history from above or complacently denouncing any claims that extrapolate from the microcosmic atoms of the past, Rancière proposes an immanent logic of history that aims at establishing a topography of autonomous axioms of perception, which only exist in the combinatory forms attested to by concrete historical formations. In other words, he forsakes the privileged positions that purport to have direct access to either macrocosmic or microcosmic truths of history in order to analyze conceptual networks from a select point within them and elucidate both their modes of operation and combinatory processes. This does not, however, amount to restricting artistic regimes to the horizons of individual works, nor does it mean that his artistic regimes are somehow between the universal and the particular. Strictly speaking, this second tendency in Rancière's work definitively breaks with an entire logic of historical perception and introduces a novel configuration of the sensible.
The tension between these two tendencies could, in principle, be resolved by definitively abandoning the neo-Kantian logic of transcendental conditions of possibility and its various manifestations in different forms of historical symptomatology. Regardless, however, of the direction Rancière's work takes in the future, his contribution to date remains a formidable tour de force. In response to the longstanding inquiry into the connection between art and politics, [End Page 74] he introduces what might be referred to as a Copernican Revolution. Rather than presupposing the exteriority of two distinct domains and searching for the pineal gland where they meet and interact, he begins by analyzing the partition of the sensible as the aesthetico-political framework that organizes the visible and the sayable. The problem is not how art and politics interact, but rather how a particular regime of the sensible makes it appear as if these two spheres are actually distinct. Interpreting this change in terms of a Copernican Revolution nonetheless runs into at least one important obstacle: Rancière himself jettisons the event-based historical framework that this paradigm is based on. Calling into question the search for the essence of modernity and the endless attempts to clearly delimit the Modern Age, he explains the contemporary convergence between art and politics in terms of the contradictory relationship between autonomous elements of the aesthetic and representative regimes of art. All things considered, there are no steadfast slogans that can summarize his philosophic project, and his writing constantly demands a deep level of commitment and engagement with the material. The only consolation for his readership on this tortuous path is that he continues to produce extremely rigorous and captivating work that never ceases to challenge the established registers of perception, thought, and action.
Gabriel Rockhill teaches part-time at the
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et clinique.
— Foucault.
Foucault, Michel. L'Archéologie du savoir.
— Dits et écrits. Volume I (1954-1969).
— Les Mots et les choses: Une Archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966.
— Raymond Roussel. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1963.
Rancière, Jacques. Aux Bords du politique. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 1990.
— La Chair des mots: Politiques de l'écriture. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1998.
— Courts Voyages au pays du peuple. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990.
— "Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?" Gilles Deleuze: Une Vie philosophique. Ed. Eric Alliez. Le Plessis-Robinso: Institut Synthélabo,, 1998. 525-536.
— La Fable cinématographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001.
— L'Inconscient esthétique. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2001.
— "Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement." SubStance 29.2 (2000): 3-24.
— Mallarmé: La Politique de la sirène. Paris: Hachette Livre, 1996.
— La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1995.
— Les Mots de l'histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992. [End Page 75]
— La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1998.
— Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2000.
— "Le Ressentiment anti-esthétique." Magazine littéraire 414 (November 2002): 18-21.
— "What Aesthetics Can Mean." From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses. Ed. Peter Osborne. London: The Serpent's Tail, 2000. 13-33.
Endnotes
1. The section entitled "Historical Trio of Art and Politics" includes a brief analysis of the major characteristics of the ethical regime of images as well as the representative and aesthetic regimes of art.
2. Rancière's views on politics should not be confounded with the almost endless proliferation of extra-phenomenological discourses on the Other, nor should they be considered a simple extension of Lyotard's project in Le Différend. Although he clearly relies on Lyotard's analysis, Rancière is careful to distinguish his project from what he considers to be the essentially discursive nature of ledifférend. Thus, what he refers to as politicaldisagreement(mésentente) mustn't be confused with a lack of comprehension(méconnaissance), a misunderstanding (malentendu) or a clash between heterogeneous phrase regimens or genres of discourse. La mésentente is a conflict over what is meant by "to speak" and over the very partition of the sensible that distinguishes the sayable from the unsayable, the audible from the inaudible, the visible from the invisible. It is worth noting, in this regard, that Rancière has frequently emphasized the contradiction inherent in the various philosophical attempts to bear witness to the Other: giving voice to the other, the poor, and the underprivileged runs the risk of silencing them in the name of the voice that speaks for them (it might be added that the only way the interminably guilty discourse of deconstruction can correct this is by continuing to talk and write about its own discourse). Regarding the general question of difference, Rancière's philosophical affiliations are to be found in the work of those who share his distance from the phenomenological dimension in recent French philosophy. Despite his profound disagreement with Alain Badiou over the question of aesthetics ("Le Ressentiment anti-esthétique"), it is clear that their kindred approach to politics and their shared refusal of post-structuralism acts as a common front against the most well-known tradition in contemporary French thought.
3. To my knowledge, Rancière has yet to deal with the exceptions to this general rule, the best example of which is to be found in "Bégaya-t-il..." (Critique et clinique 135-143).
4. Rancière's study of Rossellini in Courts Voyages au pays du peuple provides one of the clearest discussions of the artistic manifestation of equality and its proximity to la politique (137-171).
5. See for example his analyses of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust in La Parole muette, his detailed investigation of Mallarmé in the work whose title bears the same name and all of the individual studies in La Chair des mots and La Fable cinématographique.
6. It is worth noting in this regard that Rancière never fully enumerates the principles of each regime and that he avoids systematizing them into a closed set of axioms.
7. Moreover, the "equality" discernible in various types of democratic literarity must be analyzed through the historically specific forms it appears within; it should not be hastily identified with absolute equality in the political sense.
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